For a second I thought I was reading The Onion.
I do however like the philosophical nature of the question: If people can change their gender based on they feel, why can’t they change their age?
I do however like the philosophical nature of the question: If people can change their gender based on they feel, why can’t they change their age?
Excepting general relativity time dilation Interstellar situations, that is.
> Age has a definition.
Relativity explains that this definition is subjective, experimentally.
Astronauts experience time differentials and it will only get more obvious as we go farther. Again, the concept of granularity (how much of what matters from what perspective) applies in both cases - age and gender.
This isn't a justification. Resolve this philosophically however you like with one and I observe that it should be true in the other case.
That's happened zero times thus far, so I stand by my original argument.
I can totally see how someone might be 69, but still running triathlons, and want to identify with an effective age that is 49.
I fail to see how these two cases are different.
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).
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.
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.
What I'm trying to say is, a lot of very unobvious things are socially constructed, I think.
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.
Edit: TL;DR by my understanding your definition of societally determined is so broad as to not really be very meaningful.
The answer to that is that people should not be able to change their gender--unless something gets invented that can change your chromosomes--but if they can then age and race should be allowed, too.
If anything, because by changing gender you can get all sort of advantages if you become a woman:
- tax cuts if you start a company - retire earlier - you win at sport competitions - about 1000 other things
If I feel like [insert minority], why can't I change my race and get the same benefits?
If we have to be abandon common sense, we should be coherent.
Let me preent two arguments against that line of thinking:
- people born with chromasomal oddities such as XXY or XYY, asked to fit in box XY or XX, they do not fit. Do we need a separate gender for all possible chromosomal configurations? There are more than you might expect.
- while you can’t change your chromosomes, you can change how people percieve you in the world. Is gender (as in drivers license m or f) actually supposed to represent your chromosomal configuration - or is it there to match up with how you are percieved?
Last thing: you point to advantages of being female. While I’d argue that those advantages don’t exist because being female come with disadvantages that balance things out, but even if they did, the cost of changing your entire identity makes them unappealing. I find it hard to believe we’d see any significant number of people doing anything like this.
It also unjustly classifies me as having "BRN" hair. I don't have brown hair, I have dark brown hair, and a particular shade of brown hair that isn't captured by the government's arbitrarily chosen tetradecimal categorization scheme. Hair color is a spectrum, and they should recognize that by ending the practice of falsely categorizing people into inaccurate groups.
Similarly, they commit the same act of violence against me by classifying my eyes as "BRN", when I am sure my eyes' unique hue is not precisely #A52A2A.
[1] http://www.vsp.state.va.us/afis/livescan/files/VAEye&HairCol... (Yes, this is Virginia, I couldn't find one for California.)
Changing gender simply is a desire to change what you are currently. The whole notion of transitioning is to change from what you were to something that you feel more comfortable being.
Changing your gender doesn't actually have many legal implications (outside of, perhaps, marriage). Changing your age would throw your entire legal history into question.
One of these is subjective. The other is not.