Probably so. Do most people on Tinder abide by the ToS? If he looks 49, who is going to report him for a violation? If someone does report him, how hard is it to make a new account?
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.
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.
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... 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
“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.
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.
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 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.
Sure there are, and all of those things are determined by biology, not choice. That said, this is a topic that could go off the rails and sideways very quickly...
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 feel, except much more closely related to one's identity (I "feel" young, which is great, but I also "feel" male, which is more than great - it's critically important to my self identity). So, both of these things (age and gender) have subjective and objectives measures - the difference is that "years old", which term the law uses, is patently objective both legally and linguistically, whereas on the other hand "male/female/etc", which terms the law also uses, is less objective linguistically (as described above), and therefore there is at least one basis on which you could argue for a legal change of gender - a basis that does not exist for a change-of-age argument.
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.
I've always wondered how someone knows how a man feels or how a woman feels. All I know is how I feel. How am I to determine that the way I feel is the way everyone who identifies as women feel, or the way everyone who identifies as men feel? Certainly there's a continuum where rarely do two individuals feel exactly the same.
It's entirely possible to be accepting and understanding of individuals, while still disagreeing with the larger social groups and movements they are a part of. In fact, pretty much everyone does that in some way or another every single day.
The thing I take issue with is the knee-jerk reaction of certain people to shut down any conversation that suggests traditional roles and definitions were and still are valid.
Yes it's simplistic. It was a one line statement. Is it dismissive? Maybe. But it also has a grain of truth to it, which is what bothers people.
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. The one that flies out at me is retirement or senior benefits. There may be some options only available to people of color, or women, but not as widespread as the implications of age. If this passed, could I become 65 and start withdrawing my 401k penalty-free?
> 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 guess) can retire earlier than men. So, can a 60-year old become a woman and retire, while as a man he would have to work until he's 65?
> 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.
As for the UK: the Womens retirement age used to be 60, but it has been steadily rising for some time, until at one point it was brought to parity for eligibility for state pensions. (a move that was marred with protest by those wishing for "equality"? somehow)
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.
What material benefits does a pensioner have by identifying as a younger person? They would lose entitlement to pensions and benefits and social security in most European countries.
The fact is that these differences im sex exist (and increasing). I would happily change my official gender to be able to be a board member (now that California is limiting it). But if I needed, I would maybe change my official gender just to be able to fall into the gender quota and get a job.
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 complex. Is it about nationality? Geography? Skin color? Religion?
Most things about people don't fit in neat boxes. Age is not one of those things.
> There has always been "grey" areas from an anatomy perspective
Yes, extremely rare ones. It's not clear to me what the existence of the occasional XXY individual, etc., has to do with the idea that gender is just a social construct.
> It's not clear to me what the existence of the occasional XXY individual, etc., has to do with the idea that gender is just a social construct.
It doesn't, but it does have to do (potentially) with the argument.
One side says "Gender is male/female, scientific fact, and can be examined in DNA". They are outright rejecting the idea of gender being a social construct.
The other side COULD try to argue that gender is a social construct by virtue of all the social variables and treatments that are involved, but that doesn't actually set up gender as a social construct - those can all be social issues ATTACHED to a non-social construct, just as young/old are the social constructs attached to chronological age. To convince the other side, you need to separate gender as a concept from the genes. If the "static binary" group cannot imagine a gender identity separate from the genes, they might understand someone XXY having one of those binary options. They may even understand one XXY person being "male" and another being "female". Even if they argue that there is still a rigorous "male" and "female" option that is based on the expression of the genes, they are accepting that we are making some definition of "male" and "female" that is from a collection of criteria. The "decision" of what is in those collections of criteria are more clearly socially influenced.
So: Society decides what defines "male" and "female" traits (based on "traditional" traits exhibited by chromosome-based sex) => society is defining male and female for the unusual genetic mixes => male/female is based on behavior => male/female isn't solely decided by chromosomes => having only strict male/female definitions is not the only set of definitions available.
At least, that's how I understand the argument. And I have some anecdotal evidence for it - My first exposure to transgender/intersex/etc was in college with a video made by a group of people who WERE unusual genotype or extreme phenotype differences. Listening to someone talking about how they felt like a "boy" but their penis was removed shortly after birth, forcing them to be in a world that treated them as a "girl" gave me a perspective I could identify with (and was horrifying - it also gave me my first real moment of empathy to consider how day-to-day life is different for a woman. Realizing that I (cis-straight male) thought the idea of being treated as female was actually scary caused me to rethink some assumptions...and I was raised to be socially liberal. The idea that there was a penis to be removed made me instinctively agree that this person could be male in a way that is hard to match.
That said, I don't think the non-XX/XY phenotype argument is the most persuasive available, or at least not for everyone. I do think it's a valid approach, even if such visible phenotype differences are rare.
Really? The idea of age being a publicly known and verifiable fact is completely specific to highly developed Western cultures. Many places in the world attach no importance to date/time of birth and do not record it.
It's probably more accurate to describe transitioning as redefining what it means to be a woman, not simply asking people to deny one's physiology or to "play along with a delusion". Before, it was simply being born a certain way. Today, it's shifting to mean acting a certain way combined with medical intervention. If we could redefine marriage to accomidate gay couples, I don't see why we can't redefine womanhood to accomidate transgender people, although it's fair to debate if that's necessarily the best option so long as good-faith is maintained and we recognise transgender people's struggles as legitimate.
Intellectual coherency on transgender issues will be rare because so much of it is agenda-driven on many sides, even conflicting within the same side. In a way it's starting to resemble the ferocious debate on climate change. Classifying it one way or the other has grave implications for the loser(s) and it becomes easier to "stretch" your claim when the spectre of that is raised. It's still important to keep in mind that the phenomena underlying the debate is objectively demonstrable: sex-based differentiation in the brain has been observed in ordinary men versus men who transition to women. It's also important to keep in mind that a simple philosophical argument highlights the inconsistency in saying that a man who wants a certain body is diseased for wanting the same things that would cause distress if they were absent in a woman.
It remains unseen if redefining womanhood will be a sustainable solution for trans' individuals integration and equality, but the fact that it is considered is reassuring that we have the right priorities as a culture oriented toward the individual, toward secularism, and toward liberty. However, we must be willing to admit what is working and what isn't working. Aspects of transition, such as hormone therapy, clearly work. Other aspects of transition, such as ignoring sex differentiation to the disadvantage of others in sports, may not be working so well. Honesty combined with good-faith and individual, secular values will be important here.
(Disclaimer: I am transgender and I consider myself to be more in a third-category best described as "different from most men")
This brings up a valid point about health technology and "biological age". As (usually wealthy) people are increasingly able to delay the onset of senescence, the law is going to have issues with time defined "age" which represents capability.
For example having to retest every 5 years maybe unneeded if people are living to 125 and remaining healthy along the way.
Scientists can prove someone's gender by looking at his/her chromosomes, can't they (if you take exceptions, there are people born with 4 arms, or even 2 heads: was a new species created, or it's just very rare exceptions?)..?
If you abandon common sense and gender is a construct, race and age should be a construct, or however you want to call it, people should be able to change it.
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 or absence of a testosterone wash in-utero (which itself is supposed to be determined by chromosomes, but this doesn't always work).
There have been documented cases of women with XY chromosomes who not only exhibit all the usual female sexual characteristics, but even have working ovaries and have carried babies to term. In fact, while I don't have it handy, there was a story not that long ago about a woman with XY chromosomes successfully having a baby, and then they discovered that her mother also had XY chromosomes.
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).
This legal battle was really about giving a platform to bigots who want to conflate gender with sex to invalidate transgendered people. Just look in the comments for proof.
+1 for Team Reality finally winning one. Feels like we’ve been getting shut out all season. A small victory to be sure but even those are worth celebrating in these dark times.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 94.6 ms ] thread> An Arnhem court ruled in favor of the fourth dimension.
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?
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.
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.
One of these is subjective. The other is not.
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.
The thing I take issue with is the knee-jerk reaction of certain people to shut down any conversation that suggests traditional roles and definitions were and still are valid.
Yes it's simplistic. It was a one line statement. Is it dismissive? Maybe. But it also has a grain of truth to it, which is what bothers people.
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 guess) can retire earlier than men. So, can a 60-year old become a woman and retire, while as a man he would have to work until he's 65?
You haven't thought this through.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age
As for the UK: the Womens retirement age used to be 60, but it has been steadily rising for some time, until at one point it was brought to parity for eligibility for state pensions. (a move that was marred with protest by those wishing for "equality"? somehow)
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/10/thousan...
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 complex. Is it about nationality? Geography? Skin color? Religion?
Most things about people don't fit in neat boxes. Age is not one of those things.
Yes, extremely rare ones. It's not clear to me what the existence of the occasional XXY individual, etc., has to do with the idea that gender is just a social construct.
It doesn't, but it does have to do (potentially) with the argument.
One side says "Gender is male/female, scientific fact, and can be examined in DNA". They are outright rejecting the idea of gender being a social construct.
The other side COULD try to argue that gender is a social construct by virtue of all the social variables and treatments that are involved, but that doesn't actually set up gender as a social construct - those can all be social issues ATTACHED to a non-social construct, just as young/old are the social constructs attached to chronological age. To convince the other side, you need to separate gender as a concept from the genes. If the "static binary" group cannot imagine a gender identity separate from the genes, they might understand someone XXY having one of those binary options. They may even understand one XXY person being "male" and another being "female". Even if they argue that there is still a rigorous "male" and "female" option that is based on the expression of the genes, they are accepting that we are making some definition of "male" and "female" that is from a collection of criteria. The "decision" of what is in those collections of criteria are more clearly socially influenced.
So: Society decides what defines "male" and "female" traits (based on "traditional" traits exhibited by chromosome-based sex) => society is defining male and female for the unusual genetic mixes => male/female is based on behavior => male/female isn't solely decided by chromosomes => having only strict male/female definitions is not the only set of definitions available.
At least, that's how I understand the argument. And I have some anecdotal evidence for it - My first exposure to transgender/intersex/etc was in college with a video made by a group of people who WERE unusual genotype or extreme phenotype differences. Listening to someone talking about how they felt like a "boy" but their penis was removed shortly after birth, forcing them to be in a world that treated them as a "girl" gave me a perspective I could identify with (and was horrifying - it also gave me my first real moment of empathy to consider how day-to-day life is different for a woman. Realizing that I (cis-straight male) thought the idea of being treated as female was actually scary caused me to rethink some assumptions...and I was raised to be socially liberal. The idea that there was a penis to be removed made me instinctively agree that this person could be male in a way that is hard to match.
That said, I don't think the non-XX/XY phenotype argument is the most persuasive available, or at least not for everyone. I do think it's a valid approach, even if such visible phenotype differences are rare.
Whatever adjudication process that exists in a culture that doesn’t care about date of birth would probably reach a different judgement.
Intellectual coherency on transgender issues will be rare because so much of it is agenda-driven on many sides, even conflicting within the same side. In a way it's starting to resemble the ferocious debate on climate change. Classifying it one way or the other has grave implications for the loser(s) and it becomes easier to "stretch" your claim when the spectre of that is raised. It's still important to keep in mind that the phenomena underlying the debate is objectively demonstrable: sex-based differentiation in the brain has been observed in ordinary men versus men who transition to women. It's also important to keep in mind that a simple philosophical argument highlights the inconsistency in saying that a man who wants a certain body is diseased for wanting the same things that would cause distress if they were absent in a woman.
It remains unseen if redefining womanhood will be a sustainable solution for trans' individuals integration and equality, but the fact that it is considered is reassuring that we have the right priorities as a culture oriented toward the individual, toward secularism, and toward liberty. However, we must be willing to admit what is working and what isn't working. Aspects of transition, such as hormone therapy, clearly work. Other aspects of transition, such as ignoring sex differentiation to the disadvantage of others in sports, may not be working so well. Honesty combined with good-faith and individual, secular values will be important here.
(Disclaimer: I am transgender and I consider myself to be more in a third-category best described as "different from most men")
For example having to retest every 5 years maybe unneeded if people are living to 125 and remaining healthy along the way.
Verifiably false, but pedantic.
If you abandon common sense and gender is a construct, race and age should be a construct, or however you want to call it, people should be able to change it.
Only in the vast majority of cases. There are XX, XY, YY, XXY, and even more esoteric versions!
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 or absence of a testosterone wash in-utero (which itself is supposed to be determined by chromosomes, but this doesn't always work).
There have been documented cases of women with XY chromosomes who not only exhibit all the usual female sexual characteristics, but even have working ovaries and have carried babies to term. In fact, while I don't have it handy, there was a story not that long ago about a woman with XY chromosomes successfully having a baby, and then they discovered that her mother also had XY chromosomes.
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..