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).
Understood, and I should have been more clear. My question was, why ask in the first place?
Probably a mixture of tradition/inertia and old-fashioned identification ideas.
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.
https://www.euractiv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CP250002EN.pdf
“data gathering” basically.
But their reasoning for gathering the data wasn’t good enough for the court to allow it, as they basically said “it’s so we know how to talk to passengers”, but as the court says, they can use less gender-specific wording.
As a form of respect.
That’s the excuse, anyway. Only SNCF’s marketing department knows if it was the real reason.
In Europe we don’t really have the toxic American gender war.
It’s just how it’s always been. But I guess someone decided to sue.