Emile Ratelband's pleas have been rejected by the courts, but will he give up the fight? Sputnik spoke to Emile himself for more insight on the issue.
Sputnik: How do you feel about the court’s decision to deny you the right to change your age? Will you be taking up another legal battle?
Emile Ratelband: I lost the battle and everybody thinks that I’ve lost the war. You firstly have to lose the battle and then you win the war because this is all strategy, we need a case law. That means we need the information from the judge; and with this information we can shoot holes in these things he said.
Everybody knows if you are 55 or 57, you don’t get a job anymore, so that’s what I have to prove. The other thing was, that he said that your individual interest is not as important as the common interest, so I said that I am an individual, I’ve got my identity, so I could focus on and shoot them with all kinds of laws because I’m right.
Now we’ve got the whole thing, if we compare yourself to a transgender as a public debate, now if you look at the interviews, we’ve had more than 5,000 interviews in the last 4 weeks, all around the world and everybody’s having a discussion, everybody’s talking about it. So now it’s the start of a very big discussion and because we have this debate, this big social debate, it’s also proof that we are like that. I am not sad or angry that I lost. I think it’s fantastic and that’s positive thinking.
Sputnik: Do you feel age is just a social construct?
Emile Ratelband: My friend, listen, when you think of your Grandmother 50 years ago and ask how your grandmother looked, what was your grandmother doing, she will say to you well my grandmother was about 50, but she was looking like 86 nowadays.
This is also one of the points. I said that in Germany, even Mrs Merkel was out questioning about me and I said that Germany needs 35 million immigrants, why? Because in 20 years more than 36 percent of the people will be older than 67 and they cannot earn a living, so that’s why we need the 35 million immigrants.
So I say, no we don’t need those 35 million immigrants because if we use our biological age then we will work until 76, or 82 or whenever we like. We don’t have a pension anymore from 65 or 67, so we don’t need the 35 million immigrants.
It’s a political issue nowadays and economically also. In Holland we have a magazine about insurance and they added this question about Ratleband, about this age fluid issue, we have a really big problem, when it gets right then we can’t sell our insurance anymore because we have to look for other paradigms.
Now you’re going to see that everything is going to change. This is new thinking. If you have the right to go on holiday where you want to go, if you have the right to marry who you want, if you want to buy a car or you want to change your name, or you want to get rid of one of your limbs, you have the chance to change your gender, then you also have the possibility of changing your age, that’s my point.
Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of Emile Ratleband and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.