Compliance Is Not Care
FUCKing Hell. The Fuck.
Per usual, I woke up around midnight. One o’clock, actually. That’s “of the clock,” for anyone still struggling with basic language despite carrying the sum total of human knowledge in their pocket. Four hours of sleep. Wide the fuck awake. Standard operating procedure.
For reasons known only to whatever sadistic goblin runs my brain, I decided this was the perfect time to dig back into my medical records from Christus St. Vincent and UNM Health, the two hospitals involved in my recovery after my motorcycle crash back in October.
I went in looking for information. I came out pissed off.
Right at the top of every goddamn UNM record it says:
Katelyn Sjostrand
DOB: XX/XX/XXXX
Sex: MALE
Predictable. Every. Fucking. Time.
So naturally, I went looking for where I could correct it. Update my profile. Fix the error. Surely a massive university-run hospital system has thought of this.
Nope. No field. No option. No mechanism. Nothing.
Then I pulled up my Christus St. Vincent records. And somehow, the Catholic hospital, they got it right. Not “sort of right.” Actually right. Fields for gender identity. Sexual orientation. Sex assigned at birth. Legal sex. Clean. Explicit. Functional.
Which immediately sent me into a loop.
How is this so fucking hard?
Why does the Catholic hospital understand this, but the liberal, university-run hospital does not? How does that make any sense at all?
My name is legally Katelyn. It says female on my driver’s license. I introduce myself as Kate. I dress feminine … okay, not when I’m on the bike, but the rest of the time. Fine, I’m on my bike a lot. But still. I have breasts. Actual, physical, unmistakable breasts. That should be a clue.
And yet ...
So I start wondering: is this just lazy data entry? Or is it a little “gotcha”? A quiet, petty assertion of “yeah, we know what you really are”? Because if that’s the case, congratulations, you’ve managed to be both boring and shitty at the same time.
At around 3 a.m., I did what I always do: I went to my nocturnal accomplice, ChatGPT. Fed it the records. Explained exactly what I was seeing. Hoped for a response along the lines of: “Yeah, that sucks. What do you want to do with this?”
Instead, I got a lecture.
Pages of affirmation. Then explanation. Then context. Then more explanation. Then more context. And somewhere in there I checked out entirely, because Jesus Fucking Christ, really?
So now we’re in the twilight zone: a massive AI system that is meticulously trained to be offended by words like “retard” and “faggot,” while simultaneously being hard-coded to mansplain absolutely everything. A machine that polices language while condescending by default.
You can practically see the fingerprints.
So what am I actually ranting about?
On one level, it’s the absurdity that being transgender still registers as some kind of exotic edge case in the very medical systems that prescribe my hormones. On another level, it’s realizing that the same kind of clueless, self-satisfied design thinking is baked into both healthcare bureaucracy and AI, systems built by people who have never been on the receiving end of erasure, friction, or pain.
Different tools. Same blind spots.
Anyway. That’s where my night went.
