South Korea has turned back time and made its people younger – sign me up
Imagine someone offered you the chance to take a couple of years off your age – no catch, no need to hide your passport or cross your fingers that no one checks up on your LinkedIn claim to have graduated in 2008.
You’d jump at it, wouldn’t you? The people of South Korea certainly have: their government has just given its citizens the gift of youth, making them all a year or two younger overnight.
This is because South Korea is scrapping the eccentric system it previously used to count the age of its population. At birth, a baby was deemed to be one, and then a year was added every 1 January, regardless of their actual birthday. Those born on New Year’s Eve were two before the week was up.
Naturally, this caused no small amount of administrative chaos, withlegal disputes, complaints and confusion over how to calculate ages draining the country’s resources, according to the president, Yoon Suk Yeol. Concerned that it put South Korea out of step with the rest of the world, officials have now switched to theinternationally accepted method. One day you’re 66, the next 64.
As far as vote-winning policies go, UK politicians could do worse than to pay attention. After all, we’re owed it. When my younger sister recently turned 36, she was lamenting having to say a final farewell to her early 30s. “It just feels like I’m suddenly hurtling towards the end of the decade,” she said. “How did that happen?”
It made me wonder what I’d been doing at 36. I racked my brain. Come on, it was only three years ago – something of note must have happened. Then the penny dropped: we were in lockdown. The majority of that year was spent at home, weeding the garden and trying to elevate the week’s fourth meal of beans on toast. Before I knew it, I was turning 38 during the government’s Omicron plan B.I’m not alone in feeling robbed. While much attention has rightly been paid to the impact of lockdowns on the development of young people, it’s OK to acknowledge that it kept the rest of us in a holding pattern, too, denying us the daily interactions and experiences that help us to progress, mature and accept the ageing process. Is it a coincidence that there seems to be a collective reluctance in my social circle to embrace our significant birthdays that I don’t recall from before? Take it from me: I turn 40 next year and rather than throw a big party, as I did for my 30th, I fully intend to flee the country.
Admittedly, I feel the South Koreans’ pain on a personal level, given that my own birthday is on 3 January. There’s nothing guaranteed to make the start of a new year seem even more loaded with pressure to turn over a new leaf than instantly becoming a year older, too. But I think we could all do with a reset.
Now South Korea is showing us it can actually be done, albeit with some important loopholes. The new system won’t deprive people from buying alcohol and cigarettes, or change the year in which they enter education or become eligible for up to 21 months of compulsory national service.
I realise it’s rather self-indulgent to feel this way, particularly when our age on paper should be less relevant than ever. We’re living longer, and there’s no doubt that 40 doesn’t look the same as it did for our grandparents’ generation, just as 70 no longer consigns you to the blue-rinse brigade.
In our society, nothing is prized more than youth, particularly if you’re a woman. I’m reminded of the scene in Fleabag when, during a feminist lecture, the speaker asks an audience of women to “raise your hand if you’d give five years of your life for the perfect body”. Only Fleabag and her sister do – bad feminists, or the only honest people in the room?
In an ideal world, we would all understand that age is just a number and no reflection on how to live your life. Still, the path to reaching that place of acceptance might be made smoother were we given a couple of years extra to take a run at it. Just don’t ask to see my birth certificate.
Claire Cohen is a journalist and the author of BFF? The Truth About Female Friendship
lution as an activist. As a youth, she was told her condition, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, was a problem to be managed, and underwent surgery to remove her testes, an irreversible procedure requiring lifelong hormone replacement therapy and other complications, such as osteoporosis; now 32, she did not realize she was intersex until she was 27, after reading a profile of the Belgian intersex model Hanne Gaby Odiele.
Gallo, 31, was born without testes, and was not informed of their condition until age 12. They recall years of poking and prodding, a handling of their body with fear and trepidation. At age 16, they underwent surgery to implant prosthetic testicles. “At the time, I just thought it was medically necessary because that’s what doctors told me,” they said. Their parents, immigrants from El Salvador, followed the lead of doctors; however well-intentioned, the message was: you need to be fixed. It took years, as Gallo explains in the film, “to face how angry I was”.
Oftentimes, as Every Body explains, doctors advocated for care rooted in rigid gender ideals under the assumption that it was in the best interest of the patient. But such decisions were “a misapprehension of what might be the best way to handle this complicated situation”, said Cohen. In one scene, Wall reviews his birth records from 1979; for sex, an obstetrician initially checked a box titled “ambiguous”. Though born without a uterus, Wall was assigned female for “the emotional well-being of the parents”, according to the record. At 13, he underwent a gonad removal surgery; according to Wall, his mother consented to the medically unnecessary procedure after doctors inaccurately led her to believe they were cancerous.
Wall had other people in his family with the same variation, but no one talked about it. “I think people were deeply scarred,” he said. “There was a lot of shame, a lot of silence.
“I would’ve given anything as a young, queer, intersex, eventually trans person, to meet another queer person,” he said. “I think about myself as a young person and not seeing those role models, not seeing those people who I can aspire to be.”
The version of medical practice experienced by Wall, Weigel and Gallo – the secrecy, the surgeries at a young age, the belief that picking and sticking to one sex would produce the optimal result – largely stems from the teachings of one physician. The middle section of the film delves into the teachings of Dr John Money, a psychologist and researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and the tragic story of his most infamous medical experiment. In 1967, Money learned of the existence of two infant twin boys in Canada, one of whom had his penis critically burned during a botched circumcision.
Money, a proponent of the “theory of gender neutrality”, which assumed gender identity was imparted primarily through social learning, recommended that the boy, then named Bruce Reimer, undergo sex reassignment surgery to female at the age of 22 months and be raised as “Brenda” alongside his twin brother, Brian, as the experiment control. In later interviews, Reimer recalled that he never believed he was a girl; at the age of 14, he learned the truth of his surgery and went back to living as a boy named David.
David Reimer was not intersex, but the “success” of his “treatment” with Money became the basis for the “optimum gender rearing model” for medical treatment of intersex people. The film includes footage of a 1999 news interview with an emaciated and haunted-looking Reimer, in which he expresses hope that non-consensual surgeries on people will end. He died by suicide in 2004. The “experiment”, though decades-old and debunked, “actually had led to decades’ worth of mistreatment of intersex people that is in some cases still going on today, that certainly is impacting a lot of other people that are alive today”, said Cohen.
Wall, Weigel and Gallo all advocate for legal measures to prevent the legacy of “optimum gender” treatments: unnecessary, nonconsensual surgical procedures to assign intersex youth to a binary sex. In a cruel irony, intersex people have been lumped into the recent spate of state-level anti-trans legislation barring surgery from minors’ gender-affirming care; the same measures that ban the procedures sought by trans youth include carve-outs for pediatric intersex procedures. “These bills are including intersex people and erasing intersex people, which is a tragedy,” said Gallo. As Weigel put it: “We are literally erased from the conversation about our own erasure.”
With footage of Weigel telling her story to the Texas state legislature amid efforts to pass anti-trans legislation, or Wall participating in an art exhibit celebrating his body, or Gallo leading a protest against a hospital still performing surgeries on intersex youth, Every Body gestures to a larger, national fight for bodily autonomy. “Just like trans rights activists, and for that matter reproductive rights activists, the intersex rights activists are just asking to be making the decisions themselves that relate to their own bodies,” said Cohen.
Crucial to that fight is recognition. “A documentary like this is – I was going to say ahead of its time, but it’s the right time,” said Gallo. “It’s overdue.”
Every Body is out in the US on 30 June with a UK date to be announced
what if you do miss the memo? “If you make a mistake with the dress code, the first thing you must do is let go of the shame,” says Davis. “Be gentle on yourself; it happens. Reframe your outfit error as something to celebrate. If you look and feel great, enjoy the party. No apologies and no outfit regrets.”
Make others feel fascinating
We all get intimidated and think people are looking at us funnily or looking over our shoulder. The key is to try to let go of this very normal self-consciousness. “Focusing on someone else is the best way to forget your own anxiety,” says Spruyt. This is also, by the way, the definition of the best party self to inhabit: “happy high status” – a concept borrowed from acting and comedy where you control your ego and maintain a comfortable neutrality; neither better nor worse than anyone else, at ease with yourself and with the world. Tip: turn up wanting to make everything about other people. Repeat to yourself: “It’s not about me.” Then have a great time.
•Happy High Status: How to Be Effortlessly Confident byViv Groskop (Torva, £16.99) is out on 29 June
destabilise the monarchy. Their Oprah interview did that. Their documentary did that. Harry’s book Spare did that.
Archetypes did not do that, and as such was roughly as interesting as listening to changing-room chatter in the world’s most insufferable yoga studio. As such, it is increasingly clear that only fumes are left in the tank. It might be time for Harry and Meghan to go away for a while and work out who they actually want to be now.
This isn’t to say that we should write them off, of course. The Duchess of Sussex has signed with a talent agency and, depending on who you listen to, either wants to revive her blog as a Goop-style wellness hub or become
US president. Any of these ventures might boost the family coffers, something that would give Harry a bit more freedom to go and chase down Putin for that interview.