It was only (so to speak) a matter of time: A 69-year-old Dutchman is in court, demanding the right to legally change his age. As a man pushing seventy, he says that it is hard to find work (he’s a pensioner, and many employers are reluctant to hire him), and has also discovered that it is increasingly difficult to attract women on Tinder. A quick age change, he figures, will take care of that for him. From the Daily Mail:
Emile Ratelband argues that if transgender people are allowed to change sex, he should be allowed to change his date of birth because doctors said he has the body of a 45-year-old.
The motivational speaker, a media personality in the Netherlands, is suing his local authority after they refused to amend his age on official documents. Mr Ratelband’s case has now gone to a court in the city of Arnhmen in the eastern Dutch province of Gelderland.
He was born on 11 March, 1949, but says he feels at least 20 years younger and wants to change his birth date to 11 March, 1969. Mr Ratelband, who has converted to Buddhism, 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.’
‘Transgender people can now have their gender changed on their birth certificate, and in the same spirit there should be room for an age change.’
The Dutchman said he is discriminated against because of his age on a daily basis. He complains that companies are reluctant to hire someone the age of a pensioner as a consultant. And he says his move would also be good news for the government as he would be renouncing his pension until he reaches retirement age again.
The judge said that he had some sympathy with Mr Ratelband as people could now change their gender which would once have been unthinkable.
But the court said there would be practical problems in allowing people to change their birth date and it would mean legally deleting part of their lives. The judge asked Mr Ratelband about the status of his early years, from 1949 to 1969, if his official birth date was put back.
‘For whom did your parents care in those years? Who was that little boy back then?,’ the judge asked.
The court is due to deliver a written ruling within four weeks.
This might all seem insane, but the fact is that our culture has already accepted the fundamental premise of Ratelband’s case: That biological reality can be suspended in favor of the world as you happen to see it (or how you would prefer it, for that matter). It might seem crazy that men are allowed to claim that they are women (and get trundled off to a female prison to get locked in with all the ladies), but as the shockingly sympathetic judge noted, we accept that people can change their gender—even though that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
It bears mentioning that this is not the first time someone has declared themselves to be “trans-age.” A guy in Toronto abandoned his wife and seven kids and now lives with “adopted parents,” claiming to be a six-year-old girl. And a thirty-eight-year-old pedophile in Chicago who was accused of molesting several children has claimed that he is really a nine-year-old trapped in an adult’s body, thus justifying his actions.
So now we have transgender, transabled, trans-racial, otherkin, and a few dozen sexualities and gender identities in between. I’m not sure how Ratelband thinks this publicity is going to help his ability to persuade people that he is, in fact, forty-five years old, but people can hardly blame him for giving it a shot.
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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.
