If Sex Is Fluid, Why Isn't Age?

There can't really be much doubt that this is right, obviously, and people have been making similar points since the idea of "transgenderism" became fashionable.
   There's usually more than one way to make sense of a conceptual and logical train wreck of this kind. The way I currently favor puts the notion of "identity," as used on the left, at the center of things. 'Identity' means...or used to mean...who you are. The progressive left now uses it to mean something like who you think you are. Weirdly, they use it that way with respect to certain questions about race, but not others. Thus the central use of 'identify' is as a verb, as in: S identifies as F. One's "identity" in this sense is determined by one's own beliefs and/or "performative" acts (they loooove "performativity"). Though such acts of identification seem limited to the characteristics given centrality by the left: race, gender, "gender identity," sexual preference. But, while accepting that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman is obligatory, accepting that Rachel Dolezal is black is forbidden. So, laid over the main grid is a set of ad hoc limitations. To some extent these are probably just intended to conceal how nutty the view is--people will buy it in the case of a biracial person decided to go with one of their races, but won't buy it in cases like Dolezal's. (It's equally absurd in both cases, but it tracks with saner views in the former case...so the overt absurdity is concealed.) But to the extent that they're ad hoc they're indefensible.
   I've got a whole half-baked theory of this stuff half-baking in the back of my head. "Social construction" and identity-as-identification are, I think, new ways of pushing the left's old nurture-over-nature line. They're ways of subordinating the biological to...well...not merely the social, but to the non-biological more generally. The contemporary left just does not like the biological. (Except when it's convenient, as it occasionally is when sexual preference is at issue.) Hence the attempt to shove sex (and even gender) offstage in favor of "gender identity." Hence also the concerted effort to insist that race is "socially constructed." But they (a) lack the courage of their convictions, and (b) tend not to be the most systematic nor consistent of thinkers, and (c) know that, the more they let the theory metastasize, the more obviously absurd it becomes. Hence the ad hoc limitations.
   You know what's weird is finding oneself in the midst of people who think all this nonsense actually makes sense. It's like waking up to find that like half the people around you are Scientologists or believe in astrology or something...and they insist that it's always been this way. And the other half either thinks there's nothing wrong with that, or are too afraid to speak up about it.