For most sleep stuff, gender is pretty unimportant. If this had happened contemporaneously, I could be pretty certain that the misgendering was most likely the result of the way computer dictations are done. One error causes the entire report to use the incorrect gender. The doctor may not have reviewed the final dictation, and so not seen the error. If they did see it, it may still have been difficult to get it run back through secretarial to have corrected what was, to the doctor's eye, an unimportant detail. Ten years ago, this is still possible, but less certain. As for whether he read anything....man is that a crap shoot. My experience with being secretarial staff to doctors and now working in a sleep lab does not lead me to believe that most doctors spend a lot of time reading the documentation that they have available. I am not a doctor, so maybe I don't understand how these things are done. But I remember handing a four inch thick chart to an oncology doctor five minutes before he saw a patient in the Blood and Bone Marrow Clinic. He could not have possibly gotten through any amount of that chart before the patient walked into his office. I don't know how often he had seen that patient, or how familiar he was with the patient's history, but it didn't seem like he was well-prepared, to me.