Man, 69, loses legal battle against temporal reality in effort to become 49

In what sense is the time since birth subjective?

Excepting general relativity time dilation Interstellar situations, that is.

Many people refer to sex as what someone is biologically and gender as what society considers them (edit: just FYI I'm not an expert and this is probably an oversimplification). While sex is more constant there isn't any reason gender has to be (and there are practical reasons why it shouldn't be but that's out of scope of this comment). This means that while biologically someone might have two XX chromosomes and be 60 years old it's not necessary that society considers them an old woman.

That's simply wrong. Age has a definition. You cannot 'feel' yourself into a different age. Sex != gender.

Age is determined by trips around the Sun and sex is determined by genetics. Gender, by definition, is not determined by sex. You are conflating sex and gender, but they are not the same thing. You can feel like a man, but be biologically a woman. You can feel like 40 at 70, but you're still 70.

gen·der

/ˈjendər/Submit

noun

1.

the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).

> People are male or female by genetics

Some (most) people. As with most things, the whole truth is not that simple.

Regardless, "sex" and "gender" are also not the same (though they're usually closely related). There's nothing about having a Y chromosome that makes one have short fingernails, short hair, unable to wear dresses or high heels or paint one's fingernails.

Genetics is not that simplistic. A male born with androgen insensitivity syndrome have every genetic marker for being male, with male chromosomes, but get female genital and female secondary sexual characteristics. AIS has a range from mild, partial and full, and is only one of many areas where you get gender variation.

There were a study that looked if biological sex difference in the brain matched the chromosome or the gender that a person say that they are, and it found that biological sex difference did not match the chromosome for transsexuals. It matched the gender that the person said they were. The study also concluded that hormone replacement was not a factor as they only tested those who had not gone through that.

This mean that genital and secondary sexual characteristics are not adequate to correctly identify the genetic sex, nor is biological sex difference such as brain composition, bones or other traits which normally differ between genders. DNA is the closest thing to a clean binary state, but then we have strange cases where some individuals have multiple DNA in them, and thus have both XX and XY. As such the best scientific conclusions is that both gender and sex is a probabilistic result of the combined traits that we associate with male, female, man and woman.

If they do (don’t have mine handy to check) then perhaps they shouldn’t. Since that marker is used to enforce a specific gender on people’s lives.

> Although, if you show me a random person, I can easily tell you their sex (and in most cases gender).

No, you think you can easily tell their sex, because people who have successfully transitioned are the ones you can't pick out. It's confirmation bias.

Maybe I don't understand your argument but it sounds like to me you would think that 3 feet long is societally determined because you need a social system to define what 3 feet is and create measuring tapes and whatever but that would make every metric socially constructed. It only works based off a different definition of what socially constructed means thqn I intended in my post so I could try to nail down a better definition or if you want you could suggest to me clearer words in the future but I'm loathe to get into a semantic argument here.

Edit: TL;DR by my understanding your definition of societally determined is so broad as to not really be very meaningful.

I just checked my UT driver's license and saw "Sex:" "M"

It's also a violation of Facebook's ToS

Sure there are, and all of those things are determined by biology, not choice. That said, this is a topic that could go off the rails and sideways very quickly...

It's my (extremely outside) understanding that the concepts of physical/genetic/choose-something-objective gender are not what people mean in these conversations - nor are they referring to the subjective identity of what kinds of people one feels sexually attracted to. They are referring to a third thing, also subjective, best described as "what gender you feel like", which is very much like how old or young you feel, except much more closely related to one's identity (I "feel" young, which is great, but I also "feel" male, which is more than great - it's critically important to my self identity). So, both of these things (age and gender) have subjective and objectives measures - the difference is that "years old", which term the law uses, is patently objective both legally and linguistically, whereas on the other hand "male/female/etc", which terms the law also uses, is less objective linguistically (as described above), and therefore there is at least one basis on which you could argue for a legal change of gender - a basis that does not exist for a change-of-age argument.

Because it's socially popular for it to be, so the goalposts will be moved wherever they need to be for it to be true.

I'd seriously consider putting on a believable show for 5 years earlier retirement...

> Well, women (at least in Italy or Europe I guess) can retire earlier than men.

I'm from the US and haven't heard of this before. Is there a widespread rationale for this? As a whole, women live longer, so equating "retired years" doesn't seem plausible.

In the US, you get (easy) access to 401k and IRA at 59.5 years old, and social security can't be claimed until 62. Gender doesn't matter.

> It's not clear to me what the existence of the occasional XXY individual, etc., has to do with the idea that gender is just a social construct.

It doesn't, but it does have to do (potentially) with the argument.

One side says "Gender is male/female, scientific fact, and can be examined in DNA". They are outright rejecting the idea of gender being a social construct.

The other side COULD try to argue that gender is a social construct by virtue of all the social variables and treatments that are involved, but that doesn't actually set up gender as a social construct - those can all be social issues ATTACHED to a non-social construct, just as young/old are the social constructs attached to chronological age. To convince the other side, you need to separate gender as a concept from the genes. If the "static binary" group cannot imagine a gender identity separate from the genes, they might understand someone XXY having one of those binary options. They may even understand one XXY person being "male" and another being "female". Even if they argue that there is still a rigorous "male" and "female" option that is based on the expression of the genes, they are accepting that we are making some definition of "male" and "female" that is from a collection of criteria. The "decision" of what is in those collections of criteria are more clearly socially influenced.

So: Society decides what defines "male" and "female" traits (based on "traditional" traits exhibited by chromosome-based sex) => society is defining male and female for the unusual genetic mixes => male/female is based on behavior => male/female isn't solely decided by chromosomes => having only strict male/female definitions is not the only set of definitions available.

At least, that's how I understand the argument. And I have some anecdotal evidence for it - My first exposure to transgender/intersex/etc was in college with a video made by a group of people who WERE unusual genotype or extreme phenotype differences. Listening to someone talking about how they felt like a "boy" but their penis was removed shortly after birth, forcing them to be in a world that treated them as a "girl" gave me a perspective I could identify with (and was horrifying - it also gave me my first real moment of empathy to consider how day-to-day life is different for a woman. Realizing that I (cis-straight male) thought the idea of being treated as female was actually scary caused me to rethink some assumptions...and I was raised to be socially liberal. The idea that there was a penis to be removed made me instinctively agree that this person could be male in a way that is hard to match.

That said, I don't think the non-XX/XY phenotype argument is the most persuasive available, or at least not for everyone. I do think it's a valid approach, even if such visible phenotype differences are rare.

The Netherlands, the country in question, is a highly developed western culture.

Whatever adjudication process that exists in a culture that doesn’t care about date of birth would probably reach a different judgement.

So the answer is that they in fact can in the _VAST_ majority of cases. An extremely rare exception doesn't negate the rule.