"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.

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.

Someone can be male without even having a Y chromosome: https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

In what sense is the time since birth subjective?

Excepting general relativity time dilation Interstellar situations, that is.

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

> That's simply wrong.

> 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.

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.

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.

But on a birth certificate they show sex, not gender.

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.

You're right.

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.

> unless something gets invented that can change your chromosomes

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.

“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"

Good idea. I just checked mine, in California, and it also says "Sex: M".

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.)

Gender is malleable; sex and age are not.

I agree that there is a philosophical discussion to be had, but the actual request was to change his official date of birth from March 11, 1949 to March 11, 1969 which is just ridiculous.

It's the difference between are and were. Age is an indication that you existed at some point in the past. It's a compacted record of reality. You cant change that arbitrarily even if you "feel younger".

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.

Because neither of them actually work that way?

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.

Indeed. Imagine someone exposed to fiberglass or coal dust whose health may be equivalent as a person twenty years older than them. Might not a stronger case be made that a person could be 69 rather than 49?

> If people can change their gender based on they feel, why can’t they change their age?

One of these is subjective. The other is not.

Can you explain why you think that?