A Simple Way to Understand "Transgender"

"It's all in your head," your  mom or dad or friend or clergyman says about your being transgender.  And they are right.

Consider the experience of pain.  You might say, "My foot hurts."  Can you prove it?  There may be verifiable physical evidence, a cut, a bruise, a damaged muscle, but not all pain has an obvious physical cause.  Yet you know your foot hurts.  Someone might tell you "It's all in your head", meaning "You are imagining the pain."  You are unlikely to grant this possibility.

It is the same with one's subjective experience of gender.  I know I am a man, but anyone inspecting my physiology would conclude otherwise.  The same people who would accept my assertion that my foot hurts will reject my assertion that I am and always have been male.  Why?  Probably at least in part because others can't see how the wrapper, the body, can be anything other than what it looks like.  However, there is a simple explanation.

Let's go back to the topic of pain.  When you feel pain you can identify its location, but it is because the painful nerves communicate their distress to your brain.  The pain is experienced in the brain but identified as to its location.  The brain tracks ever thing, and that includes one's sense of oneself.

There's a good reason why someone's brain might identify the person as one gender rather than another.  Hormones play an essential role in whether an embryo develops into a boy body or a girl body, but that's not the end of the story.  There are later hormone flows that affect other stages in develp,ent.  More and mre researchers are identifying the flood of gender hormones at the point the brain begins to grow as a possible source for why someone is transgender.  If, for instance, in my case, the flow of female hormones caused me to be biologically female, it was the flow of male hormones at the point of my brain's growth that made my brain male and to have male structures and characteristics.  You can read more about this at GID Info:
http://www.hemingways.org/GIDinfo/research.htm .

How can you get your head around the a person having a female body and a male brain or vice versa?    Try this.  You've seen movies or TV shows where a mad scientist or pioneering surgeon exchanges two people's brains.  There is an episode of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND with that very theme.  Ginger's mind is transmitted into the brawny henchman's head and Mary Ann has the Professor's in hers, etc.  .

Episode The Friendly Physician

Let me ask you, which of the two was Mary Ann and which the Professor?  It may have looked like Mary Ann but it talked, acted and thought like the Professor.  If you and another person swapped brains, you, your personality, memories, thoughts, would go where your brain went.  It would not matter what other people who saw you and your former body asserted.  They would only see what you formerly saw in the mirror.  They would not see what you perceive as YOU.  This makes the whle accusation "It's all in your mind" rather meaningless.

Now imagine that instead of undergoing an operation or mad scientist mind transference you had been born with that other body.  That's what it is to be transgender.  Your mind is in the wrong body.    What if Ginger had been forced to remain  in the brawny henchman's body.  Do you think that may have caused her a great deal of stress?  Could she survive that trauma?  Could she be expected to, as a former friend said to me abuot top surgery, keep what she was born with, the large rather uncouth male body of the henchmqan?  Of course not.  And that's why given that my brain is Christopher I need to change my body, to make Nan's female body match Christoper's brain.  Ginger had to count on the mind transference gizmo, as she had no way to alter her body back to it's radically different shape.  I don't have any diabolical mad scientist machine to put my mind in a more compatible body, but unlike Ginger, I can modift the one I have.

One more point -- plenty of people will deny that the brain is where our identity resides.  In fact, in earlier times and other cultures the seat of the self was and is identified as variously the heart, the Third Eye, and othjer body parts no doubt.  Our language shows that the brai, or more specifically the mind is situated in our heads.  You have no doubt heard some say "That guy is out of his mind!"  I sincerely doubt you have ever heard someone described as being out of his elbow.

When you have to explain what it means to be transgender to someone perhaps you might want to hold off on the more clinical or academic explanations and simply allude to the hormone flood determining the gender of the brain and then sit them down to watch GILLIGAN'S ISLAND.

You can contact Christopher Hawthorne Moss at https://www.facebook.com/kitmoss2012 .