B.C.'s Human Rights Tribunal has ordered LifeLabs and a subsidiary to pay $32,000 to three transgender and non-binary people for “injury to their dignity” after separate instances of discrimination.
Tribunal member Theressa Etmanski said in her decision, posted last week, that LifeLabs and its subsidiary Excelleris Technologies misgendered and outed the three patients at service centres in Vancouver and Burnaby in 2019.
Etmanski also ordered LifeLabs to pay almost $3,000 in lost wages and $11,100 for an expert report.
I endorse the court’s decision, a clinic has no say over gender and this was obviously a political stance a medical practicionner was taking.Fuck that.
I am supportive of people’s right to live with dignity and respect, and I agree that asking in front of a waiting room is undesirable (I have had that same thought in other waiting rooms, too), but I feel like a medical analysis setting is one in which biology (sex) actually does take precedence over identity (gender), because that has implications what and how things are analyzed.
That said, transgender persons taking hormones will have much greater variance in ranges of everything. I think it’s sensible to have additional gender markers in addition to sex.
They’re a lab that takes samples, they do no medical analysis, they do sample analysis then send it to people whom are qualified. The average Lifelabs worker is a phlebotomist, and last time I checked, your sex, gender, skin colour, height, age doesn’t make blood somehow different in any respect as to how you handle it.
Pull your head out of your ass.
The problem often to me comes from wrongful abstraction of social markers by people educated in the life sciences. Most individuals coming from the STEM sector tend to align right due to the fundamentalist fatalist perception education in the sciences procurs. The issue is they lack the self-awareness to realize that they are not educated sufficiently on social topics.
This article (scientificamerican.com) contains a really nice graphic illustrating all the various reasons why looking at gender in binary is flawed from the get-go. Much more useful to understand the person individually; respecting pronouns being just the tip of the iceberg of that.
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People don’t stop having a gender just because they’re in a doctor’s office. Gender-affirming care starts with treating people like themselves.
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“Sex” is not always a “one or the other” situation, if you assume that all cis women have ovaries then you’re going to be wrong about every cis women with a hysterectomy. The actual medical best-practice is an anatomical inventory.
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