Registering at the eye doctor, whose patient portal credits CPT©2025 American Medical Association with all of the questions and choices below:
Hatefully, there is no “ze” nor a write-in box:
The default sexual orientation is “don’t know”:
But some other choices are available:
Should there be an “irrelevant” choice for people who’ve been in heterosexual marriages for longer than 4 years? Psychology Today:
What’s more, we found that marital satisfaction for both husband and wife deteriorated in step with the wife’s loss of sexual desire. (The husband’s sexual desire was irrelevant to anybody’s marital happiness.) Might wives lose sexual desire because the marriage is turning bad? No: Time-lag analyses indicated that her loss of desire came first, leading to lower satisfaction later. Early levels of (dis)satisfaction did not predict how rapidly the wives lost interest in sex. … Crucially, it was not due to childbirth. Becoming parents made the mismatch worse, as in steeper declines in wives’ sexual desire. … A possible explanation that fits our data is that female sexual desire increases during the brief phase of passionate love. Nature may have arranged that as a way of encouraging the man to make a long-term commitment.
We can also see how the American Medical Association thinks about race, the default for which is “any” (the racial equivalent of “pangender”? Why isn’t it “panracial”?):
1.4 billion people in China, a country with 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, are lumped together as “Chinese”. For cousins of Elizabeth Warren, i.e., the 3,000ish enrolled Chinooks, there are five categories:
Why so many posts on this boring passe gender crap?
Did your ex go lesbo?
Does your kid claim they/them?
What is the source of your fixation on this societal construct?
Progressives were never interested in gender expansiveness in the same way that progressives never used the term “Latinx”? https://youtu.be/8jNUgrqOdpY?si=WBgEBoPgAM3KoaqM
What are the cool kids concerned about now that the battle for 74 scientifically recognized gender IDs has been won (and thus become “passé”)?
(You asked about our kids. Their pronouns are Go/Gators.)
If you identify as emmetropic, do you still need an eye doctor?
I would find another doctor.
“A possible explanation that fits our data is that female sexual desire increases during the brief phase of passionate love.”
I’m not sure that Psychology Today is highly regarded, but that seems to beg the question.
My colleague is divorcing his wife because her sexual desire increased…for her tennis coach. He asked her to stop doing that but she didn’t want to stop. As part of her reward, he gets to buy her a house in the most expensive neighborhood in Alabama.
why do they care about any of these? isn’t the collection of any of this data a blatant privacy violation? what is the justification?
Federico: The beauty of medical forms in the U.S. is that no justification is ever required or offered! Given the 80 million-ish immigrants to the U.S. in recent decades (see https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2015/09/28/modern-immigration-wave-brings-59-million-to-u-s-driving-population-growth-and-change-through-2065/ for data through 2015), hardly any of whom have been physicians, we Americans are fortunate any time that a doctor’s appointment opens up!
what happens if you refuse to answer?
Philip, how do you get screenshots from volatile drop-downs? Taking pictures of the with a mobile phone? Or holding mouse and pressing screen print keyboard key at the same time?
I use Windows 10 because I am not sufficiently elite to own a Mac. I make screen shots with the Windows-Shift-S command and then snipping the part that I want with a mouse.
The race part of the characterizing has been going on for a long time. Back four decades ago right after college I worked for the census department and part of the job was asking people their race. People would bang on for a long time, that their mother was Italian and their father Irish or Polish or whatever so they are not sure, consider themselves, etc. & I would sit with glazed eyes since whatever the mix it would go into the category of “white.” I think then there were seven categories, the most exotic (for NYC) being “Pacific Islander.”