Man, 69, loses legal battle against temporal reality in effort to become 49 • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by EpicEng » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 12:23 AM UTC

andrenth wrote: post #78

EpicEng wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the stretch. Ok, I give up: if it is demonstrable that a given person has traveled near the speed of light and thus aged significantly differently than the rest of us, that person should be allowed to legally change their age. That's happened zero times thus far, so I stand by my original argument.

Physics is quite a stretch and yet denying biology isn’t... This is an anti-science, ideological stance.

>Physics is quite a stretch and yet denying biology isn’t... Who's talking about biology? Go look up the definition of "gender". We can debate the specifics and current state of affairs, but you can't argue with the definition.

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

#82

Post by belorn » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 1:26 PM UTC

outside1234 wrote: post #36

tdb7893 wrote: 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.

People are male or female by genetics and have a personal perception of themselves as something other than that gender. 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.

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.

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

#83

Post by throwawaywtfvjk » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 2:23 PM UTC

people arguing, that temporal reality is absolute. what do you think about daylight savings?

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

#84

Post by andrenth » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #81

andrenth wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physics is quite a stretch and yet denying biology isn’t... This is an anti-science, ideological stance.

>Physics is quite a stretch and yet denying biology isn’t... Who's talking about biology? Go look up the definition of "gender". We can debate the specifics and current state of affairs, but you can't argue with the definition.

The definition of gender, stated multiple times in this thread as if it were a hard truth (i.e. a social construct), is purely ideological.

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

#85

Post by jazoom » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:03 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #72

captainmuon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 celebr…

> 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.

So they get wrong one in ten thousand. I bet you can't guess the age of 9999/10000 people.