An Open Letter on Systemic Misgendering at MIT
An open letter to Denzil Streete, hearing officer to this grievance; and Ellen McClintock, manager of labor relations.
An open letter to Denzil Streete, hearing officer to this grievance; and Ellen McClintock, manager of labor relations:
It should not be too much to ask for the agency to be accurately represented in MIT systems while having the right to medical care, but here I am writing this letter. These rights should be the bare minimum for all MIT community members, and they are protected for bargaining unit members of MIT GSU under the Collective Bargaining Agreement. I raised concerns about this matter informally in February of 2024. Without any movement through that route, MIT GSU filed a formal step 1 grievance on my behalf in March. Each step of the way, my union stewards and I have clearly demonstrated the contract violations and have proposed possible solutions. Now in July, with the grievance at step 3 in the process, MIT has yet to commit to a timely solution that resolves the contract violations. I write this letter reaffirming the need for said solution, with support from other members of the trans and gender-expansive community.
Unknown to many, each student and employee has a “legal sex” listed in their personal information. This field currently serves two purposes at MIT: it is used to represent one’s gender in MIT systems (such as in housing, in MIT recreation, and by academic departments) and it is used as the sex listed on a MIT health insurance plan. These fields do not align for many trans and gender-expansive folks; the sex listed for health insurance purposes is different from their gender. Therefore, many of us who need health insurance through MIT, as many students and employees do, are forced by MIT to have inaccurate personal information for gender across campus—systemically misgendering us. Why should we have to make the choice between a “legal sex” that gives us health insurance or one that more accurately represents our gender?
You might ask, “Why can’t you change the ‘legal sex’ to be one that represents your gender? Is that not a solution?” For trans and gender-expansive folks, it’s not that simple. Changing legal sex for health insurance has huge and complicated implications. If the sex listed on one’s health insurance policy does not match the sex listed on one’s medical record, claims cannot be processed properly. In other words, in order to functionally have health insurance, one’s health insurance sex must match the sex listed on their medical records. It can be difficult or impossible to change the sex listed on one’s medical records, even in the Boston area, so many trans and gender-expansive individuals are stuck with the sex that they already have listed. In order to have functioning health insurance at MIT, the “legal sex” field in one’s personal information must be the sex listed on their medical records. This means that we are stuck with “legal sex” as our gender marker in MIT’s systems, viewable by other MIT employees, even though it is not representative of our gender, nor did we consent to that information being used as such.
I am not writing this letter because I want to. In fact, I would rather focus my energy on my research and communities I hold closely within MIT. But I feel the need to write this after months of working with MIT and their failure to come up with a clearly defined, timely solution to this urgent and important matter for the trans and gender-expansive community.
Since the onset of this grievance where we have been trying to remedy this very problem, we have emphasized the need to decouple the two purposes of “legal sex” as they currently stand. Namely, allowing the option for one’s health insurance sex to be specified separately from one’s “legal sex”. We have also discussed and seen implemented much-needed improvements to sex and gender information at MIT. In addition to the previous M and F options, an X option was added for the “legal sex” field as a result of this grievance. MIT Health now also has a process to update sex and gender identity fields in one’s medical records. These changes are improvements. However, they do not fix the issue at hand: I still have to select the “legal sex” option that gives me health insurance, not the one that accurately reflects my gender.
In attempting to resolve this grievance, the work of the Gender Identity Initiative (GII) has been proposed as a solution. Specifically, phase 3 of the GII recently implemented gender identity and pronoun questions for students and employees in Atlas. This phase of their work also involves educating MIT employees about best practices on using sex- and gender-related data. Phase 4, as presented to us during the grievance procedure, “will address the use of gender-related information in downstream and local systems, including sharing pronouns more widely and clarifying the use of directory and legal names.” More importantly, Phase 4 does not have a clearly defined scope of “downstream and local systems” nor a timeline for implementation. It does not even have a stated intention of removing the propagation of the “legal sex” field as a “gender” data-field in downstream systems. This is, frankly, not a solution to the issue at hand. Even if it were a solution, an undefined timeline for implementation is unacceptable.
The current use of “legal sex” data fails all six guiding principles of the Gender Identity Initiative, reproduced below.
Inclusiveness: People deserve to count and be counted.
Precision: Use precise terminology that reflects the constructs of interest.
Autonomy: Respect identity and autonomy.
Parsimony: Collect only necessary data.
Privacy: Use data in a manner that benefits respondents and respects their privacy and confidentiality.
Transparency: Share relevant information in a clear, accessible, and timely manner.
Trans and gender-expansive students and employees, at best, cannot have their identities be accurately reflected in MIT’s systems of record. At worst, the current use and solutions proposed by MIT continue to forcibly out trans and gender-expansive folks to employees all across campus, from housing employees to PE instructors to academic administrators. I have been unknowingly and forcibly outed to fellow students and co-workers. Students in my residence have been unknowingly and forcibly outed as transgender to me in my role as a graduate resident advisor. We, trans and gender-expansive MIT community members, urge MIT to treat this matter with the urgency, care, and resources that it deserves.
We have proposed a solution for decoupling the two purposes of “legal sex” by adding a new “health insurance sex” datafield to WebSIS for students and SAP for employees. This would simply provide the option for individuals to specify the sex listed on their health insurance policy separately from “legal sex”, which gets propagated as “gender” to downstream systems. Fortunately, we have technical precedence for this solution; the “directory name” is an optional field in the main systems of record, which if filled out, masks one’s legal name in many instances downstream. In fact, the “health insurance sex” datafield would only have to mask “legal sex” in its propagation to MIT health insurance, making it a technically simpler solution than the “directory name” option that is already implemented. Like “directory name” is an optional field, “health insurance sex” would be as well, defaulting to “legal sex” if left unfilled. This entirely optional field meets the GII guiding principles for all individuals, including trans and gender-expansive folks, while requiring no action to be taken by unaffected community members.
By meeting as a community during the grievance process, we have already communicated urgency around this issue and strong support for the above-mentioned solution. We are writing, now in the last stage of the union grievance procedure, to reiterate our messages of urgency and broad support for an optional “health insurance sex” datafield to be added. We underscore that the work of the Gender Identity Initiative, while much-needed, does not provide a timely or clear path to resolving the forced misgendering that is currently required of trans and gender-expansive folks to access health insurance.
At the heart of this grievance, we need a solution where everyone at MIT is able to exercise their rights to health care coverage at no cost to their right to accurate gender representation. We, as members of and allies to trans and gender-expansive communities, must stand up together to let the Institute know that we will not settle for any less. The only way we can pressure the MIT administration to put forward a real resolution to this issue is through taking collective action together now. If you would like to help in demanding the Institute to resolve these issues with the timely and urgently needed solution we propose, we urge you to sign onto our open letter here.
Signed,
Joules Provenzano
Joules Provenzano is a rising fifth year PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering and a Graduate Resident Advisor.