I have been tasked with creating a new front-end for an insurance company, the idea being to provide rough quotes based on filling out a questionnaire, the back-end quote generation etc. is all already working and has been used internally for years, we plan to provide a significantly wider range than the quote provided by this system to the end user.
The questions are quite straightforward: age, location, ethnicity, smoker non/smoker, years driving etc. However, one particular question has given me food for thought for a while now.
The back-end system requires the person's biological sex as an input factor, because testicular cancer and breast cancer among other things are taken into account for the quote. I am worried that only having two options for sex may be seen as trans-phobic or exclusionary, an 'other' box however is not adequate, as we do need to know their biological sex.
The current WIP is to have a 'Sex' selection and an (optional) 'Gender' selection separately. Although this may be confusing for some, the ethical issue is that we discard the 'Gender' selection, basically making it a padding to avoid offending trans people. Which in my opinion is offensive, and the UX equivalent of giving a child your keys to make them happy.
I'd like to have a solution to this issue that fulfills these points:
- The user is prompted to provide their biological (birth) sex
- The user is not made to feel excluded if they are trans or otherwise
- The questionnaire is presented as ethically as possible
I believe this issue is unrelated to other "duplicates" purely because an 'Other' box etc. is not applicable, and the question cannot be removed entirely.
Male
orFemale
doesn't consider intersex. Why not have those 3 options, and a "biological sex" label?