Dutch man, 69, brings lawsuit to lower his age 20 years
bbc.com
bbc.com
Solid logic
Age, on the other hand, is the number of times you've circled the sun since you were born.
That isn’t to say I was born in or even alive in the year 1118 AD. But I’m 900 just the same because I feel like it.
And observing revolutions feels like an abstraction to most people, kind of like "seeing" chromosomes. Most people see effects of revolutions (seasons).
How many of their chromosomes have you seen?
As I understand it, an organism that reproduces sexually (rather than asexually) has a sex dependent on the gamete it produces. There _might_ be some insects with more than two sexes[1], but generally a dioecious (two-sexed) species will be anisogamous, meaning one sex is responsible for bringing a load of smaller, simpler gametes (sperm, pollen) to the party whilst the other brings a single, larger one (egg, ova). Put them together and babies happen.
The mechanism that determines the organism's sex varies by species. Homo sapiens are a species that have an XY sex-differentiation system. As a sexually dimorhic species (our two sexes look different), one's chromosomes also cause one to express distinct secondary sexual characteristics (e.g., male facial hair, female breasts). Man boobs and bearded women exist, however, so these characteristics are not a 100% accurate indication of one's sex.
Also, as another reply stated, the meaning of ‘gender’ may or may not == that of ‘sex’.
Gender referred only to a linguistic concept or was a synonym for sex until the '60s-'70s, when radical feminists and sexologists like John Money[2] proposed that gender be used to refer to the expectations, roles and responsibilities that a culture assigns based on sex (i.e., women should raise kids, men are more aggressive). Personally, I feel a term like ‘tertiary’ or ‘socio-sexual characteristics’ would have been a better, less confusing choice, but unfortunately I wasn't around in the '60s to tell them.
Outside of social sciences, the words generally remain synonymous. Within social sciences the '60s-'70s-era distinction is retained and gender is studied almost exclusively (as you might expect of a sociological concept rather than a biological one).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953470...
Then age starts to look as definitional and mutable as names or gender. Why not petition to change it?
Anecdotes: I know someone age 53 whom I would not trust to add two numbers and get the right answer. OTOH, my wife's uncle, who died two years ago at 91, was somebody I consulted regularly until his death about MacOS issues and what DSLR I should use to photograph microwave plasmas. He was an MD. Go figure.
I think definition of age deserves more discussion.
What you're saying is we should have a different metric to measure ability / health, which isn't called age.
For now, that’s a reasonable approximation, but it already fails due to relativistic effects in the ISS, where astronauts age about 0.01 second a year less than when they would stay at sea level and at sea level speed, and it will definitely fail due if we ever leave earth, say by colonizing Mars, where a year is 687 earth days.
Hard to change the fact having fathered children.
Thanks to increasingly anachronistic mandated retirement ages it's quite possible the fitter one is excluded from the workplace.
Age seems like it's a bit of a gradient too.
Most people don't realize time is relative and actually hard to pin down with logical precision in every case. Once you start to question the rules and references, there are lots of quirks.
I do think his argument about Tinder is more interesting than you might think. Why should he have to lie about his age on this public accommodation? He doesn't have to lie about his sex or race, even though some people choose intimate relationships on those factors. Why not put the onus on those who wish to "discriminate" against his age to out themselves as people who care about age?
[0] https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Well, I'm not going to be on the losing side this time. Here's to hoping for an age-fluid world in 5 years!
"That's ageism, and it's illegal! Also, did you just assume my gender identity?? Now watch my walker, and hand me that M14."
Maybe this is how we implement basic income.
That seems inefficient and slow. Someone I knew growing up wanted to drive sooner. They asked their father to get them a new birth certificate. A few phone calls later, a "gift" to the right person at the records office and voila, he turned a year older. It was both scary and amazing that legally his age changed overnight.
Maybe he should've taken the time to convince the people drafting his birth certificate to put a different year on it back when they were writing it... if he can't do that, then he shouldn't have the power to change his age.
Of course, he can certainly lie about his age on tinder. Don't know why he needs a lawsuit to do that.