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from the does-the-pensioner-want-to-repay-his-benefits-and-go-back-to-work,-too? dept.
In the quixotic battle against old age, some people use skin care and spin class.
That’s not enough for Emile Ratelband, a 69-year-old who feels like he’s in his 40s. The Dutch pensioner is asking a court in his hometown of Arnhem, southeast of Amsterdam, to change his birth certificate so that it says he took his first breath on March 11, 1969, rather than on March 11, 1949. The judges heard his case Monday and promised they would render a verdict in the next several weeks.
Ratelband sees his request as no different from a petition to change his name or the gender he was assigned at birth — and isn’t bothered that this comparison might offend transgender people, whose medical needs have been recognized by the American Medical Association. It comes down to free will, he maintains.
I want to be recognized as an alien trapped in an Earthling's body.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday November 09 2018, @06:07AM (34 children)
Time is a quantitative standard, and the units of its measurement would make sense even with no human around to do the measuring. Entropy, which is what time was invented to measure, does not emerge from humanity the way gender does; indeed, humanity (and life itself) is an entropy-shuffling trick. A year is a year even if it doesn't feel like it. Now, there is a chance that cytologically this guy is a lot younger than his chronological age, but that doesn't change his chronological age, and this is a stupid, trollish "hurr hurr own da libs durrrp" stunt he's playing.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @06:35AM (13 children)
It's entirely possible that some variation of this could become "true" one day with anti-aging. You can only estimate a person's age from their appearance, DNA [soylentnews.org], skeleton, and other forensic clues, if you don't know their actual birth date.
If you introduce comprehensive anti-aging therapies, this could complicate things. We could see partial anti-aging where some aspects are treated while others continue to degrade. Or we could eventually see people permanently appearing to be in their 20s (or "newborn" on the cellular scale) regardless of their actual age.
You could see this applying to
genderbiological sex too. It is possible that improvements in biotechnology will eventually allow people to change their sex on command, including transforming their entire genome. Fully functional parts, swapping out mismatched bones, the whole package.None of this helps Emile Ratelband's case. Even if you could get a full bio sex change and get your relevant government IDs altered to reflect it, no amount of anti-aging (or naturally slow aging) changes the fact that you were officially born on a certain day. You need a time machine to change that, not anti-aging. And if you have a time machine, you don't need no stinking courts to tell you how to live. You could just take some tech back in time and rule the planet forever.
This is a stunt and the court should show him the door.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Funny) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @06:45AM (7 children)
TL;DR: "Age" can be fluid, but there is no such thing as birthdatefluid.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @07:59AM (4 children)
You and the other poster Azuki whatever are both bigoted pieces of shit. I hope you fucking die.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @08:14AM (2 children)
Care to explain why?
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @08:19AM (1 child)
Shut up Nazi piece of shit
(Score: 5, Touché) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @08:32AM
Isn't that what you identify as?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Friday November 09 2018, @10:09AM
You will get your wish. Absent injury or illness, they will both die from that whole "age" thing you're denying.
Moron.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Friday November 09 2018, @11:59PM (1 child)
...there is no such thing as birthdatefluid.
Well it's something now: my new favorite euphemism for semen.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:56PM
Associating semen to birth is like associating gamblers to jackpot, though. The odds are thin.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by qzm on Friday November 09 2018, @07:56AM (3 children)
And now just replace age with gender.
See what a pig you are being?
Of course not.
Interestingly he has quite a solid point.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @08:17AM (2 children)
I covered gender in my comment.
Seems like you have no point whatsoever. But you can't see that.
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @08:21AM (1 child)
Shut up Nazi bigot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @04:13PM
Someone is upset that people think he is a racist jackass.
(Score: 2, Funny) by fustakrakich on Sunday November 11 2018, @07:14PM
You can only estimate a person's age from their appearance, DNA, skeleton, and other forensic clues, if you don't know their actual birth date.
You can't cut him open and count the rings?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @08:02AM (1 child)
Fuck you bigot
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday November 10 2018, @06:10AM
You *wish,* you basement-crawling freak.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday November 09 2018, @12:36PM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 09 2018, @03:02PM (4 children)
Well, there are some major age-based government and business services to consider, at least in some countries. I'd love to declare myself legally 80 and start claiming fully-vested retirement, Medicare, etc. Yeah, retirement wouldn't pay out quite as much per year, but the several decades of additional payout would probably make it quite profitable overall.
Or in the other direction, I could have myself declared perpetually 12 and avoid eligibility for mandatory military service, being tried as an adult for my crimes, and not have to worry about statuary rape charges if I were into teenagers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 09 2018, @03:09PM (2 children)
Another indication to me that those programs probably shouldn't exist.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday November 09 2018, @04:17PM (1 child)
Why not? Retirement programs are generally profitable for everyone involved, so long as you're not allowed to game the formulas in your favor. Professional investors controlling a large pool of money can reliably get a much better return than private "investment hobbyists", and skim off some of the excess for their own profit.
Even social security wouldn't have a funding problem if congress hadn't "borrowed" almost 3 trillion dollars from its dedicated fund over the years. Repay that with interest and it would be in the clear.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 10 2018, @01:40PM
Except, of course, for the youth who get to pay for more services than they receive (due to demographic changes that increase the relative number of old pensioners and/or pensions promising more for decades than they can sustainably deliver).
Depends on the size of the pool and how well the conflicts of interest are addressed. Too big a pool and they aren't going to get a better return. This is a serious problem for the largest funds like PIMCO [wikipedia.org] or CalPERS [wikipedia.org]. But worse is the conflicts of interest between the professional investors and their customers. For example, CalPERS above is virtue [ai-cio.com] signaling [citylimits.org] at the expense of theirs. From the second link:
That's a really fine sentiment, but done with other peoples' money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @10:21PM
Sure, and that's part of what Mr. Ratelband is challenging. By virtue of his age, he is forced into retirement and lacks any standing on the job market. By declaring himself of lower age, he has more chances to land a job. For example, he has already stated in court that were the court to rule in his favour, he plans to suspend his pension until he has reached retirement age (again).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday November 09 2018, @01:07PM (9 children)
I logged in just to reply to some misnomers here. First of all, this doesn't appear to be a stunt or someone trying to prove a political point. He has reasons for this, which I'll get to. Second, to those saying he should give up his pension and other legal benefits of senior citizens, he is willing to do so. (The WaPo has paywalls, so here's a link [npr.org] to a source without them that explains all of this.)
It's disappointing to see so many ad hominem and kneejerk reactions to this suit, from people who clearly haven't bothered to learn anything about the case. Also, from a legal perspective, what matters is what makes legal sense according to precedent, not some political argument. Transgender folks have argued compellingly that there are elements to information that appears on official documents that perhaps should be challenged at times. (Frankly, intersex people have an even stronger case for all of this, but they don't have as strong a political lobby.)
Let's take a moment and realize that society emphasizes chronological age to an extent that far exceeds its predictive utility value. Agism is a real, serious discriminatory problem in the workplace. And age-determined BS restrictions pervade our society and often legal restrictions. We also make a lot of unsupported assumptions based on age. I first realized this when I had a kid. Every time we'd go for a doctor's visit, we'd get this list of things he was "supposed" to do at particular ages. I never paid much attention to it, until I realized that in the vast majority of things, my son could clearly understand things and perform tasks that supposedly were cognitively or physically "impossible" according to psychologists at certain ages. I have a friend who studies math cognition in children and actually observed my son because of his unusual understanding of numbers at very early ages -- but I never pushed my son on anything. I just didn't look at the "sheets" that told me what he was supposed to do and instead just showed him stuff that he was interested in. (In a few areas, he was "behind" expectations too. I didn't worry about that either.)
We have educational systems that continue this age-related segregation, for which there is little scientific evidence that it's the best method. "Skipping a grade" is very unusual most places, while "being held back" is a source of ridicule, rather than what it probably should be viewed as -- namely just allowing students the ability to develop at a reasonable personalized rate.
One of the few legal places where we actually have a court mechanism to commonly overcome assumptions about age is for late teenagers, where courts can grant "emancipation" to minors who demonstrate more maturity than their supposed guardians. But those same minors would not be successful in a bid to argue they should have a right to vote or have other benefits of older people, even though they may be a lot more mature.
I'm sure we've all met a teenager who is an "old soul" and is about as mature as a 40-year-old, while I'm sure we've also all met people in their 20s (particularly guys) who have the emotional and social maturity of an early teen. Yet we just accept that one's birthdate should be the presumed determinant for all sorts of legal, social, educational, etc. restrictions.
Why? Seriously -- start thinking seriously about it, rather than just having an ignorant kneejerk reaction. Is chronological age the best determiner for MOST people? Sure. Definitely it works well for the majority of people, just like traditional rules about heterosexual marriage and male/female binary for gender work for MOST people.
The question is whether we should place so much weight on one's birthdate -- which we KNOW is used for discrimination in many cases -- all the time.
The question isn't whether a year is an objective standard of measure. Most people have chromosomes that determine their biological sex (excepting a minority of intersex folks). Should those be the relevant measure for society, or should we accept a conception of "gender" that's more fluid?
Let's take this out of the political arena. As another example of a supposedly "objective" measure that has questionable "human" relevance, think of temperature. What humans sense is heat transfer -- which is why a coin feels "cooler" than a wooden table it is sitting on in the same room. We have correctives like "wind chill" and "heat index" to attempt to deal with effects like humidity and convection that influence heat transfer -- but really heat transfer is what we should be reporting in terms of human comfort. How many thermostats in the world would work better if we took such things into account? Yet we continue fumbling through with an objective measure that isn't generally the most relevant factor for humans. (One, I should note, that historically wasn't measured accurately or thought particularly relevant until the last few centuries.)
Back to birthdates -- they may be an objective measure, but of what? How long you've been breathing? Is that enough to justify their presumed use in 100% of cases to determine all sorts of aspects of people's rights, their educational trajectory, their social lives?
Now, to this guy. Personally, I think his reason for the age change sounds frivolous. If you read the NPR link I posted above, he basically says he wants to date younger people and post a younger age on social media to get more dates. He apparently wants to have more children, and finds agism to be an impediment.
Does that sound frivolous to you? It does to me. BUT, all of the recent questions about sexuality and gender have often been framed in terms of people's relationships (sexual, social, etc.), and that is precisely the basis this guy is using to make his argument. So if we declare his rationale to be frivolous, must we not also declare much of the concerns about sexuality from LGBTQ folks to be similar frivolous? I don't think LGBTQ people have frivolous concerns -- so maybe this guy's concerns should be considered more thoughtfully rather than dismissed summarily.
I'm not saying I agree with his lawsuit or his argument. But I think it's undeniable that agism is a serious element of discrimination and that we use birthdates for WAY too many things that they may not be an objective measure of. Whether this guy's lawsuit makes sense or not, he brings up an important issue about human (and humane) metrics of time, how we view each other on that basis, etc.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday November 09 2018, @01:22PM (3 children)
Oh, as a final note -- I'd just like to remind everyone that we used to have more confidence in age fluidity in terms of social roles than we do today. Teenagers used to be called to rule countries (with aides of course). Younger teens who wanted to get married were often allowed to. Children were assumed to be able to work when their bodies were able -- and in agrarian societies, that often meant starting help with chores at a young age. "Childhood" was invented in the 1700s, and "adolescence" as a period without responsibility was basically an invention of the 20th century.
Older people worked until they were able. Older people (and particularly older men) often continued to have relationships and have children as they were able. "Retirement" was also invented in the 20th century as a common experience, partly due to increased life expectancy. But age 65 was adopted as an age for "Social Security" effectively as insurance -- the word "insurance" appears in the original act -- that is, insurance against living longer than the expected life. Most people were still expected to work basically until they died. Now they often "retire" earlier.
I'm not saying it's all a bad thing (which it isn't), but we have many issues of age stratification and expectations that are effectively recent social inventions.
IQ also stands for "Intelligence Quotient," back in the time when it was thought proper to divide one's "Mental age" by one's "Physical age." Nowadays that idea is deprecated by psychologists, who apparently want us all to be properly segregated educationally and socially to develop at the "proper" rate.
A lot of it is based on BS. Again, that doesn't mean I think this guy should get to change his birthdate. But perhaps we should seriously consider why we place so much emphasis on it in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @02:04PM (1 child)
he wants to lie.
it is a fact that he was born in 1949, and he wants to say otherwise.
he can already do that. go to a bar, meet a woman, lie about his age. then, as the relationship progresses and the woman decides she wants to have children with him, he can always tell the truth (at that point the woman should be somewhat pissed off, but able to get over it). or he can keep lying until he's caught, I don't care.
the LGBT people say "I don't feel like a man even though I have a penis and testicles. I feel like a woman, and I want to be treated like a woman". This is not about facts, it's about how the person feels, and how the person wants other to act towards them. They want to have an official acknowledgment of how they feel.
if you really insist on making the comparison to "non-standard sexual orientatiton people", you should be comparing this guy to someone saying "you think you see a penis and testicles, I know you see a penis and testicles, but I want everyone to say that it's in fact a vagina, and act accordingly".
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday November 09 2018, @02:42PM
I'm pretty sure I repeatedly said I don't necessarily agree with this guy's lawsuit. I just think it raises questions about the importance we give to a birthdate and how it is pervasively used in records of people, often to their detriment.
Actually, no. He wants to change what's on his birth certificate. I don't know what the laws are in his country, but I assume it may be similar to the laws used in most states in the U.S. that now allow transgender people to change their sex on their birth certificate [wikipedia.org]. (Some don't even require evidence of sex reassignment surgery to do so.)
It is a fact that many transgender people were born with certain genitals and certain chromosomes. They are now able to change their birth certificates to state that something different happened. Again, I think this guy's claims are questionable, but your analogy is not quite on point given the ability of transgender folks to alter records.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:04PM
> we used to have more confidence in age fluidity in terms of social roles than we do today. Teenagers used to be called to rule countries (with aides of course). Younger teens who wanted to get married were often allowed to.
David Farragut, midshipman at 9, commanded ship at 12, comes to mind.
OTOH those were not teens who spent their years with TV and tablets munching on MSG food and drinking basically sugar. These kids have trouble with shoelaces.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday November 09 2018, @05:28PM (1 child)
You must be new here. Welcome!
Some advice you may not be aware of -- in order to keep up with the discussion, you should often delay reading TFA until after discussion (after which it's optional). Geez, much less doing independent research. What are you, intelligent or something?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:08PM
rules of the green site which this site also follow:
1. reading the title of the story before commenting is OK
2. reading the summary before commenting is cheating.
3. reading the article is anathema.
4. your comment has no memes?
5. ???
6. DON'T POST IT!!!
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ilsa on Friday November 09 2018, @06:56PM (2 children)
The reason why the opposition is so harsh is because it feels like a dogwhistle lawsuit trying to discredit transgender people. While your arguments regarding age-ism are true and worth discussing, the lawsuit doesn't seem to speak to them.
Especially when you consider the political backdrop: The Right has been seriously ratcheting up their rhetoric against Trans people, lead by the Orange Gropenfuhrer. Based on that, it is very hard to see this as anything other than a poorly veiled attack on Trans people.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @01:53AM (1 child)
You do realize this guy is in the Netherlands, not the USA, right? So it isn't a Trump thing. And did you bother to look up this guy, who is a minor celebrity and seemingly quite vain, just the sort of person who might want to pretend to be younger than he is??
No -- it must be a grand conspiracy to undermine transgender rights... Because no one in the world ever wanted to lie about their age.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday November 13 2018, @10:33PM
I actually double-checked after I made the post, but the point still stands.
If you knew anything about the world of transgender rights, you wouldn't be so quick to throw out terms like "grand conspiracy".
The fact is that Trump has done an exceptionally good job of empowering bigots all around the world. There have been incidents outside the US where the douchebag cited Trump as motivation for their douchebaggery. And nevermind the US sending their shit-stirring missionaries around the world, inciting hatred. Look at what happened with gays in Africa.
And heck, we haven't even gotten into US foreign policy yet. It's not at all hard to blame the US for tons of things happening all over the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @03:25PM (1 child)
> Time is a quantitative standard, and the units of its measurement would make sense even with no human around to do the measuring.
no it isn't. Humans do agree on corrections so often. try to run or even sync with an NTP server for fucks sake
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday November 09 2018, @05:36PM
I think you're disagreeing with the wrong part.
Time is a quantitative standard in this case, with age being the distance the Earth has traveled relative to the Sun since a person was born.
Its units of measure are approximations at best, but they're good enough for things like government work. Many of them would certainly make no sense without humans interpreting them according to our social constructs. Hours? Minutes? Seconds? independently meaningless. (But days, years? Not meaningless, and we measure age mostly with those.)