Realist, not conformist analysis of the latest financial, business and political news

Sergia Lazarovicha Or Sergio Lazarovich?

Sergio Lazarovich has, so we are told, become Sergia Lazarovich – or possibly Lazarovicha dependent upon how far Argentina goes in following slavic naming conventions – in order to be able to retire 5 years earlier. The point being that Argentina has different retirement ages for men and women in the civil service and it also has rather liberal, not to say progressive, laws about who may claim to be a man and or a woman.

At one level this is simply an amusement, someone spotting the gaps in the system and exploiting them for all they’re worth. After all, who wouldn’t like to gain an extra five years of leisure after a working life? Especially as it’s going to be at the healthy end of that retirement.

At another level though this is rather important. No, this isn’t a complaint about how silly it is to have a system of gender declaration that simply asks for the declaration. None of us here has any problem with that, we are the true liberals after all – call yourself as you wish. It’s mildly to point out the silliness of legal privilege following that self-declaration. Or if you prefer of there being legal privilege associated with sex or gender themselves. Instead, what it is about is to insist that society is a complex thing and merely changing one part of it doesn’t work. Complexity meaning that many things are connected, change one and therefore change all. Even that we cannot really quite plan what to change as there’s no one who actually knows, nor can, the complexity of the connections.

Yes, we’re back to Hayek and the impossibility of running a planned economy. An odd thing to get to from a bloke with a beard declaring femaleness but true all the same:

An Argentinian tax worker who changed his gender on official documents after claiming to identify as female actually did it in order to retire earlier, a relative says.

Sergia Lazarovich, 60, a government worker from the northern province of Salta, applied to change her gender in June last year, having lived for decades as Sergio.

OK, yes, the Mail, but they’re not the only people running the story:

Sergio Lazarovich has become a topic of debate throughout South America, and soon probably the whole world, after he took advantage of his country’s Gender Identity Law to change his name to ‘Sergia’ and register himself as a female, allegedly so he could retire from his job five years earlier. His intentions were made public by a relative of Lazarovich, who contacted Argentinian media, telling reporters that throughout his life Sergio had only been romantically involved with women, and continued to have heterosexual relationships even after applying for the gender change.

That’s not really a valid complaint there. Desiring to shag women is not an accurate identifier of being male after all. The existence of homosexual men proves that in one manner, of lesbians in another. And Bruce – Caitlyn if you prefer – Jenner has pointed out that while definitely female there’s going to be no tackle coming off given the intensity of the desire to shag women rather than comfort their organs in less traditional manners.

Tracking the story back we get to Spanish language sources which accord with the Mail’s reading. One of those things not always a certainty, the coincidence between a Mail story and reality. Of course some others are just riffing off the Mail:

According to a relative identified as Enzo, reported Informate Salta, the 60-year-old Argentinian tax worker – now known as Sergia – didn’t make the change because of some long-simmering psychological turmoil about his identity, but instead switched so he could retire five years earlier, a move he has been contemplating for three years.

Argentina sets the retirement age at 60 for female state workers and 65 for males.

Again, at one level this is simply a giggle at someone driving coach and horses through ill thought through changes to the world. The more important part though is this difficulty of those attempts to change the world. Recall Tony Blair sofaizing one day on how archaic the office of Lord Chancellor was thus abolish it in this Cool Britannia. Only to realise after the announcement, aided by the barrage of noise from those who knew what they were talking about, that the office is so intertwined into the basic British system that it just doesn’t work without someone holding said office. It had to be reinvented therefore, pretty pronto. Just so that we had someone called Lord Chancellor.

Societies are complex things, change one bit in a fit of inspired progressivism and we’ve got to change rather a lot of other things. For example, perhaps it is just and righteous that blokes who think themselves to be women should be called women. Why not, what does that matter to the rest of us? But does that mean that they then also gain all those other privileges of femaledom? Earlier pensions ages where those exist? Maternity pay, well, that can be tied pretty closely to actual evidence of ovaries and wombs. But which prison should they serve in if it comes to that? And how much surgery should be required for that differentiation? There is actually, in a British prison right now, a convicted rapist who declared femaleness, was transferred to a women’s prison where there were complaints about his overly aggressive use of his still intact and undrugged tackle.

Hmm.

There are other things possibly simpler, like not referring such changelings for smear tests but continuing, perhaps, to run prostate ones.

I am not, at all, saying that sex changes shouldn’t happen. Nor that the run of implications can’t or won’t be managed over time. Nor even that we must have an answer to them before we grant that legal freedom to decide and change. What I am insisting though is that this is, writ small perhaps, an example of the impossibility of planning a society. It’s all just too complex, too chaotic even, for any central authority to be able to manage it in advance.

At which point we should all be grateful to Sergia Lazarovicha. The world’s current argument against socialist economics, Sergio Lazarovich.

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Pat
Pat
5 years ago

One would expect many people to take advantage of our new found flexibility re gender, taking advantage of all those privileges stuffy old fashioned society has granted people with vaginas. This will end either in the complete removal of those privileges, or a return to stuffy old fashioned views on gender. Given that there are vastly more people with vaginas, and that they are commonly supported by people with penises I know which way I’m betting.
But if will be fun watching all the sporting competitions won by women with penises.

Spike
5 years ago
Reply to  Pat

You haven’t heard about the Texas state high-school wrestling finals, where a steroided-up LGBT of the T variety is ruining the athletic careers of many schoolgirls. Their feelings are irrelevant, because trannies outrank the rest of us, and there is little controversy except to us who had stuffy old-fashioned views to begin with.

Quentin Vole
Quentin Vole
5 years ago

When I started work, my employer had a pension scheme which provided for women to retire at 55 (with a max 35/60ths pension) and men at 60 (with a max 40/60ths). That was ‘equalised’ around 1980, but one of my colleagues pointed out that he had been discriminated against and was allowed to retire at 55 without an early retirement penalty. No need to change his name to Glenda or don a frock 🙂

DiscoveredJoys
DiscoveredJoys
5 years ago

If I were a convicted criminal coming into court for sentencing perhaps I should declare myself female hoping that there are fewer prison places for women, reducing my chances of being jailed?

Gamecock
Gamecock
5 years ago

Government should recognize citizens. Not men and women. Nor rich and poor.

Fair treatment under the law is a human right.

Gamecock
Gamecock
5 years ago

Sorry.

Equal treatment under the law is a human right.

Spike
5 years ago

If “all [people] are created equal,” then government should not legislate arbitrary inequalities. Private employers would be welcome to, and government-as-employer poses tougher problems on how it treats its employees. The current case owes to the increasing demand that we cater to those playing pretend. Lazarovich (I think even Latinos with Slavic names do not make their surname match their sex) is demonstrably lying to game the system. Likewise gays who insist that we recognize their “marriage” and extend tax breaks to them, though I am not sure by what right the government sets lower taxes for marrieds in the… Read more »

Gamecock
Gamecock
5 years ago
Reply to  Spike

Agreed. The proper response to gay “marriage” is to disband marriage.

So Much For Subtlety
So Much For Subtlety
5 years ago
Reply to  Gamecock

The answer to society breaking down and losing its mind is more social break down and insanity?

The proper response is to stick with what everyone agreed was sane under Bill Clinton and most of Obama’s administration. The social costs of a lack of marriage are immense.

Gamecock
Gamecock
5 years ago

The point is to degovernmentalize it. Not get rid of it. But the Left has already diluted it to meaninglessness.

jgh
jgh
5 years ago

People should be allowed to retire whenever the hell they like, then receive whatever pension they had managed to accrue by then. Retire at 22? Go ahead, that’ll be threppence happeny a year pension.

BlokeInTejas
BlokeInTejas
5 years ago
Reply to  jgh

Damn right.

So Much For Subtlety
So Much For Subtlety
5 years ago

And in other news from the Mail, Grace Mugabe’s farm has been invaded by squatters:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5562621/Grace-Mugabes-luxury-Zimbabwe-farm-invaded-locals-mining-gold.html

Spike
5 years ago

What a come-uppance.

Steve
Steve
5 years ago

Equal treatment under the law is a human right.

But people aren’t equal. Men and women are rather different, in all sorts of ways both delightful and significant.

We can’t be fair to women by treating them like men. And we can’t have a civilisation if we treat men like women.

Gamecock
Gamecock
5 years ago
Reply to  Steve

In front of government they are equal.

Progressive taxes, affirmative action, etc., are tyranny.

“We can’t be fair to women by treating them like men. And we can’t have a civilisation if we treat men like women.”

We can do whatever we want. Government can’t.

Esteban DeGolf
Esteban DeGolf
5 years ago

I seem to recall an earlier article here at CT that suggested that there will be a few problems with the following approach: Everyone is entitled to be treated as though their actual gender is the one they “identify” with and we must take their word on said “identification”. Hmm, someone took advantage of this brave new world? Shocked I am, shocked! Fortunately in this case it’s only a few years’ of pension payments being swiped. On a lighter note, I recall a story a few years ago about a Northeastern U.S. college where a young woman announced she ID’d… Read more »

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