If Gender Is Subjective, Makes Sense Age Should Be, Too

Dennis Prager / November 13, 2018

Emile Ratelband, a 69-year-old motivational speaker in the Netherlands, has petitioned a Dutch court for permission to change his legal age by altering his birth certificate to show he was born 20 years later than he really was—to legally make him 49 rather 69 years old.

Ratelband told The Washington Post, “We can make our own decisions if we want to change our name, or if we want to change our gender. So I want to change my age. My feeling about my body and about my mind is that I’m about 40 or 45.”

As The Telegraph reported:

Ratelband was born on 11th March 1949, but says he feels at least 20 years younger and wants to change his birth date to 11th March 1969.

Ratelband said: ‘I have done a check-up and what does it show? My biological age is 45 years. When I’m 69, I am limited. If I’m 49, then I can buy a new house, drive a different car. I can take up more work. When I’m on Tinder and it says I’m 69, I don’t get an answer. When I’m 49, with the face I have, I will be in a luxurious position.’

It is the transgender movement that inspired Ratelband.

“Transgenders can now have their gender changed on their birth certificate,” he argues, “and in the same spirit there should be room for an age change.”

Now, what exactly is wrong with Ratelband’s argument? If sex doesn’t objectively exist, why does age? If feelings determine sex, why don’t feelings determine age? If we are to regard sex as “assigned” at birth, why don’t we regard age as “assigned” at birth?

Of course, the left would argue that age is fixed while “gender is fluid.” But “gender is fluid” is a meaningless statement. All the left has done is substitute the word “gender” for “sex” and then make up a rule: Gender is fluid, meaning sex is fluid.

Few deny there are people with gender dysphoria—people who do not identify with their biological sex. These people deserve our care, sympathy, and the respect due every person as the child of God he or she is.

But sympathy for the minuscule percentage of people who do not identify with their sex doesn’t mean sex (or gender) doesn’t objectively exist. It just means some people don’t identify with their objective sexual identity.

We are living in a time of intellectual and moral chaos. The political movement known as leftism or progressivism (not liberalism) is first and foremost a chaotic force. And nowhere is that chaos more evident than in the left’s attempt to end the reality that the human being is created either male or female. That is “binary” nonsense, according to the left.

Thus, a New York Times headline last month read, “Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender, Experts Say.”

Just 10 years ago, not to mention at any time in recorded history, that headline would have been regarded as so absurd only a satirist or an opponent of science would have written it.

The article cited Dr. Joshua D. Safer, an endocrinologist and executive director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Mount Sinai Health System in New York, as saying, “The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades.”

When medical doctors argue that a person who has two X chromosomes, a vagina, breasts, ovaries, a uterus, and a menstrual cycle might be a man, your society is in deep trouble.

So, why is Ratelband wrong?

The judges in the Netherlands will likely rule against him. But if they believe sex has no objective reality, that the sex on one’s birth certificate can be changed, on what grounds can they rule that the date of birth cannot be changed?

The answer is there are no such grounds. But only for the time being—because the day The New York Times publishes an article titled “The Idea That a Person’s Age Is Determined by Their Date of Birth Is Not True,” age, too, will become subjective.