> "You can change your name. You can change your gender. Why not your age?"
Solid logic
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.