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I don't think this line works because the age effect is a meritocratic difference. The kid who is 8 months older than their peer isn't the beneficiary of unfair favoritism, or subtle preference effects. They actually are bigger, stronger. They actually have had more time to develop their coordination. Their brain actually is more developed, and was for the entire process of schooling.
the favoritism is that the older kids are being compared to their younger peers in the same group, which, for example, makes them more likely to be placed in 'gifted' programs.
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The anti-meritocratic part isn't that older kids are allowed to outperform younger kids. It's that someone born in August is automatically slotted in to be the "older kid", whereas the person born in September is forced to be the younger kid for every social, physical, or intellectual competition from ages 6-22.
I'm lukewarm on the motte of the social justice movement when they apply this kind of logic to race and sex/gender. I just disagree that they have identified the most important sources of unfair disparate outcomes, or that a society is illegitimate if it doesn't hunt those specific categories of unfair advantage out, whatever the human or societal cost. I basically think "born rich in a rich country" makes a rounding error of any other kind of privilege in the modern world.
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