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).
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.