Secret changes to major U.S. health datasets raise alarms

23 DocFeind 11 7/15/2025, 3:09:20 PM psypost.org ↗

Comments (11)

lenerdenator · 2h ago
Again, as with all things involving this administration:

The behavior will continue until real consequences are applied.

xnx · 2h ago
And there will be no real consequences because all of the Republicans support this, or accept it as a cost of doing business to get tax cuts for the rich.
AstralStorm · 2h ago
Until they're all eaten by the face eating leopards or switch.
deweller · 1h ago
The title implies that the data was manipulated. What happened was column headers were renamed without an official entry in the changelog.

Most of these changes were the column heading “Gender” renamed to “Sex.”

readthenotes1 · 1m ago
I would imagine that the modern definition of gender is less important for healthcare then the biological sex of the patient.

I feel it is one of the unfortunate consequences of "sex" being a noun and a verb, as well as a somewhat prudish desinclination to asking "has external genitalia" and use "gender" instead that lead us to the logomachy we have today.

(Of course the label should not have been gender or sex in either case because all one can determine at birth is whether they see a penis or not, and for less than 1% of humans that's not sufficient to determine their genetic makeup)

jimt1234 · 2h ago
NewJazz · 3h ago
See also the HN submission for the direct link to the study this article is a topic of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44571705

xenator · 2h ago
Seems like fixes after shift from destructive ideology. It never should appear in the first place.
ummonk · 1h ago
If a survey asked people what gender they identified as, you think it constitutes "fixes" to go back and label that data as "Sex"?
Ancapistani · 1h ago
I don’t see the changes as the real issue - the real issue is that these sorts of changes should have been in the changelog.

It’s like claiming to follow semver and then releasing a bugfix with breaking changes.

NewJazz · 1h ago
It is like deleting a tag or release assets and substituting in something different.