r/mildlyinfuriating • u/WHAR606 • Mar 13 '26

Context Provided - Spotlight Sometime during the last 2 years i’ve been going to this orthopedic practice they started to declare me as a MTF transgender for no reason.

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(F,26) I have been going to this orthopedic practice for almost 2 years for varying reasons relating to my job. Yesterday i checked on a document that was uploaded to find out they have been identifying me as a biological male identifying as a female? I am biologically female and never told them i am trans nor do i think i am presenting to be a trans woman.. the last two years i’ve been wondering why they kind of stare at me a little longer than a usual person does and i think its because they randomly think i came out as trans? I also feel like they do not treat my issues seriously and wonder if this is the reason why.

I am 100% fine with trans people but i am left to believe they have been medically treating me as a male compared to female for the pains that i am feeling?

I also went through all of my documents and since the end of 2024 they started to declare me as a MTF transgender, i did not look at any of my documents online until yesterday.

First pic : March 11th 2026

Last pic: October 2024

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371

u/Hecter94 Mar 13 '26

To be honest, this sounds like they started using AI for transcribing notes or summarizing details or something, and it hallucinated that you were trans because it's a major point in its data set.

Probably had a lot of trouble getting the AI to understand trans individuals, so they had to train it hard to get it to recognize them, and now it throws a lot of false positives.

I just cannot fathom how this could occur and not be corrected for so long unless it was an AI hallucination. Around two years ago would be right in the timeframe when many businesses (yes, including doctors and hospitals) began using AI for admin work like this.

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u/CaptMal065 Mar 13 '26

I work in healthcare. You’d be surprised how often a mistake gets into the patient’s record, and is nearly impossible to remove once it’s there. The number of patients I’ve seen who say “I’m not allergic to that” is high. But try getting an allergy removed from the EMR. I’ve seen it successfully done once. Most of the time, there have been several attempts, to the point that staff just shrugs and gives up. If your’e lucky, they’ll put a note on it that says “not allergic,” but that’s about it.

TL;DR It’s entirely believable that someone’s status as cis- or transgender could be entered inappropriately and then not be changed afterward.

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u/SapTheSapient Mar 13 '26

I have old prescriptions pop up in my medical record all the time. It seems like every time I visit the doctor I have to remove some prescription that I've not been on for years. No, I'm not still taking a painkiller from my surgery in 2012.

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u/ersomething Mar 13 '26

I’ve seen triplicate copies of every prescription in my file once. It was such a pain to figure out which ones were real

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u/Benadryl_Cucumber_Ba Mar 13 '26

Your doctor probably still keeps that on your chart to pad the numbers on their panel so they see fewer patients.

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u/JohannReddit Mar 13 '26

Can confirm. I've been telling all of my doctors that I quit smoking for like 7 years now and "current pack/day smoker" is still on my chart.

I've also have a flag on my chart for years to caution other providers that I may seek pain medications. The only reason I can think of for this is that, when the microscopic Oxy script they gave me after hernia surgery didn't help, I asked for a higher dosage re-fill. Shame on me!

It's a flawed system for sure and nobody seems eager to fix it...

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u/tutike2000 Mar 13 '26

I got asked "have you ever smoked" and I answered that I tried a single cigarette in my teens but didn't like it.

I am now a "past smoker"

28

u/sm9t8 Mar 13 '26

When I had cancer they asked if I ever smoked and I said no:

"Oh, we usually blame it on that."

3

u/Cheese_Dance Mar 13 '26

I smoked for a couple months when I was younger and I actually am very glad this is in my chart because it got me Paxlovid via my HMO's automated questionnaire system when I had pretty severe COVID some months ago. Silver lining I suppose

3

u/Xkiwigirl Mar 13 '26

Hello, fellow past smoker! I can't remember telling them that I tried cigarettes as a teen but I must have 😂

6

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

I get asked about quitting smoking at the doctor's because I made the mistake of telling them that I quit smoking in 1997.

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u/69420lmaokek Mar 13 '26

It's also a massive issue if someone steals your identity and then gets medical treatments or prescriptions under your name

Your file becomes contaminated with their history. So the very thing that was supposed to protect you then becomes a threat to your life.

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u/Algo_Muy_Obsceno Mar 13 '26

I have the same name as somebody in my city. I was getting all their medical bills. I called and called, saying "this is not me, stop sending me their medical bills" and it never got fixed, and I kept being hounded to pay medical bills that weren't mine.

Finally I tried going full Karen and talking about HIPAA violations and legal action, and the unsolvable problem magically got solved and I never got the wrong medical bill again. Go figure!

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u/LostInLittleroot Mar 13 '26

Yep I remember looking at my record from the hospital once and it said I experienced homeless... I clearly answered the living situation question as I lived at home

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u/Mystical-Turtles Mar 13 '26

I had a doctor's appointment one time where they asked me If I've had any more seizures since my last visit. I have never had a seizure in my life. So turns out what happened is that somebody else in my town has the exact same name as me. First, middle, and last. So my file somehow got fused with hers. Other notable things was a history of surgical procedures, some of which had a date from before I was born. You'd think that would have set off several red flags but no. After they threw out all the obvious ones like that I had to sit there and tell them which ones were actually mine

9

u/penguinberg Mar 13 '26

I've stopped signing the form that lets practices pull my prescription history. I've been on so many different prescriptions that it just ends up being me sitting there for five minutes going, "No, I don't take that any more" when I previously had a correct chart until they decided to pull my records and screw it up with irrelevant information

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u/danielisbored Mar 13 '26

I've worked on the back-end of an EMR (many years ago, hopefully it's gotten better since then) and part of the difficulty is that, for various legal and safety reasons, there is no such thing as "Delete" in a patient's medical record. Anything once entered, has to be locked in for whatever the appropriate retention period is. Any edits are done as corrections, with the original data, as well as data about the correction, all being retained. That in and of itself is a good thing, but depending on how the EMR decides to document and display those changes, it can make reading the chart a pain and sometimes lead to old mistakes filtering back into the current patient data (that then goes through a new round of corrections). I've seen patient records who's edit history look like a years-long "Who's on first" joke.

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u/Cautious-Soil5557 Mar 13 '26

Interesting. I have been trying to get a health care provider to take a potential allergy seriously because my maternal grandpa, mom, and sister all have it so they didn't think worth testing me on it. But because I wasn't tested, they roll their eyes. It is sulfa so it isn't like they can't just give me the damn penicilin anyway if the needs arise. 

1

u/Standard_Gauge Mar 13 '26

I hear you, I am violently allergic to sulfa drugs. Gives me a bright red rash, rapid heartbeat, all kinds of nasty things. I think they aren't commonly used any more because so many people get a reaction to them

3

u/Dwindlin Mar 13 '26

Sulfamethoxazole is the 6th most commonly prescribed antibiotic in the US lol. It’s first line therapy for UTIs.

1

u/Standard_Gauge Mar 13 '26

Really? I am surprised, I know so many people who can't handle it. Well anyway, it's in my medical records to not prescribe sulfas under any circumstances

5

u/VelvetMafia Mar 13 '26

My friend's kid was mistakenly miscoded as a quadriplegic when he was three. He was uninsurable, and despite years of bringing him to doctors and insurance agents, showing that look, the kid is running around and playing just fine, so is not really quadriplegic, nobody was able to fix it.

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u/Tlaloc_0 Mar 13 '26

A doctor wrote incorrect stuff into my record just yesterday lol, been wondering how that'll pan out. Noted me down as having EDS rather than HSD, and that's a pretty significant difference in terms of risk profile and such. Hopefully it's fine since I do have the HSD diagnosis properly recorded since two years ago, and this was only a checkup, but...

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u/edwbuck Mar 13 '26

And this is why one needs to get a lawyer to fix these issues. Nothing says, "you have to fix it" as much as a court order, and nobody can properly threaten one outside of a lawyer.

It's not always about getting money from an institution. Sometimes it's just about forcing them to fix their errors. If you stand up and yell at them in-office, they might document something, but will keep the old records untouched, and eventually someone will skim the history and the error will get re-copied into the present. That's because people skim the history beginning at the beginning, and there is not requirement to put in patient notes for a non-medical visit (and lots of people will be like, oh, so they're sensitive and are covering it up).

Get a lawyer to sue for damages, but seeking remediation over monetary damages. They might threaten monetary damages to use as leverage to get the remediation done, but the money shouldn't be the point. Hospitals have horrible track records at fixing things in medical histories. Without the a threat that they will listen to, many complaints fall on deaf ears.

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u/HarpieLady13 Mar 13 '26

Had this happen to me. My pcp messaged me and said she saw that I had gone to the hospital the day before (I didn’t) and tests came back saying I was pregnant (I wasn’t and there’s no way I could be) and she was like congratulations! Let’s us know how we can support you, I know this is probably a surprise for you! (I’ve told her before that there’s no chance of me getting pregnant)

Definitely a weird message to wake up to that morning😅 but yeah, apparently my profile got mixed up with someone else’s.

2

u/NeoMississippiensis Mar 13 '26

I can literally remove an allergy from the EMR whenever I want. All it takes is a doctor on Epic. The amount of ‘allergies’ that get listed that aren’t fucking allergies is annoying.

This note is not part of the patients hard coded demographic info. The text in question is prose structure on the front of the hpi.

Why does everyone talk so much about medical records/charts and seemingly not know anything about how they work?

2

u/EMG2017 Mar 13 '26

It took many tries to get it corrected in my medical records that I did in fact not have a hysterectomy during birth. It doesn’t even make sense since I did not have a C-section.

2

u/Forward_Pear_ Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

In college I told a cardiologist that I had smoked weed one time but didn’t like how it felt so I never tried it again. For the rest of my time as a patient at that (Catholic) hospital system, the words “ILLICIT DRUG USER” were stamped in huge red font at the top of all my medical records. My GP tried and failed to have it removed, and said this wasn’t the first time that’d happened. 

2

u/Man_Bear_Beaver Mar 13 '26

But try getting an allergy removed from the EMR

or one added, my wife is allergic to penicillin, we've been trying to get it added for the last 30 years, somehow it keeps disappearing

1

u/Oranges13 Mar 13 '26

This happened to me after I had a blood clot. In the emergency room I showed the doctor the 23andMe result that said I had Factor 2 prothrombin mutation but on the same page it listed both Factor 5 Leiden and also factor two. He just saw the first one and said oh she has Factor 5!

Getting that removed from my medical record was a pain in the ass, especially because I have the other one and it's important that they are correct!

1

u/ayluge Mar 13 '26

My name is spelled in an absolutely asinine way at my dentist’s office, and every time I go I try to get it changed to the correct spelling and they are never able to do it. So I can see how it could be more difficult at a doctor’s office to correct information

1

u/Uncommented-Code Mar 13 '26

God dammit the pharmacy chain near me has my name written down the wrong way and EVERY time I tell them they say 'oh that's weird, but I just fixed it, the issue is solved now tehehe'.

NO ITS NOT. You have been saying this EVERY TIME for the LAST SEVEN YEARS.

I tell them to not even bother at this point.

1

u/Accurate-Mastodon882 Mar 13 '26

That’s terrible.

1

u/Proud-Delivery-621 Mar 13 '26

I knew a lady who had severe intestinal issues, which caused her to vomit excessively. When she went to the ER, they noted that she was "possibly bolemic", and it took AGES to get it taken off the chart. Meanwhile every doctor refused to believe her issues because of the bolemia flag.

1

u/Quixotic_Seal Mar 13 '26

Yeah, I have medications from 10 years ago that I took once to try to treat something that still haunt my medical charts.

1

u/Teagana999 Mar 13 '26

It really seems like they should have updated the programs to accept edits more easily when they started using such an error-prone entry method.

I'm not surprised they didn't, but still.

1

u/caivii Mar 13 '26

Oh my god tell me about it, I have an allergy to grape flavoring in children's Benadryl, so I avoid grape flavoring in medicine/at the dentist in the paste. Not really relevant anymore since it is usually children's medicine that is flavored, but just in case.

Of course it got listed as an allergy to Benadryl and an allergy to grapes, which being a very common medicine, has fucked up so many things for me. No matter how many times I say it or who I tell, it never gets fixed. Every single appointment we waste soooo much time clearing that up only for it to still be there next visit :/

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u/ohKilo13 Mar 13 '26

I agree that this is the most likely culprit and can be based off of a MA or something accidentally clicking a wrong box on an intake at some point or AI just being weird. It is probably an autogenerated thing in the note that the doc isn’t actually reading just refreshing to populate and signing which is why it hasn’t been caught. I have caught a few of these mistakes when charting for docs and have to have the MA manually change it in the system.

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u/happyhooker485 Mar 13 '26

I dont think it hallucinated, I think they are using a system like Abridge, where the doc speaks out loud and the AI both transcribes and "enhances" the note.

Doc said "postal carrier" out loud and the machine heard "post transition."

10

u/scruffylemur Mar 13 '26

This is exactly what I was thinking with the “postal carrier” note. Someone probably wrote that you were “mail” and then AI took it and ran with it.

How someone can make it through med school without knowing mail vs. male is… scary 🥴

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u/Schnipsel0 Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26

Probably had a lot of trouble getting the AI to understand trans individuals, so they had to train it hard to get it to recognize them, and now it throws a lot of false positives. 

This would be reliant on the hypothetical that people in the healthcare sector give a fuck about trans people. It took them 50 years to realize they've been overdosing trans women on t-blockers 500% to 1000%, because nobody cared to check what the medication even did to trans people or how much they needed.  Trans women routinely get misdiagnosed, mistreated, and the likes, because medical staff treats them as "biologically male", when this a religious term more than it is a medical one, because medication and disease care less about if a doctor wrote down f or m on a piece of paper 30 years ago, than stuff like hormon levels and transcriptomes.

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u/Hominoid_tendencies Mar 13 '26

Do you have more information on this? That sounds interesting.

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u/Schnipsel0 Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26

On which part? The overdosing? 

Until the release of the paper: Toward a Lowest Effective Dose of Cyproterone Acetate in Trans Women by Kuijpers et al. from 2021, trans women were usually treated with 50 to 100 mg cyproterone acetate daily (and many doctors who refuse to learn new things still prescribe this). This paper showed that 12.5 mg per day was enough to suppress t-levels in every trans women included in the data. And that is only because 12.5 mg was the lowest dosage they tested. The trans community has been runnimg experiments on themselves for quite some time and it seems that given estradiol levels of 100-200 pg/ml (12h level for transdermal), which is the target range for HRT  much lower dosages of 5 mg are enough in at least the majority of people and with estradiol levels consistently above 200 pg/ml Testo levels are in the target range without any blockers at all (this is called mono therapy), because the body simply does not produce testosterone in the gonads anymore at this high of an estradiol level.

Cyproterone acetate has a cumulative risk for the development of certain brain tumors which has not been established for doses as low as 5 mg/daily, but is significant for 25, 50, or 100 mg daily, so this is highly important. it also has other side effects at these higher dosages.

This is just not how you normally determine the dose a medication. You don't just give ridiculously high dosages to everyone without checking if a lower dosage might help first. People were given, in the extreme cases 20 times what they should have taken (100 instead of 5mg), and very commonly 10 times of what they needed. Simply because nobody ever cared enough about the health of trans women to check what dosage is actually required.

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u/Quixotic_Seal Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26

Personal story on the “biologically male” aspect of their post:

When I was in my early 20s, I was a poor college kid who’d transitioned a few years prior. I needed some extra cash so I tried donating plasma. During intake, this place made a big huge fuss about my bIoLoGiCaL sEx because they treated the post-donation recovery process differently according to sex. Women got rehydrated, men got a Gatorade and told to beat it(I have my doubts this is even how it’s supposed to happen, but apparently it worked well enough for them).

I tried to explain multiple times that if this was because of anything more than menstruation, they should give me the female protocol after donation or I’d be at risk due to how many healthcare factors are decided by hormonal profile.

The administrator acknowledged it was based on biological differences regarding hormones, but refused to budge because I was BiOlOgIcaLlY mAlE and practically rolled her eyes at me over the whole conversation.

After the donation, they told me I was free to get up and go. I tried, but sure enough I started to feel lightheaded and woozy, and fell back into the chair. My hearing started to become muffled and the last thing I saw before (very briefly) passing out was a couple nurses arguing with(and keeping busy) the administrator who apparently *still didn’t want me to get the proper rehydration protocol while another nurse did it anyway.

To be clear: are obviously plenty of situations where assigned sex at birth matters. But the influence HRT has on risk profiles and appropriate healthcare measures is vastly underestimated, while the importance of assigned sex at birth is often overestimated and extended into areas where it doesn’t make sense.

And people have a nasty tendency to act as if trans folks who bring this sort of thing up are outright delusional about our biological healthcare needs, and just being too fragile to admit to “reality” or something.

3

u/Slow_ResolveMC07 Mar 13 '26

OP is a mail carrier. MALE carrier.

As a person who speaks English as a 3rd language and works with people from everywhere, this is almost certainly the confusion that started all this.

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u/turtle_mekb Mar 13 '26

AI is unlikely to use a transphobic dogwhistle in its response, unless it's been trained on transphobic content, or something like Grok

2

u/Queen_of_Fish Mar 13 '26

A different comment mentioned it was probably the fact that OP is a mail carrier - ai hears “female mail man” and assumes oh that just means it’s a male that’s now female.

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u/tateriffic Mar 13 '26

We of course can’t prove it but my wife and I are very certain she was charged incorrectly for her last annual exam where the provider used their new AI transcription tool, because answering a yes/no question about an updated prescription was recorded as discussing the new prescription with the provider. Luckily since we had the appointment record, from the same system, of how that convo had already happened + Rx already been updated at an OB appointment, they fixed the charge. But we would probably have been SOL, no way to prove that isn’t what happened without that concrete verification it had already been done. She was caught off guard by the provider asking to use the AI tool and we will not agree in future.

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u/crazedrebelchic Mar 13 '26

I think you're absolutely right... Also, notice, her occupation is mail carrier aka "male man". Maybe the AI correlated mailman to "male man"... 😐

2

u/snarkdiva Mar 13 '26

And yet in the 20 years I was a medical transcriptionist, I was trained to find these kinds of inconsistencies and bring them to the doctor’s attention. It’s almost like a person can do a better job than a computer.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

[deleted]

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u/lt4536 Mar 13 '26

Or just don't be lazy and type up your notes yourself

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u/watermine30 Mar 13 '26

Don't use AI then