Vol X, Issue 3 Date of Publication: July 17, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20529/IJME.2025.054

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Recording sex and gender data in clinical settings

Sayantan Datta
Abstract:

On April 16, 2025, the United Kingdom (UK) Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of “woman” refers to biological females; the judgment also stated that biological sex is “binary” [1]. Less than ten days later, on April 25, 2025, the BMJ published an editorial titled “Sex and gender should not be conflated in medical data” [2]. In the editorial, authors Margaret McCartney and Susan Bewley critique the interchangeable use of sex and gender in medical data collection — a practice prevalent in the recordkeeping of the National Health Service, UK — and argue that such a conflation runs the risk of medical practitioners making erroneous decisions and diagnoses [2]. While recognising that “A few people are found to have one of a small number of clinically recognized variations in sex development”, the authors too suggest that biological sex is a binary (“male or female”) [2].


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©Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 2025: Open Access and Distributed under the Creative Commons license ( CC BY-NC-ND 4.0),
which permits only non-commercial and non-modified sharing in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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