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I’m positive that most people whining about this are not even aware of what the changes made will actually do. Reddit especially is the land of *people who freak out without bothering to find out what the changes actually do. Outside looking in, my answer would be “not much.” For the 99% of American veterans and their families using the VA, the gender column is a redundant sex column. Its deletion changes very little. For the 1% who are diagnosed as trans, noting it in the chart is probably trivial and will happen much like other medical history information.
But hatred feels so righteous, especially the pure hatred that comes from having no idea how anything actually affects anything else. It’s a deleted checkbox, and really that’s all that happened.
Again, nothing was actually deleted, it was a straight rename. If data HAD been deleted, then conversely the liberals would be entirely right to worry-- both at the object level (because it would make it harder to track the health outcomes of people whose sex differs from their stated gender identity), and at the meta level (because it would prove that the VA was staffed by people perfectly happy to delete inconvenient data to serve their political masters.) It's important to mantain all the current data, and to have it clearly placed in a well-defined structure. Storage is much cheaper than compute, and just "having something in the chart" is way less convenient for medical researchers looking to make conclusions about aggregate data than a checkbox. Actually, if you'll let me climb up onto an even taller soapbox-- I privately suspect that a massive fraction of healthcare inefficiency is ultimately caused by incompatible and difficult-to-parse data standards that waste the time of providers and make it difficult to provide care. I don't have ANY of my childhood medical records, for example, because they're stored in hard copy in another state in my childhood doctor's medical office. And unfortunately, the process of taking old bad records and unifying them into a smooth, unified system is beyond nightmarish-- so any attempt to obstruct that where it's happening is literally costing lives.
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If it's so inconsequential, why not follow the mundane processes of publishing why and how the change was made? That's my main issue with it. It's a canary in the coal mine for poor data integrity, which, taken in conjunction with the rest of the actions of the administration, is a huge red flag. It did not happen in an isolated context. If this was a corporate setting with financial or industrial data, heads would roll - even if the changes affect "very little".
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