Survey Says . . . . . . I'm A Female!

A few weeks ago, I received a letter in the mail stating that our household had been chosen to participate in a Center for Disease Control phone survey about the public's perception of tobacco.  Because research money needs to be spent on determining whether the public really believes tobacco is unhealthy? I'm more than happy to share my opinion (ha!) and I did appreciate the heads up, otherwise I would have just hung up, thinking it was a solicitor.

If you are like our family, you use caller ID to screen your calls, because the Do Not Call Registry never lived up to its hype.  For some reason, I expected a call from the CDC to come from an official CDC headquarters in Atlanta or Washington, D.C.  Eventually, one of their smart surveyors did leave a message saying they were from the CDC, calling about the survey. This enabled me to look out for a call from Burlington, Vermont (of all places?) and answer the next time they called.

After going through how many people lived here and the number of males vs. females in our household, the surveyor asked to speak with the oldest female; more on this later.  I was told I could refuse to answer any of the questions and she moved along to some rather specific questions: How many cigarettes have I smoked (at least 2 puffs) in my lifetime? It got so specific that I was waiting to be asked the brand name of every cigarette I had ever smoked (but had to be at least 2 puffs!)

She went through the whole litany of my experiences with cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, e-cigarettes, hookahs, and even things I'd never heard of, such as dissolvable tobacco.  Then I had to rate them all based on my opinion: very unhealthy/moderately unhealthy/not unhealthy at all.  No questions, however, about weed!

Just when my patience was beginning to wear thin, she said the final questions were for classification purposes.  Things like race, family income, education.  Then this:

"Were you born a male or female?" (Ok, I'll bite.  Female)
"And do you currently consider yourself a male or female?" (This is when I laughed and said I thought we had covered this at the beginning of the phone call?)

In true "I am from the government and I'm here to help you robot-fashion" she just asked the question again.  I'm wondering how often they come across a transgendered person in their random survey, and what effect they believe it would have on their survey?

Later on, I spoke to my husband on the phone and told him about some of the survey questions.  He said he hoped I'd still be a female by the time he got home.