No, he’s just saying he wants the age on his ID to match the age he feels (identifies as). It’s an equivalent argument to that for allowing trans people to change their ID from their birth gender, much as you’d like it not to be
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Government issued IDs indicate chronological age. And I think he knows that.
I have to go to UPS. I’ll try to explain the several flaws in that statement when I return if no one else has.
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“people can legally change their name…”
Screw him for trolling trans-namers. I can’t believe he would go to all this trouble just because he’s bigotted against those who change their names
No, it absolutely is not. Unlike gender, time is not a social construct, it’s a fundamental component of the universe. Calendars are constructs, but all accurate calendars tend to converge on a single measurement for the length of a year in our terrestrial frame of reference. The measure of how many calendar years you’ve been alive is not a mutable unit. I can call myself an “old soul” all I want, but I have no standing to change the fact that my birth certificate was legally issued in 1984.
Science has firmly established that gender, sexual orientation, and even biological sex are multi-dimensional spectra. Time, while subject to the influence of gravity and velocity, is not a spectrum that you can “identify” on.
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Given his apparent history of intolerance, no it’s really not at all.
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“Government issue IDs indicate (or should indicate) biological sex” say the transphobes. See how you are begging the question?
Time may not be, but “age” is. For instance in China, when you are born you are aged 1 rather than zero. Transphobes argue that gender should be identical to biological sex, or that IDs should reflect the sex one is born into, whereas we know that gender is an identity separate to one’s biological sex. He is arguing that his “age” should be an identity, separate to his chronological lifespan-to-date (we don’t really have two separate words for age, although we could). He has a point in that age is a also a social identity.
Chronological age is an objective reality. Whether you begin counting at age one or zero, every year passes at the same rate for everyone, even if certain internet discussions make it feel like an agonizing eternity.
As was already explained to you, sex and gender are multi-dimensional non-binary characteristics, sex because of the complexities of biology and gender because of the complexities of society. Legal recognition of those characteristics has historically been, and in most places continues to be, reduced to a cis-gendered heterosexual binary assignment which ignores those complexities and either erases the intrinsic identity of people who don’t fit it or dehumanizes them as criminals or mentally ill, frequently coercing them to endure psychologically damaging “conversion” torture or outright killing them if they refuse to comply with the roles assigned to them.
There is no equivalence between the oppression of transpeople and this trolley’s frivolous lawsuit against the state recognizing his true chronological age because he claims he doesn’t feel it. The state doesn’t say diddlysquat about how old he’s allowed to feel. It’s recording the year during which he was born, and if he moves to a country that starts at one instead of zero, his birth year remains the same. And please don’t bother with any bull about different calendars. The conversion of dates between calendars in legal use by various states is just as immutable as the passage of time in our shared reference frame.
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When someone builds a near-light speed vessel and takes a relativistic journey, we’ll talk about adjusting their chronological age. I feel pretty safe saying it won’t be this idiot.
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Actually no, except for a tiny minority with chromosomal abnormalities, biological sex is an objective binary reality, that does not necessarily correspond to self- identified, constructed /performed gender. But whether sex is binary or not is of little relevance to the question of transgender dignity and self-identity, and whether or not this should be recognized on IDs.
I don’t believe anyone is claiming an equivalency in oppression, that’s just your own strawman. There is an analytical equivalency in argument though, which you haven’t successfully refuted.
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Your use of the word abnormalities is suggestive. And no, it is not.
Sex and gender don’t necessarily correspond. Calling gender performative is the kind of reductive stupidity Jordan Peterson loves to promulgate.
The subject of the article made a clear comparison between his situation and that of transpeople, going even so far as to claim his supposed plight was the worse, indeed the worst.
FTA: “You can change your name. You can change your gender. Why not your age? Nowhere are you so discriminated against as with your age.”
Far from being a strawman, if anything I understated his position. More than mere false-equivalence, he’s explicitly claiming he is more oppressed.
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Showing my age here…
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Oppression is not the same as discrimination. Nobody faces violence due to their age. However age discrimination certainly occurs, Age discrimination (brochure) | Ontario Human Rights Commission and is probably more prevalent than transgender discrimination (mainly due to the very small proportion of transgender people).
Then his brain must have traveled to Pluto then back.
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I thought that was just a kooky story, but I can see that it has underpinnings that are not as much fun.
Now I feel like that I need to go re-examine my relationship with Cecil Adams.
Saying “I should be allowed to legally change my age because age discrimination” is like saying “I should be allowed to legally change my weight because body discrimination.” It’s inane; even if you were able to change what your ID says the same people who were going to discriminate against you before are still going to do so anyway.
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In my experience, government IDs do not list your age, they list your date of birth. His he claiming to have been born at a different date?
I understand the concern about age discrimination at work. It is actually illegal in the US to discriminate against people over 40 years old because of their age. In Europe, it used to be common practice to list required ages in job postings and to list your birth date on your resume or CV, and you can be forced to retire once you reach a particular age. Here in the US you do not list your birth date, gender, race, nationality, or marital status in your resume or CV. The only pertinent question is whether you are qualified for the job, including being able to legally work in the country. Tinder is, of course, a totally different matter; no sympathy from me in that respect.
And, yes, I think that he is driving trollies and that he is mocking the struggle of transgendered people.
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But it is very different because we culturally accept that age is an arbitrary number for record-keeping and descriptive only on a statistical level (e.g. for triggering pensions because of working-life-span expectations). We don’t use it to classify and separate people for the most part, unlike with legal gender. On the other hand, legal gender has some very real and serious consequences (e.g. what prison you get put in) and culturally we’re under the misapprehension that legal gender means things that it doesn’t (as evidenced by all the transphobes saying “science says [the opposite of what science says]”).
I’m sorry, but that’s obvious fucking bullshit. Beyond his pension, there’s no consequences for his “mental age” being different from his legal age. There’s big consequences for gender, on the other hand.
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I am being thoroughly divine right now!
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