Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

51–60 of 85 posts

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

#51
He clearly has not thought through the consequences..

eg

turns up to pick up rented car..

Goes to bank to arrange a bank loan..

Tries to sell or buy land.. or anything for thar matter..

Tries get on an international flight...

Result..

sorry sir there is no way you are 49 years old you have obviously stolen someones identity just wait here while i call the police..

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

#52
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gender" is a social construct but while "old" or "young" is a social construct "69 years old" isn't really.

69 years old (more or less on earth or in space) is no different than Male or Female (more or less). The difference is in relative subjective granularity.

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

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

#53
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Age” and “gender” in this case are just entries in a government database somewhere. There’s no deep philosophy to it. Trans people wanted to be able to change their gender, so they fought hard for it—that’s what you need to do to get policies like this changed. If people want to be able to change their age, they’ll have to fight for that too.

I think "sex" is in the government database, not gender.

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

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

#54
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i think the important difference with age is that there are hard legal implications that go along with it, that SHOULDN'T exist over the dimensions of sex and race There are many incentives for women. Think about tax cuts for starting a company, etc. etc. Do you want to remove those incentives? > If this passed, could I become 65 and start withdrawing my 401k penalty-free? Well, women (at least in Italy or Europe I…

> 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.

There is a gender difference in many countries worldwide - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age , with women often getting to retire 5 years earlier. The differences used to be more common, now many countries have equalized the retirement age where it used to be different, and many of those where there currently is a difference are phasing it out.

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

#56
post #35
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they can't. Gender is a social construct. But they can't tell that for physiological sex either. Humans have a whole host of secondary sexual characteristics, most of which are more important than genitals in determining how other people categorize them. But even ignoring all of that, chromosomes don't strictly determine what sex characteristics someone ends up with. AIUI a lot of this has to do with the presence…

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

AFAIK nobody's done a study to determine what percentage of the population has chromosomes that don't match with their expressed sexual characteristics (either primary or secondary).

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

#57
post #4

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?

Because then he could be married before he was even born? Or a young person could "feel" like you are 65+, and start collecting retirement benefits early? Or they could "feel" 21+, so they could buy alcohol? Or if by changing your age, then a crime you committed when you were 18 was retroactively changed to when you were a minor?

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.

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

#58
post #12
post #4

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?

"Gender" is a social construct but while "old" or "young" is a social construct "69 years old" isn't really.

Although, if you show me a random person, I can easily tell you their sex (and in most cases gender). However I can't precisely determine their age. To track somebody's age is quite elaborate, you need a calendar and have to count days and years, and you can't do that yourself or trust the person to do it, but you need a certain social system... Birth certificates etc. or at least your fellow villagers have to celebrate birthdays regularly.

What I'm trying to say is, a lot of very unobvious things are socially constructed, I think.

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

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, is gender arbitrary? There are albino blacks, blonde latinos, etc.

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 fee…

As much as anything, this comes down to societal gender roles and a desire not to conform with the ones you've been assigned. In a different culture, it could simply come down to "piss off and I'll do what I want", but we live in a time and place where labels very much matter to people, and they want to be able to pick labels that mean what they would like.

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

#60
post #5

I don't see why one can change sex, but not change age, race, etc.

It's an issue of fact vs expression/perception. There was a moment in time when you started breathing outside of your mother's womb. There is usually a witness and time is a one-way metric. Gender expression is a different, more complex matter. There has always been "grey" areas from an anatomy perspective and I think there is consensus that other factors affect this as well. Race, depending on context, is even more…

Whoah, I thought time was relative. What happened to time dilation?
Post reply on HN