Bureaucratic error lists Ontario woman as a man, and now she must pay for her mammogram

The province of Ontario is under the impression that a 60-year-old Windsor woman is a man, despite her history of giving birth to children and a proclivity for receiving pap smears.

The Windsor Star reports that Dianne Whitson, a mother of three adult children, recently learned that Ontario's health insurance program has her erroneously identified as a male. The news came to light this week when OHIP refused to cover the cost of her pap smear. Because health insurance doesn't cover the cost of male pap smears.

Whitson has been told she (or I suppose he, from OHIP’s view) will be required to cover the cost of the procedure, as well as an upcoming mammogram scheduled for next week, unless the matter can be sorted out.

The issue itself seems to be a matter of bureaucratic error, and problematic paperwork. OHIP at some point identified Whitson as a man – probably by a computer and presumably at some point after her youngest child was born 34 years ago – and she currently possesses a health card in an old format that does not distinctly note her gender.

Further, the stay-at-home wife does not have a driver's licence, nor a passport, nor credit cards or bills in her name. In short, the only document that can identify who she is, is the Ontario health card... which states she is a man.

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And here we have an example of why the public loathes sluggish and disconnected bureaucracy. There is no debate that Whitson is an Ontario resident, and there is no debate that she received a pap smear – a procedure covered by Ontario health insurance. But because the wrong button was pressed in a computer program at some point in the past 30 years, Whitson faces steep and foolish financial penalties.

Images immediately come to mind of the Vogons – that bureaucracy-loving alien race from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that revels in assigning thick stacks of paperwork that often run in circles and, at least once, was responsible for the destruction of Earth. Or the bureaucratic, totalitarian government from Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. Or Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks.

The issue should be a quick fix, shouldn't it? Yet we all know that gender, and the government's interpretation of gender, is not as cut-and-dry as it once was.

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Earlier in February, Ontario's Ministry of Community and Correctional Services faced a gender-identifying quandary when a transgender woman was temporarily held with the male population of a Toronto jail. Outrage followed, because Avery Edison was being treated like a man despite holding a government-issued passport identifying her as a woman.

This points to the issue of gender politics in the bureaucracy of paperwork, not specifically the issues surrounding Whitson's inability to prove she is a woman.

There are 16 different documents or forms of identification that Service Ontario would accept as proof of identity, including passports and basic provincial photo IDs. It is amazing that an Ontario resident would be unable to provide any of them.

It is clear in hindsight that Whitson had the past three decades to update her OHIP card, check in at a hospital or secure some other form of government identification. But now that the matter is pressing, there should be some legal avenue to clear up the issue by taking her at her word. Her husband is willing to testify to her identity, and I suspect her three children would be up for confirming their mother is a woman.

If she has a history of receiving womanly health assistance – such as receiving support during three pregnancies – and would like that to continue, one suspects and arrangement should be easily made.

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