Comment by jawns

While it's true that there's a correlation between age and maturity in childhood and adolescence, there's also some variability. Nevertheless, the law typically treats age as a proxy for maturity, because it's an objective, easily verifiable trait. If that disadvantages certain children and teens who are mature beyond their physical age, society is mostly OK with that drawback.

Yet over the past several decades, we've seen a change in society attitudes about another personal attribute, sex, which was previously treated as an objective characteristic but is now largely (both socially and in the law) treated as a subjective characteristic, meaning the only way to determine whether someone is male or female is through their own assertion.

I am curious whether we will see a similar shift in attitude toward age. The idea that "age is just a number" and "you're only as old as you feel" has been around forever, but I'd be interested to see if the law codifies that somehow.