The NWT’s health authority spent nine years refusing to change a woman’s gender designation in her medical records after misidentifying her as male, an MLA says.
Great Slave MLA Kate Reid said the issue had been fixed within a week of the woman and her partner bringing the problem to Reid’s attention and the MLA writing to health minister Lesa Semmler.
Reid said the couple, both women, had made “multiple attempts” to have the woman’s records corrected before resorting to asking a politician to intervene.
“To put it plainly, someone had previously looked at this woman and decided she was a man, and for nine years the health system refused to correct this error,” Reid told the legislature on Monday.
On some occasions, Reid said, the woman was told changing her gender designation from M to F would require using “the change of sex designation process and forms.”
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
“This is infuriating because the individual in question is not transgender,” Reid continued.
“Her birth certificate and all other identification correctly identify her as female. She is not trying to change her sex designation but to correct her mistaken medical records.”
“How,” Reid concluded, “do we allow a situation like this to persist for nine years?”
Semmler, responding to Reid, said she extended a “sincere apology” to the woman.
The health minister acknowledged the medical misgendering of the woman’s medical file but said she did not have details about “why and how” the records were not changed years earlier.
“What I can say is that we will make sure that this doesn’t happen to any Northwest Territories resident again,” Semmler said.
