Bureaucracy vs. Common Sense

In addition to the pension I get from my “day job” employer, I maintain a pension pot with a separate private provider which I top up with money from my freelance work. I logged in to that second pension provider’s (reliably shonky, web-standards-violating) website about a month ago and found that I couldn’t do anything because they’d added a new mandatory field to the “My Profile” page and I wasn’t allowed to do anything else until I’d filled it out. No problem, I thought: a few seconds won’t kill me.

The newly-added field turned out to be “Gender”, and as it was apparently unacceptable to leave this unspecified (as would be my preference: after all, I’ll certainly be retiring after November 2018, when gender will cease to have any legal bearing on retirement age), I clicked the drop-down to see what options they’d provided. “Not provided”, “Male”, and “Female” were the options: fine, I thought, I’ll just pick “Not provided” and be done with it. And for a while, everything seemed fine.

Over three weeks later I received a message from them saying that they hadn’t yet been able to action the changes to my profile because they hadn’t yet received hard-copy documentary evidence from me. By this point, I’d forgotten about the minor not-really-a-change change I’d made and assumed that whatever they were on about must probably be related to my unusual name. I sent a message back to them to ask exactly what kind of evidence they needed to see. And that’s when things got weird.

I received a message back – very-definitely from a human – to say that what they needed to see what evidence of my gender change. That is, my change of gender from “not specified” to “not provided”.

They went on to suggest that I could get my doctor to certify a letter verifying my gender change. Needless to say, I haven’t made an appointment to try to get my GP to sign a document that confirms that my gender is “not provided”. Instead, I’ve emailed back to ask them to read what they just asked me for again, and perhaps this time they’ll engage both brain cells and try to think about what they’re actually asking, rather than getting tied up in knots in their own bureaucratic process. Let’s see how that goes.