Sexing the Database

Who tracks your gender and why it matters
From other issue one, June 2003

By Annalee Newitz
Illustrations by Leigh Clark

How many times will you disclose your gender today? If you read the Washington Post on-line in the morning, you will be asked to check "male" or "female" in a dialog box before you get the news. If you go to work or school, you have already told a human resources manager or admissions officer what your gender is. Along with a great deal of other information about you, your gender is permanently attached to your name in a database of your fellow employees or students. If use a public bathroom sometime during the day, most likely you'll have to pick a gender in order to do it.

Maybe you're feeling sick today, and you skip work to go to the doctor's office. The admitting nurse or staff worker will note your gender on any forms needed. Later that day, you'll be lying in bed sniffling, and might decide to buy a DVD or a book on-line. Microsoft's Passport service -- which you use for all your on-line financial transactions -- will ask you for your gender. You will probably use your credit card in this purchase, which means you'll reveal your gender twice in one transaction: your information in the credit card company's database includes gender as well. When evening rolls around, let's say a cutie you met last week calls up and asks if you'd like to go out for beer. Miraculously, you'll feel better and decide to go out. To get into your local bar, however, you'll have to broadcast your gender one more time. Your drivers' license, which the bouncer will examine before you go inside, includes your gender designation.

Your gender is threaded into the data stream. On a practical level, what this means is that you cannot work, study, vote, or drive unless you are willing to declare, "I'm female!" or "I'm male!" Many of our dearest social freedoms hinge on having a gender identity and plugging it into dozens of large institutional databases.

We are so used to being asked for our gender that we rarely question why, for example, only males and females are allowed to read the Washington Post. After all, there is a sizable minority of Washington Post readers who probably prefer to be known as transgendered, intersexed or no gender whatsoever. And why should your drivers' license have anything to do with your gender? Why does your financial services company care about the levels of testosterone and estrogen in your body?

The surprising answer is that they don't. Despite its ubiquity, gender as a category of identification is withering away-- and we can track its decline in the very databases that beg us to pick M or F.

Driving While Gendered

Jay Maxwell is the CIO of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. He works at the top level of one of the largest single data-gathering institutions in the United States: a coalition of state motor vehicle departments which issue driver's licenses and identification cards. According to Maxwell, drivers' licenses became the one of the most important forms of identification in the U.S. by accident. "It really took off as a form of ID in the late 1960s and 70s when we started using photos," he says. "There was a need out there for photo ID, and people just gravitated to it."

These days, almost any time you're asked for an ID, you're expected to provide a card issued by your local motor vehicle department. Getting a driver's license -- and entering your vitals into an identity database -- is practically a rite of passage. Young adults fetishize driver's licenses because most bars and liquor stores use them to determine whether they're old enough to drink. And for many transsexuals, getting a new driver's license with the appropriate gender designation is a crucial step in the process of transitioning from one gender to another.

Next: Just a Note in Your File Pages 1 2 3 4