Older women face considerable prejudices at work, and now they are being forced to retire later. Old-held assumptions must be challenged
Emile Ratelband wants to be younger. He wouldn’t be the first 69-year-old man to say so but what makes Ratelband unusual, to put it mildly, is that he has just launched a lawsuit in the Netherlands demanding to be legally recognised as only 49. If a trans woman can identify as female and change her official documents accordingly, he argues, why can’t he change his registered date of birth and thus get more dates on Tinder? After all, his doctor says he’s very fit for his age, and if he could only claim to be under 50 then surely “with this face I will be in a luxurious position” with women.
This makes significantly more sense as a PR stunt, obviously, than as any sort of argument. Age is not a mutable fact or a social construct, and “age dysphoria” is – unlike its gender variant – not even remotely a thing. You’re born when you’re born and if other people make madly unfair assumptions based on something as arbitrary as a date then it’s the assumptions that need changing, not birth records. And unless he’s arguing that only as a born-again fortysomething could he finally get women in their 60s to look twice at him, then Ratelband himself seems guilty of some pretty dodgy assumptions about age. Older women, so often spurned on dating apps by vain old goats who stubbornly refuse to “settle” for someone their own age, may not shed too many tears over this one.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zBSByN
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