Walgreens requires you provide "sex assigned at birth"!?
this is along with name, race and other demographic information
They don't have a gender field, and it really feels like they are just reducing sex and gender down to "you are what you were assigned at birth", and then hiding behind amorphous medical "reasons" as justification ....
Walgreen's is the goody-two-shoes couch fucking Vance of the pharmacy world in my experience, so this totally tracks.
Last year when I went in to get my covid vaccine, they asked a ton of questions and then turned me away because "technically I said yes" when they asked if I'd been in contact with anybody in the past 14 days who tested positive for covid. I even explained that it was outdoors and from a distance after my neighbor briefly stopped their car to say hello and then tested positive a few days later.
I literally drove down the street to Walmart right after and got the vaccine. They only asked me about my insurance info and which arm I wanted the shot in.
What was the purpose of all those questions and why was it necessary to begin with?
The medical reasons are not entirely amorphous. There are biological differences to take into account, the most obvious being whether a person is capable of becoming pregnant. There are certain warnings and considerations that the pharmacy may be required to inform someone of if they are physically capable of becoming pregnant. Might be corporate policy, might be because of state laws (especially if you're in a slave state). Demographic information can be used to ensure that different groups of people are treated fairly.
Companies take actions that they think will maximize profit. Yes, they will trample all over anyone in that process, but it will be for profit, and not for anything else - malice included - in the absence of maximizing profit. Point being: they may be hamfisted about it, but that's about it.
I agree that the capacity to be pregnant is medically relevant, but asking someone what they were assigned at birth (based on a quick genital inspection) is not the same as asking them to disclose if they are capable of being pregnant.
So replace it with a checkbox that says "I can get pregnant"
There are plenty of cis women who can't
That's just the single most obvious out of dozens of differences. Do you prefer fifty checkboxes or one dropdown list?
Here's a better way to look at this: medication cares about your biology. That means sex. Gender does not factor in. So they're asking your sex. Why would they need to know your gender? Wouldn't asking that be invasive, like asking your political affiliation or your hobbies or your religion or literally anything else that does not impact your purchase and use of medicine?
not that walgreens actually needs to know this for me to get a flu shot 🙄
but yeah, it would be nice if in medical contexts they just marked down what is relevant, e.g. presence or absence of a prostate, presence or absence of a uterus, capacity to become pregnant, etc.
This is more likely to hurt patients though. People metabolize medications according to hormonal sex, not genetics. If you report your assigned sex at birth, some dumbass is going to try and give you a medication dose based on that, not your hormonal sex. It's just an invitation to bigotry and medical errors. Even people who are nominally allies may still think "well I support your identity and pronouns, but your medical needs are obviously still those of your sex at birth." Medical people tend to be pretty ignorant about trans bodies, and trans people need to look out for our own interests, because the system certainky won't.
Not to mention that hormone levels vary wildly among cisgender people and no one should ever be medically treated based on trends rather than their actual individual medical status.
Then that should be the questions asked, not some arbitrary "sex" question with only some of the possible answers as options.
It should be apparent, especially now, that those things never were never enough to determine these things anyway. There are tons of types of intersex people which are not an insignificant percentage of the population.
So, there are some things that loosely follow AGAB for the majority of people, but the assumptions made based on that, end up causing more trouble for those whose bodies don't conform. And that's not a small portion of the population. Basically between intersex people and trans people who have had HRT and/or surgery are at very, very conservative estimates, around 3%, but since there's no finding and it's now unsafe to track even in the US and UK and other western countries, it's likely much higher in reality. These people are poorly served by the current system of AGAB only.
For me, many of my lab tests show abnormal because it should ask what is my body's primary sex hormone or ask to select for the specific test, what range is normal for my body if they want to get it really right. And honestly, body weight is more impactful on a lot of things anyway, why aren't we asking that of every person (rhetorical question, but essentially asking if you were born with or the doctors modified your body at birth to have something that looked closer to a penis than a vulva, should be just as uncouth)? Also, insurance won't pay for gynecology/urology kind of stuff or mammograms or prostate cancer screenings even if you have the right body parts to need it, if your AGAB is wrong without a long and drawn out process each and every time to prove you have the right part. Heck it's not even good for marketing if you have the wrong one listed because it has to be your AGAB rather than the gender you present as and thus the high profit products you're most likely to use.
So it really has a low usefulness compared to asking more relevant questions whether for medical or commercial reasons.
lie :3
LIE. LIE TO THE CORPOS.
Hack the form!
Yikes. I would take my business elsewhere for sure. I don't use Walgreens currently, personally. My current pharmacy seems pretty alright, they changed my GF's name on her pill bottles when we transferred the prescription, no problem.
The hiding behind vague medical reasons is infuriating. When I went through this form, I was thinking "don't lie to me and I won't have to lie to you."
right!? It definitely feels like they don't have any right to ask this given the context, and the way they are applying it feels like it's denying trans identity (as well as not accounting for the existence of intersex folks, some of whom are neither male nor female).
If you were intentionally trying to design the page in a way to deny trans people their identity, I don't know what you would do differently from this.
A binary 'Sex' field could at least have the cover of "Sorry, the code is 30 years old and we don't know how to change this field in the database without breaking things." Labeling the field as Sex Assigned at Birth means they considered trans people and considered them worth hurting.
Edit: I do think asking for sex is a CDC thing. But only asking that means you can be misgendered at the pharmacy and also ignores that hormones have a major role in your health. A doctor or pharmacist going off your birth certificate to treat you is a bad doctor/pharmacist.
Just put your hormonal sex. That is the most accurate sex you can use for any pharmacology purpose. If you're hormonally female, you metabolize medications like any other woman, regardless of your genetics. Systems like this are built by ignorant fools who think that someone's assigned sex at birth maps directly to their medical needs. They think being trans is just something that involves changing clothes or surgery. When in reality HRT rewires your body at the cellular level.
Exactly, you would be surprised how many cis people really are confused about the medical and biological situation, they assume your chromosomes are more relevant for everything, when it's mostly the hormones!
The main exceptions I can think of are:
Those still aren't pharmacologically relevant, except maybe screening drugs that could harm a fetus?
Would love for medicine to catch up and become more "trans and intersex sensitive" in its training and application (and let's be real: its research), but that reality feels increasingly distant to me.
Any chance this is a client side web form which could be modified to allow an additional choice of "None of your business, Walgreens" injected into the form?
Yes! This is the way!
Just change it to [object Object]
i just put f because that's what i am; only my pcp knows my saab and that's only because i know and trust her.
I'm debating whether to even tell my PCP - I will have to tell someone to get access to hormones, but I would really prefer to not have to disclose my trans status for so many reasons ... (one of those being the poor medical assumptions made when they assume I'm "male").
There's always DIY.
it really all depends on your location too and whether or not you feel safe. for me, my pcp was who i initially talked about being trans with and she gave me some pointers on places to go (i also get my hormones and see my endo through fenway health which is a dedicated lgbtq clinic) so definitely only do it if you feel safe (erin's hrt map helped out a lot to find places near me)
what are the options on the drop down menu? I refuse to supply any demographic information under all circumstances.
Just Male and Female.
ok good to know never setting foot in walgreens ever.
can confirm, it was just male and female
I refuse when there is an option to, but in this case you had to make a choice between male and female, it was a required field to schedule a vaccine.
It sounds like a medical records thing and you should use whatever gender is listed on your medical records, which should probably match your social security records.
Some people only change state records so they have to respond differently depending on who's asking. I think in this case its related to federal records.
I'm guessing they'll assume your genitalia match your ASAB and shove even more annoying ads into your face. Either that or leak it to the Federal Bureau for Conversion Therapy so that they can pay you a nice visit. You never know with capitalism in decline.
I just put male and was done with it. They do make a point to call me "sir" or "gentleman" but IDGAF just gimme my estrogens and let me be on my way
You're risking being harmed by doing so. If you're hormonally female, you metabolize medications like a cis woman. On medications with different male/female doses, you should be given the female dose, not the name one. And very few pharmacists are aware of this. Putting male as your ASAB is just asking to be improperly dosed.
You know how HRT changes your alcohol tolerance? Do you think that's the only substance it has this effect on?
I'm not sure putting male is the right answer for trans women ... it's one thing to have a conversation with a doctor when you need access to gender-affirming care, it's another when filling out demographic information when scheduling a vaccine outside your normal provider.
I was once turned away for a scheduled covid vaccine at a Rite Aid that had been bought out by Walgreens because one of the pharmacy assistants couldn't figure out how to put my gender into the system.
Same thing happened to my buddy Robert'); DROP TABLE Gender;--
this is the dumbest shit I've ever heard
yikes, any updates? I wanna see how it turns out.
what update are you expecting?
it will never be relevant, it's just demographic information they were collecting because I was scheduling a flu shot ...
EDIT: also potentially relevant to the context: people don't seem to be able to tell I'm trans (to my surprise), so it's not like I'll show up as a visibly trans person or anything, I've mostly just told medical people I was born without a uterus when they ask for my last period or if I'm pregnant.
Is Walgreens the only available pharmacy?
Ours closed down because they refused to treat customers like humans and locked everything, so you always need an employee to get anything.
There's a local pharmacy that I get my prescriptions from.