mxactivist:

Fitocracy is this interesting-looking fitness social network website thingy and app for iPhone. I want to sign up because I have CFS and I want to get my body moving some more, but I am faced with this bizarre situation at sign up.

Not only are gender and sex totally different, but there are more than two of both.

Please join me on the forum and have your say. I’m just going to start by saying that I don’t think it should be required information and they should just stick to sex OR gender, to avoid confusion.

Worth noting that there’s already a discussion on it in the forums here.

Fitocracy is this interesting-looking fitness social network website thingy and app for iPhone. I want to sign up because I have CFS and I want to get my body moving some more, but I am faced with this bizarre situation at sign up.

Not only are gender and sex totally different, but there are more than two of both.

Please join me on the forum and have your say. I’m just going to start by saying that I don’t think it should be required information and they should just stick to sex OR gender, to avoid confusion.

Royal Mail. I love them, I do. Post is properly pleasing, and postal delivery folk are legends, the lot of them.

Observe. I get lots of post addressed to Misc/Mx Cassian Lodge these days, and not much addressed to Miss or Mr. Occasionally I get a Dr, because I am too lazy to complain so hard that CEOs demand their webmasters change their forms just for me.

Anyway, something gender-inclusive on the Royal Mail website would be pretty awesome, right? If the UK Deed Poll Service have Mx on their website, maybe Royal Mail will, too.

But nooooo.

Here’s their customer service page for random queries. They’re also, pleasingly, on Twittah: https://twitter.com/#!/royalmail

Send a little something to help get one of the largest companies in the UK to recognise us. Imagine how fast things would change if an organisation like Royal Mail made this one small step.

And here’s what I’m writing:

Hello! I am trying to fill out a mail redirection form, and the title field is causing me trouble. It’s required, and the title options are either male or female or connected to a qualification that I don’t have (Dr). Your gender form also requires a response, but offers only male or female. What about intersex and nonbinary-identified people? I am genderqueer/nonbinary, meaning I identify as neither male nor female, and my preferred title Mx is accepted and/or offered as an option with the UK Deed Poll Service, the IPS, DVLA and the NHS. It’s also available with banks such as HSBC and NatWest. If I was male or female and my preferred title wasn’t offered I’d just pick one, but none of the titles offered are even slightly right for me. Would you consider adding Mx to your online form as the UK Deed Poll Service have done? Would you consider making the gender field optional or include “nonbinary”? Almost 200,000 people ticked neither or both sex boxes in the UK 2001 census, and there’s a strong community of nonbinary/genderqueer folk in the UK who’d love you if you provided this option. Many thanks, and if you’d like to contact me to ask for evidence or discuss these issues, please don’t hesitate.

ETA: I got a reference number within a couple of days, and a little message saying thanks and my query might take a few weeks.

Nochex is a UK-based money-sending thingummy. Since I could accept payments from all over the world and I sell lots of little thingies in various places online, I thought I’d sign up and see if it meant I could escape from PayPal.

However, the first field on the sign-up form leaves me completely excluded.

You can submit a support ticket here. Unfortunately for me clicking “submit” led to an error page, so I’m going to write a proper letter and post it to their address:

Nochex Ltd
Customer Services
103 Clarendon Road
Leeds
LS2 9DF

Here’s what I said:

Hi, I am interested in signing up for your service and I managed to get as far as the sign-up form (https://secure.nochex.com/apply/merchant.aspx) but the title field is causing me problems. Titles aren’t legally binding but Title is a required field in your form. There are only four titles, and the only non-gendered title requires a qualification. I am genderqueer/nonbinary, neither male nor female, and there are probably around 200,000 of us in the UK. The UK Deed Poll Service, the Identity and Passport Service, the NHS and the DVLA have all happily used and/or added Mx and Misc to their systems as gender-neutral titles. (Let me know if you’d like evidence.) The Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, and NatWest all issue bank cards and chequebooks with the title Mx on them. For more information on genderqueer/nonbinary issues please take a look at http://nonbinary.org/wiki/Recognition_(UK) . Could you be persuaded to add a neutral title to your title field, or remove the title field altogether? As you can see, I cannot sign up until you do and I’d really love an alternative to PayPal and to support a UK organisation. Thank you for your time.