June being Pride month, I found it particularly creepy that the very first question on the survey asked "What is your original gender as stated on your birth certificate?" only it was phrased much more precisely and weirdly than that. Seriously, these people did not invest in a sensitivity reader for this survey.
The second question asked what gender do you identify as, and the third or fourth question went on to ask about your sexual orientation. Later questions asked about your citizen status and your work status. The survey didn't allow you to go back and change any of your answers.
Let me add, these are the people who, twenty years ago when I was persuaded to undergo a period of training by my MCB counselor, and I was very reluctant I might add, I was put under a *lot* of pressure and reprimands to conform to very traditional female appearance including wearing makeup and spending large amounts of time on my hair, despite the fact that I was already wearing business-appropriate attire and had my hair in a very neat French braid.
There is still a lot of pressure in the blind community to be quote normal unquote, and a lot of emphasis is still placed on traditional gender roles and het relationships, and the MCB has always felt it has some sort of paternalistic privilege when it comes to snooping and judging people's lives. This is why many people choose not to receive services at all, because once you let these services in, you don't know where they draw the line regarding what is their job and what is your private life.
As for the questions on this survey, my straightforward summary of that first question doesn't even do justice to the weirdly-worded psycho-babble of the actual question. All I could think was, there is no way that a trans person read that first question and believed that this was a safe space for them.
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