French operator SNCF has previously asked passengers to self-declare as ‘Monsieur’ or ‘Madame’.
The EU’s top court ruled on Thursday that requiring rail passengers to declare a gender when buying a ticket is in breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Their mistake was not to add the “prefer not to say” option, now they can’t collect any gender stats.
I think it wouldn’t fly either since verdict was that this is GDPR problem - there was no need to collect this info.
Yeah mostly, “prefer not to say” kinda means it’s optional. You’re allowed to use optional non-essential stuff like this, you do have to state why and not use it for other things. So they could use “Madame Lastname” to address their emails to you if they say that’s what it’s for but not reuse that for market research.
I put it like this because that would have avoided the complaint and most likely the court case too.
Chere SNCF, je suis eune mondame, comme mon genre est non-binaire! [Liebe SNCF, ich bin eine “mondame” [Geschlechtsneutrale Alternative zu madame/monsieur, entsprechend Herr*in], da mein [soziales] Geschlecht nicht binär ist!]
Englisch: Dear SNCF, I am a “mondame”, due to my gender being non-binary!
The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) ruled against French rail operator SNCF, which has previously required passengers to self-declare as either “Monsieur” or “Madame” when booking train tickets online, deeming it unnecessary information under the GDPR.
The case was brought by the French association Mousse, whose mission is to “campaign for justice for the LGBTQI+ community,” according to its website.
Holy crap, what evil company would let this make it to court?
When a queer NGO asks you to please allow folks to book a train without entering a gender, just fucking make that change.
Ignoring them and having to go to court over it is absurd.
Wonder if it was a weird cost thing, like it’s ridiculously difficult/costly to change their ticketing infrastructure to cope with this?
Probably not “ridiculously costly” but companies like cheaping out on… well, everything.
Is this like the first step towards having gender-specific train cars? Does France have an issue with harassment on trains like some other countries/cultures? Or are they just being weird about gender?
I think it’s the opposite of that. They stopped asking about the gender of the passengers.
Understood, and I should have been more clear. My question was, why ask in the first place?
Asking whether they write sir or madam on the ticket as a form of politeness. Sure it helps collecting statistics too.
Conservative are weird, the will be fine with asking sir or madam, but would throw a tantrum if you ask them a pronoum which is exactly the same question
Sure, but is that a reason to make it mandatory? If someone does not want to share the information, then saying “non, we must be polite to you!” doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Probably whoever drafted the requirements for the software team just didn’t think to add a third option, and the software team didn’t want to add additional requirements.
Probably a mixture of tradition/inertia and old-fashioned identification ideas.
