![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Charing cross and gender boxes
Oct. 12th, 2011 04:18 pmSo, as most of you may be aware I'm involved in Think Outside The Box Campaign about recognition of non-binary gendered people. You might also know that I've been recently referred to Charing Cross, today I got a letter confirming funding and offering to put me on the waiting list, this should have been a happy occasion but for one reason it was a trangst inducing, anxiety attack situation instead. A really bad reason.
And the observent of you will probably know what I'm going to say next, yes, the sign up form has a Gender question with just two options. I, don't even. I'm not going to go into depth of how that felt beyond saying extremely low and upset as well as scared for the future. To do them justice when I phoned up angry and in tears the reaction was basically "Yes, we're sorry, we know it's wrong and we're held up in NHS bureaucracy so can't change it now". They did face palm and say that was a sensible point that when referred a non-binary person that might want to explain that was the case in the letter rather then just having it on the form without that context and encouraged me to get in contact on behalf of TOTB. Which is good I suppose but all feels a bit cop out.
So, anyway this is the sort of thing you get - that a 'red tape' process has to be gone through before a form which contains a useless bit of data (they don't use the gender from this anyway) taken in a way that is deeply distressing and against the will of the service providing the form but still has to be looked over and takes a huge and unknown amount of time. There seems to be a general impressive that non-binary gendered people are vastly rarer then binary trans people, from my personal experience and those of others this is just not the case, there may be somewhat less of us (though I'm not sure, it depends how non-binary is defined) but we are not a small or an unusual group and it's this sort of thing that leaves people with the impression that we are. We are not a weird edge case to be ignored and we're starting to shout about that.
Anyway, they encouraged me to get TOTB involved so vague plan could be to ask for a public statement explaining that they can't change it and why and that it doesn't reflect treatment of Non-binary people and then start a petition to whomever's has control to allow this to get changed.
ION *eeee* funding. I'm going to phone back tomorrow and ask if they have info as to how much funding has been agreed.
And the observent of you will probably know what I'm going to say next, yes, the sign up form has a Gender question with just two options. I, don't even. I'm not going to go into depth of how that felt beyond saying extremely low and upset as well as scared for the future. To do them justice when I phoned up angry and in tears the reaction was basically "Yes, we're sorry, we know it's wrong and we're held up in NHS bureaucracy so can't change it now". They did face palm and say that was a sensible point that when referred a non-binary person that might want to explain that was the case in the letter rather then just having it on the form without that context and encouraged me to get in contact on behalf of TOTB. Which is good I suppose but all feels a bit cop out.
So, anyway this is the sort of thing you get - that a 'red tape' process has to be gone through before a form which contains a useless bit of data (they don't use the gender from this anyway) taken in a way that is deeply distressing and against the will of the service providing the form but still has to be looked over and takes a huge and unknown amount of time. There seems to be a general impressive that non-binary gendered people are vastly rarer then binary trans people, from my personal experience and those of others this is just not the case, there may be somewhat less of us (though I'm not sure, it depends how non-binary is defined) but we are not a small or an unusual group and it's this sort of thing that leaves people with the impression that we are. We are not a weird edge case to be ignored and we're starting to shout about that.
Anyway, they encouraged me to get TOTB involved so vague plan could be to ask for a public statement explaining that they can't change it and why and that it doesn't reflect treatment of Non-binary people and then start a petition to whomever's has control to allow this to get changed.
ION *eeee* funding. I'm going to phone back tomorrow and ask if they have info as to how much funding has been agreed.
