Hopefully an easy question to answer. I’ve been tasked with updating part of our software to handle transgender & non-binary patients. The work relates to genomic medicine. As of such both a patient’s birth gender, and their current gender are relevant to care.
One of my questions - what happens when a patient’s gender changes? - was answered by PDS Administrative Gender Change.
My other question was, how does the ‘indeterminate’ gender relate to non-binary patients? Do these terms mean effectively the same thing, or is there a distinction that I’ve missed (e.g. it being possible to be ‘indeterminate’ without being non-binary for some reason). Essentially, I’d like to know if there is any need to store additional information on top of the patient’s gender on the PDS API in this instance.
As a side question, would it also be possible to find their gender-assigned-at-birth via the PDS service, or is this something that would need to be stored separately?
firstly apologies this forum has filters which doesn’t allow the word s e x hence my having to use spaces.
currently - PDS holds Person Administrative Gender Administrative gender Classification of the s e x of a Person. The classification is phenotypical rather than genotypical, i.e. it does not provide codes for medical or scientific purposes.
One of the main challenges is that as PDS is an Administrative system rather than clinical we do not hold the clinical definition of s e x at birth, and there are processes whereby someone who wishes to update their Administrative Gender can do so through their GP, this can be done without a Gender Recognition Certificate (as you have linked above). Also due to law stating a person has to explicitly allow each disclosure of a change of gender individually – and PDS being accessed/updated by multiple organisations we cannot currently hold both s e x at-birth and Current Administrative Gender. Currently this is kept by the GP who instigated the change and any other clinical systems where the individual has notified of this change.
Re the actual term Indeterminate, this is not relating to their Gender identity, rather what s e x was observed at birth, and if classified as indeterminate it could not be determined at this point.
hope this helps, it is a very complex subject and we are working with other areas understand how what we hold could further meet the needs of patients and users of PDS. if you have any questions, please get in touch.
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