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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: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday November 10 2018, @06:08AM
That's what you'd expect out of a natural process, isn't it?
My view is that the "it's a binary!" and the "it's a spectrum!" folks are *both* right, but only seeing part of the story each. Nature "intends," please note scare quotes, for there to be a binary. Nature is also not 1) intelligent, 2) perfect, 3) even necessarily right to follow. And because nature is imperfect, you get fuzziness, clustering around the extremes, and a few cases of outright inversion.
Where the left goes wrong on this is the idea that what we have is a perfectly flat power distribution from one side to another. No, we don't, and if we did, we would not see almost universal gender preferences across cultures and races and time periods, and we'd see waaaaaaaay more ambiguous, "gender-fluid" androgynes than polarized trans* people.
So what we really have here is a lot more advanced of a concept: it's a bimodal distribution with two extremely sharp peaks at either end and a wide, flaring "bathtub" curve in the middle. That doesn't fit in a sound byte, though, so neither side likes it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...