I was originally going to ask how many legal genders there should be, but I fail to see a compelling argument against 0.

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[–] 3 points 8 hours ago (2 children)
  • you're trans
  • you're involved in an accident
  • you're unconscious
  • EMTs administer medication at levels that a woman can handle depending on body fat composition and hormonal fluctuations
  • being a genetic male, you die because you lack the increased body fats and estrogen that was assumed in dosage

I get your point, but it's important to have your gender somewhere on a trustworthy source that everybody has.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago

    Emergency medication isn't dosed by gender, it's dosed by weight. It really would only matter with certain drugs in pregnancy.

    It is helpful to know the original gender for some things because certain illnesses present differently in men V women and not all of that changes post transition so if you are treating a man it would be helpful to know that he was born a woman so you don't brush off certain symptoms as minor if in fact in a women they would be very alarming. For example, men having heart attacks are more likely to present with the classic chest pain radiating to their arm. Women can have chest pain, but often present as sudden onset of nausea and vomiting with no pain. That's a rare presentation of a heart attack in a man, so a man complaining of severe nausea is more likely to be thought of as GI in nature, but if you know he's trans then alarm bells start screaming that this might be cardiac and you need to do an EKG now.

    But in an unconscious trauma patient, it doesn't really matter. If a trans man still has a uterus then that's an additional organ to be damaged that might not be expected, but that's not something that's going to be caught in the ambulance either way because we don't have a CT scanner hanging out in the cabinets.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago

    This sounds convincing, but then, is there actually any medication an EMT would administer based on sex? I honestly dont know.

    Maybe we should all have blood types written down somewhere, because that surely is the same situation right? (I mean, we should all know it, I don't)

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