Sexing the Database, page 2
But from Maxwell's perspective, most of the personal information we provide to get a driver's license has no value. Questions about height, weight, gender and eye color are residual traditions left over from the days before driver's licenses included photos. Says Maxwell, "We're in the process of revising the driver's license, and in focus groups over the summer we discussed how most of the information we gather -- eye color, height, weight, gender -- just isn't really valuable anymore. I think the photo is worth more than all that other information combined." For now, he says, the AAMVA will be continuing to ask for that data -- largely because law enforcement groups have requested that they keep it. But, adds Maxwell, "In the future, as to whether we'd need gender -- I don't personally see why we would retain it."
There are also good legal reasons why local motor vehicle administrations might want to get rid of gender tracking. When Maxwell asked administrators from several state motor vehicle departments how they dealt with people changing their genders, 6 out of the 17 state administrators who responded said their databases were set up to maintain records showing that the person had changed sex. While this practice may sound fairly innocuous, it's a recipe for potential abuses. Say, for example, a transsexual woman gets arrested while protesting President Bush's foreign policy. Police could access a record showing that the woman used to be male. On that basis, police might decide to place her in the men's jail and, subsequently, in a great deal of danger. Given the history of how transsexuals have been treated in police custody, this possibility is far from outlandish -- nor is it outlandish to imagine that such treatment would result in a discrimination lawsuit.
However, Maxwell doesn't need the threat of lawsuits to push gender tracking off the AAMVA's agenda. He and his colleagues feel that gender has no place in DMV databases because it's no longer useful as a form of identification. With photos -- and in the future, biometrics -- you hardly need broad, clumsy categories like M and F.
Just a Note in Your File
One place where administrators cling to gender in databases is hospitals, places which are in part devoted to tracking, data-mining and classifying the human body. At the University of California San Francisco's teaching hospital, a vast sprawling complex in the hills above Golden Gate Park, your gender will be recorded in a database the first time you come in the door for services. "The data comes from the person admitting the patient at the desk," says Julie Cox, a director in UCSF's Medical Center IT department. "We need this information to track conditions that are specific to men or women." Given that hospitals might have good reason to track conditions specific to transsexuals and intersexuals too, one would expect that hospital databases would offer more than the traditional M and F. But in fact UCSF's patient database gender field only offers M, F and unknown as possibilities. Cox notes, "We have very few unknowns. Most come from ER admissions where they need to register the patient in a hurry, and they go back and correct it afterward." A similar process exists for babies born with unknown gender, which happens in a few cases. According to Myriam Cabello, director of UCSF's Admissions and Registration Department, "it may take some time to determine a sex to assign to the baby," and for that period of time the baby's sex will be recorded as "unknown."Why doesn't UCSF have gender categories for transsexuals, intersexuals, and others? By and large, their database choices are designed to fit the standards at other institutions. Cox says, "we need to have M or F because Medicare and diagnosis codes don't really know how to handle anything but M or F." This situation is common when database administrators know their data needs to mesh with data in other systems. Rather than risk a patient not being covered because the Medicare database doesn't understand "transsexual" as a category, a hospital like UCSF will simply make the pragmatic choice and assign a gender.
Of course the "pragmatic" database choices that hospitals make will skew medical research being conducted now and into the future. Geoffrey Bowker, a professor of communications at the University of California, San Diego, studies the social impact of data categories. He explains, "These classifications have consequences. When categories melt away, or get distributed out, they are lost to history." Bowker describes how difficult it is to study the spread of tuberculosis because historical medical records only leave us with diagnoses -- the accepted "diagnosis codes" of their day. Before tuberculosis was discovered, its symptoms would be recorded as some other condition, or perhaps just "a disease of the lungs." Because doctors didn't record the actual symptoms of each patient, it's impossible for present-day researchers to estimate how many people died of the disease before Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus in the late nineteenth century.
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