It's the little things that make me happy...

[featherynscale]

Pardon my postiness for a moment. This is an update to a previous post, in which I wrote a note to a polling agency about their craptacular misuse of the word 'transgendered', and other assorted effed-up gender assumptions.

I wanted to mention that I just took another poll written by the same company, and noticed that they have broken 'transgendered' out of the available choices on sexual orientation, and made it its own demographic item. So you don't have to choose, for example, whether you are, say, bisexual *or* transgendered, but could, in fact be recorded as bisexual *and* transgendered. (You still have to check 'male' or 'female' in another item, but hey. Baby steps.) I'm going to take a moment and revel in the possibility that someone might have read my letter and done some research. You know, since they're a *research company*.

Comments

[greektoomey.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's great! \:D/

[kittenpants.livejournal.com]

In other news... Science Merit Badges.

[liquidfun.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally enough, I put surveys online for medical staff to take.

 

In medicine:

• "sex" reflects your chromosomes (XX=female, XY=male, etc)
• "primary sexual characteristics" reflects your physiology (vagina=female, penis=male)
• "gender" reflects your behavior (psychologically feels like male/female, manner of dress, etc)
• "sexual preference" reflects who you are attracted to

This gets complicated, because we are conducting these surveys for the HR departments of hospitals, and HR is populated by people who are more concerned with whatever is in vogue politically at the moment and what costs the hospital money than anything else. This often means that we have to change what is on a survey month-by-month depending on who in the hospital is kicking up a fuss loudest at the moment.

Do we put "sex" on the form and ask male/female, knowing that the medical staff prefer to see this question? Or do we put "gender" on there instead, because some people who work in the non-medical parts of the hospital (security, housekeeping, food preparation), especially those in the midwest, can't count and believe "sex" is a four-letter word?

I actually prefer the organizations that drop the question entirely, because it really isn't relevant to what we are surveying, IMO, which is people's satisfaction with their job.

Unless people are (not) getting sex (as in intercourse) on the job, I don't see it as a particularly relevant question ...