Last week, Ars Technica broke the news that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) quietly took down their 2022 crash data, for the rumored purpose to scrub gender data from its Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). At the time, the records had simply vanished from the public database, leaving only speculation… now that the data has been reposted, we see that Ars Technica had it exactly right.
So, what does that mean? [Removed] Attribute 3 was “Other (e.g., “X”, Non-Binary, Not Specified, etc.)“, according to Ars Technica’s reporting. The variable “Gender” was also renamed to “Sex.”
They’re really obsessively concerned with whether your naughty bits are “innie” or “outie”, why don’t they change it all to “Naughty Bits: [Innie|Outie]”?
I looked over the data pretty closely: looks like, irrespective of your bits, if you were recorded as certain genders by first responders, that data was later purged from the federal government database. Your accurate gender was replaced with “Sex: Not Reported.”
I suspect if the NHTSA knew what bits the car crash victims had, they would have updated the data with that, but the first responders didn’t collect that data so they instead erased the data they did collect (obviously the police aren’t peeking in your pants… yet).
More sanding off things that form the US. Will it be reduced to a nubbin?
We’re past the nubbin, need a new pencil.
