Description: Huxi Bach in conversation with Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen: We can change our gender—will age change be the next emerging right?

When we as citizens have gained new rights, it has often started with ideas that, at the time, were seen as wild, provocative, and utopian notions without any basis in reality: Why should women be allowed to vote? Why should Black people have the same rights as white people? And should one really have the right to change gender “just because” one did not feel at home in the biological sex assigned at birth? All of these rights are a reality today. And perhaps we need to get used to the idea that we should have the right to change our age, if the birth certificate does not reflect the age we feel we are. At the very least, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, professor of political theory and philosophy, believes that the right to change one’s legal age would be a natural extension of the right to legal gender change—and that this right could help address some of the challenges we currently face with widespread age discrimination.

Participants: 

Huxi Bach, Moderator, Independent

Bjarke Oxlund, Panelist, PhD, Head of Department, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen

Denmark’s population is ageing, which makes it more important than ever to discuss age discrimination against older people. Few people have a single, clear understanding of what it means to be “old” — age can be chronological (as stated in one’s passport), biological, social, or perceived. These measures of age often coincide, but there can also be significant differences: for example, social psychology shows that many people with a chronological age of 25+ experience themselves as significantly younger.

In this talk, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen explains the different concepts of age and show why they matter when assessing whether—and when—differential treatment based on age can be justified. The conclusion is nuanced: in some contexts (e.g. recruitment), discrimination based on chronological age is generally unfair, whereas differential treatment based on biological or social age may be justified in certain types of jobs.

Participants: