Every time this comes up in conversation, I always point out that the sole reason to have gender markers on an ID is to enable gender discrimination, and people always get really uncomfortable and weird about that.
Nu? It’s so that people can quickly identify what gender you are and treat you differently based on that information, yes?? Is that not the definition of gender discrimination???
Sometimes people try and pull out the whole “what about medical emergencies” thing, and to that, I have three responses:
1. As @masterswordobjection points out above, if we actually care about including medically relevant information, there are very few pieces of life saving information more important than blood type. Our IDs also don’t include allergy information, or the medications we’re currently taking. If you want to stealman this incredibly stupid argument, you’d really better start by clamoring to add those things to IDs. If you’re not actively writing and calling your state reps about the lack of blood types, then I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to doubt your conviction on this point.
2. Racial demographic information can also be relevant for medical treatment. Do you (correctly) recoil at the idea of having IDs stamped “white” and “colored”, even if that information could sometimes be medically relevant? Cool, ok, so we do actually all understand that the risk of schools and jobs and law enforcement discriminating against people due to what is on their IDs is high enough that preventing that is sometime worth the inconvenience caused by those IDs not being drop-in substitutes for simply asking patients for their demographic information. Given that, if you think we still need gender markers on IDs due to potential medical uses, either you must think that gender discrimination just isn’t very serious, or else you must think that M/F is such a uniquely burdensome demographic question that we can’t expect doctors to include it on patient intake forms. Reflect on that for a moment – now that I’ve actually spelled it out, do you really believe either? Really?
3. Finally, guys, I hate to break it to you, but in addition to being used primarily for non-medical gender discrimination, gender markers also enable medical gender discrimination. Ask literally any woman with chronic pain or an invisible disability what having an F on their ID has done for them in a medical context, and you won’t get nice little stories about how it helped their doctors treat their conditions quickly, safely, and efficiently. You’ll get horror stories about how doctors dismissed them as hysterical, used their gender as an excuse to reduce their pain meds, gave them the runaround to instead talk primarily with their partner if that partner had an ID with an M, the list goes on. Treating patients differently based on sex or gender is discrimination, and while yes, there are sometimes scientifically backed medical justifications for limited discrimination in very narrow contexts, we should be extremely skeptical of expanding any of this on the basis of those rare exceptions because, newsflash: most of the time, discriminating between different demographics in a medical context is a very bad thing.
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