TRANSMEN IN THE MILITARY: Hua Mulan

Originally published at DODFED GLOB

Legend or history? Who can tell with Hua Mulan, but the story of this woman turned soldier is compelling enough for Disney to tackle it. If Mulan never lived, certainly her story fit hundreds of others with the desire to "fight like a man" as well as the ability, forced or preferring to don a male identity in order to fulfill the plan.

Hua Mulan 's place in history is uncertain. The oldest mentions of her come from the Northern Wall dynasty, which ruled from 386–534 CE. The original ballad (see translation below) has been lost, but there is ample evidence of its existence in the form of poetic interpretations and early Chinese scholarship. It was turned into a novel during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). It has remained a favorite story in Chna for hundreds of years and is one of the earliest examples of stories about gender equality in the Chinese language.

Who was Hua Mulan and why did she choose to take on a male identity? When the emperor called for all adult men to be conscripted into the army to fight for him, Mulan was distressed that she had no brothers, and her father, who was elderly, could not show their family's loyalty to the empire. She decided to don the identity of a man as well as the armor and fought for no less than twelve years alongside male companions. She was so brave and valiant that the Emperor wanted to reward her with a government position, but in her modesty she turned the post down, choosing instead to return home to her father. In the legend Mulan reveals that she is a biological female and she and her closest companion turn into rabbits and go away side by side as equals. Hua Mulan's story exemplifies several Chinese cultural vbalues, modesty, fillial loyalty and courage.

Ode of Mulan

(Anonymous)

Tsiek tsiek and again tsiek tsiek,
Mu-lan weaves, facing the door.
You don't hear the shuttle's sound,
You only hear Daughter's sighs.
They ask Daughter who's in her heart,
They ask Daughter who's on her mind.
"No one is on Daughter's heart,
No one is on Daughter's mind.
Last night I saw the draft posters,
The Khan is calling many troops,
The army list is in twelve scrolls,
On every scroll there's Father's name.
Father has no grown-up son,
Mu-lan has no elder brother.
I want to buy a saddle and horse,
And serve in the army in Father's place."

In the East Market she buys a spirited horse,
In the West Market she buys a saddle,
In the South Market she buys a bridle,
In the North Market she buys a long whip.
At dawn she takes leave of Father and Mother,
In the evening camps on the Yellow River's bank.
She doesn't hear the sound of Father and Mother calling,
She only hears the Yellow River's flowing water cry tsien tsien.

At dawn she takes leave of the Yellow River,
In the evening she arrives at Black Mountain.
She doesn't hear the sound of Father and Mother calling,
She only hears Mount Yen's nomad horses cry tsiu tsiu.
She goes ten thousand miles on the business of war,
She crosses passes and mountains like flying.
Northern gusts carry the rattle of army pots,
Chilly light shines on iron armor.
Generals die in a hundred battles,
Stout soldiers return after ten years.

On her return she sees the Son of Heaven,
The Son of Heaven sits in the Splendid Hall.
He gives out promotions in twelve ranks
And prizes of a hundred thousand and more.
The Khan asks her what she desires.
"Mu-lan has no use for a minister's post.
I wish to ride a swift mount
To take me back to my home."

When Father and Mother hear Daughter is coming
They go outside the wall to meet her, leaning on each other.
When Elder Sister hears Younger Sister is coming
She fixes her rouge, facing the door.
When Little Brother hears Elder Sister is coming
He whets the knife, quick quick, for pig and sheep.
"I open the door to my east chamber,
I sit on my couch in the west room,
I take off my wartime gown
And put on my old-time clothes."
Facing the window she fixes her cloudlike hair,
Hanging up a mirror she dabs on yellow flower powder
She goes out the door and sees her comrades.
Her comrades are all amazed and perplexed.
Traveling together for twelve years
They didn't know Mu-lan was a girl.
"The he-hare's feet go hop and skip,
The she-hare's eyes are muddled and fuddled.
Two hares running side by side close to the ground,
How can they tell if I am he or she?"

See calligraphy and Chinese text at http://www.chinapage.com/mulan.html

What Do You Call a Straight Man Who Stays with his Transman Partner? Jim.

You hear about straight women who stay with their transwoman partners, preferring, perhaps, the continued friendship with a woman over being single.  But how often do you hear about straight men who accept their wife's transition and stay with her?  Is it that men can't handle being partnered with another man?  Do they not want to appear gay?  Or was it just that their partnership lacked loyalty and commitment and a genuine desire for the good of the partner?  I have to conclude it is the last, since Jim Tedford, my partner of 33 years, has stayed with me even though I insist I am a man.

Did I consider this choice he would have to make when I came to the conclusion I am a transman?  Yes and no.  I was so fixated on who I am that I think I was willing, at least I thought I was, to accept whatever decision Jim made about staying with me.  Or perhaps I just thought he would stay, for whatever reasons.  I can't say that expecting him to stay was not one of the most selfish, most self-absorbed things I have ever done.  I am ashamed of myself, except that I feel I had to make the choice, or, barring that, I just did and I am beyond grateful Jim had the grace to accept what I chose.

I have known for a while that Jim accepted my assertion that my brain is male.  I suspect my Aries moon would just make me rush ahead, but what should surprise me is that he still loves me.  He was baffled at first, asked questions like: "What does it mean?"  I have had various explanations to his decisions, (when I stopped to think about it) primarily that Jim just did not want to be alone and that we have all this shared history.  I called it everything to myself from petty to arrogant that I assumed that was the main reason.  I have had occasion to think more deeply more recently.

In April, possibly because I went on testosterone, I sustained a hemorrhagic stroke, a brain bleed.  Jim came home early to find me sitting on a box on the floor with our cats sitting by me watching me, perhaps guarding me.  He called the paramedics who came quickly and took me to the hospital.  An MRI showed them I had had a bleed in my caudate nucleus.  I was completely out by then, constantly drifting off to sleep, unable to communicate.  Jim sat by my side, uncertain whether I would live or die, or whether if I did live I would be compos mentis, just what he could expect to see happen to the person he had shared his life with for more than three decades.

But Jim stood up for me from the first moment.  He told the hospital I was Christopher Moss, a man.  There is nothing about me that says "man".  I have large breasts.  I have a vagina.  I have no facial hair at all.  If my face had begun to take on a more masculine appearance, no one at the hospital would have seen me before to judge.  I was silent so my lower-toned voice was unheard.  The hospital had to take Jim's word for it.  What would happen to me if I lived would be another matter.

I was unconscious, unable to speak with the respirator tubes down my throat.  My wrists were lashed to the rails of the bed to keep me from pulling out IVs and the tubes.  I was more or less incapacitated. After the doctors first tried to prepare Jim for my death, then for my being impaired, then to staying in the hospital for months, and having the respirator installed for weeks, I surprised everyone by getting better.  Within two weeks I was off the respirator and able to begin relating to people.  Jim could not tell if I recognized him at first, but then I must have.  

When I was first able to speak I insisted my name was Nan Louise Hawthorne.  Every time I was asked I stated it emphatically.  Jim was surprised, but he decided to accept whatever I came to identify myself as.  That should have told me everything that he loved me and wanted me to be whoever I was.

Then one day I answered the question about my name, "Nan Louise Hawthorne... but something tells me gender is important."   Jim told me the first time I answered the question with "Christopher Hawthorne Moss" he was pleased.  He knew I was truly returning to him.

I have already written about Evergreen Hospital and how they almost to a person respected my status as a transgender person.  Happily the days of gender segregation are over, but that in itself shows respect.  My records were correct, my doctors and nurses used the right name and pronoun, in my case "he", and no one ever questioned me as to my choice.  

I know to a huge extent I owe this to Jim.  He was loyal to a degree that is astounding.  He did not take advantage of my disability to return me to being female.  He stated emphatically that I am a man and that he was my husband.  He did it, he says, "Because I love you, whoever you are."

If I ever took that for granted I do not any  more.  I have been acutely aware of opportunities for discomfort for him, but now I  know he completely accepts me as I am.

What makes Jim so special?  Let me count the ways:

1.  He is realistic... he looks at his life with calm and perception.  He does not veer off into the realm of self-serving interpretation or coloring.
2.  He is fair.   He learned young from dysfunctional parents that their notions of what is right in the world was dead wrong.  He questioned, and being intelligent, he figured out the truth.
3.  He is intelligent, intelligent enough to know when he is bull shitting himself.
4.  He is empathetic.  He knows, and what's more, cares how others feel.  He knows when what they feel is true and right.
5.  He is fair-minded.  He doesn't judge without all the evidence or at least an intelligent stab at it.
6.  He is real.  He does not have a façade that he believes in to his own detriment.  He sees himself clearly, and that is what he presents to the world.
7.  Jim is compassionate.  He knows when I am less than fair or generous and he forgives me for it.

Is he perfect?  Of course not.  It takes a lot of effort to be all these things, and it gets to him from time to time.  He copes with it as he can.

One thing Jim said is that over the past two years since I came out he has watched me become a serene and happy person, stable, untroubled, that I don't "chew" on things any more.  He figures that has to mean I am who I am supposed to be, that the consistency of my brain and body is no longer important, that my brain is me.

And he loves me.  He is attending the Gender Odyssey conference this year with me to, as I put it to a friend, "babysit my addled brain."  I am sure he will be uncertain, uncomfortable, but a weekend with all the trannies will get him more used to what I came to accept two years ago, people just following the personality of their brains.  He will relax almost immediately.  Yeah, these folks are different... so what?  They are being enormously true to themselves.  That is, after all, what he has done by coming to accept that he loves me.

I am astounded by him, by his growth, but his deep and abiding love for me, by his sheer completeness as a person.  I have tried to return his love, his loyalty, and I am not that convinced I have achieved what I hope to attain.  He knows me well, knows how focused on myself I can be.  He sees somehow in me though the earnest person I am however childish or selfish I can be.  He knows, somehow, how much I love and appreciate him.

I just hope he feels it.  My top priority in life now is to deserve his love

Lambda Literary Review of BELOVED PILGRIM

‘Beloved Pilgrim’ by Christopher Hawthorne Moss

Posted on 01. Jun, 2014 by Mitch Kellaway in Reviews, Young Adult

 

Transgender author Christopher Hawthorne Moss jokingly calls his new YA novel, the second edition of Beloved Pilgrim (Harmony Ink Press, 2014), a book that has undergone a “sex change”–then quickly follows-up by informing readers that “sex change” (now known as “gender reassignment surgery”) is an obsolete term used only with “tongue firmly in cheek.”
Still, he knows the initial imagery is striking to a core audience of non-trans fans of historical fiction and gay historical romance. Once he has their ears, he patiently goes over a more nuanced understanding of transgender identity. He has an eye for the teachable moment: the way to grab the reader with an image, and then use that attention to deliver a deeper lesson about how limiting gender expectations can be. It’s a worthy skill in a YA novelist.

When Moss starts talking about that updated edition of Beloved Pilgrim—which was first penned and self-published in 2011—he’ll undoubtedly talk about how he originally wrote his protagonist as a lesbian knight to fill a gap he saw in the historical fiction genre. But several years after releasing the novel and beginning his gender transition, the now 60-year-old Moss quickly realized that his original impetus to write a hero he could relate to was in sore need of a revisit. And so Elisabeth was reborn as transgender knight Elias von Winterkirch—a decision that meant a daunting overhaul of his 300-page novel, but which Moss appears to have handled skillfully.

Elias does not read as female, but as a man who is using the resources his circumstances allow to project his male idenitty. It’s a reality sewn into the fabric of his life, but not a circumstance he overly laments or which is in constant danger of being spectacularly revealed and punished. Elias discloses his birth gender to his close friends and lovers, who largely embrace him. Then he carries on with his job in a manner not unlike the other men who surround him. While transgender characters often seems to offer storytellers a great opportunity for shocking twists and a tragedy-to-triumph, it’s commendable that Moss focuses all of these effects onto the plot and not on Elias’ trans-ness. This sends a much needed implicit message to his teenage readership that being trans is simply another possibility among identity’s many intersections, and they shouldn’t expect it to be sensationalized.
Even so, it’s worth noting that Elias manhood emerge from of slightly different lived experience than his peers, and this proves to be an advantage: his history of being treated poorly as a woman makes him particularly sensitive to other-ing and injustice. In this way, his trans identity subtly becomes into one pillar of his heroism, helping to develop his worldview as he develops from a boy into a man. And his keen desire for justice is soon tested as he embarks on a Crusade that devolves into senseless violence and loss.

Moss’ prose is well-paced and cinematic, with a particular ability to evoke the rank smells and sounds of a traveling army in a war-scorched terrain. His sharp ear for dialogue allows a reader to stay in the historical moment, even as characters address topics like queerness and gender transition that are often considered contemporary—they simply find their own language and rarely come off as “out of character.” The story remains appropriate for a mature YA reader, touching briefly but tactfully on important subjects like marital abuse and the objectification of women.

The time period and events appear to be meticulously researched, which results, in part, in a twisting, and sometimes head-scratchingly unexpected narrative with a few long stretches of talking and thinking rather than action. While the knights originally set off on a straightforward Crusade, with Elias seeking his father and honor for his deceased brother, his crew ends up on a zig-zagging journey that offers little glory and much suffering. This dovetails perfectly with Elias’ growing disillusionment towards violence, but also results in a plot that occasionally drags, and leaves off on a slightly unfinished note.

Younger readers may feel frustrated that the “epic battle” they await is forever put-off, but I found a greater pleasure in Elias not being able to achieve heroism in a classic way. Though he does at one point have his chance to slaughter “enemies,” the lasting feeling afterwards is a sadness at the friends he’s lost through war, compounded by a nagging feeling that everyone has an inherent humanity beyond skin color or belief system. This feeling is only enhanced by memories of his fiancé and stepson—introduced in a bit of a rushed romance, and more instrumental than realistic—who are not of his own privileged race and class background and therefore threatened by the possibility of inhumane treatment at any moment.

While historical fiction abounds with stories of female-assigned people going undercover to fight in wars, they rarely consider the possibility that protagonists could truly be transgender men (even if they lack our current language to express this in their time periods). Moss gives young trans readers the benefit of a trans hero they can identify with and who overcomes tragedies unrelated to being rejected by family or being revealed as an “imposter.” And he does the genre a great favor by writing a trans character so authentically from the core of his own experiences—one whose inner questions about his gender do not overwhelm the narrative, and who spends the majority of the book living and growing as a whole self: a future husband and father, a loyal son, a just employer, and a defender of innocent bystanders.  Sure, it has the elements of idealism and wish fulfillment this suggests, but enough dashes of darkness to give it a necessary complexity.

Beloved Pilgrim
By Christopher Hawthorne Moss
Harmony Ink Press
Paperback, 9781627985383, 304 pp.
January 2014

- See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/06/01/beloved-pilgrim-by-christopher-hawthorne-moss/#sthash.er6jNRyU.dpuf

Respect in the Hospital

You hear the horror stories of being forced into a pink nightie in the hospital, of being treated as a little nuts by nurses and the rest, but this is not the experience I had recently when a stroke landed me in  intensive care and rehab at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, Washington.  This is in spite of the fact that when I was first admitted for a stroke on April 15 I insisted my name was Nan Louise Hawthorne and only started identifying as myself a couple weeks later. 

Part of the reason I got the respect I was due was the stalwart insistence that "Kit identifies as male" by my longtime spouse Jim.  That alone speaks volumes of his regard for me  since this might have been his golden opportunity to "get me back".  His love and loyalty is beyond praise.

I don't know when I remembered I was Kit.  Perhaps it was when I had been transferred to the rehab unit, but I began to notice how the nurses and staff carefully referred to me as "he".  Short term memory loss is a hallmark of stroke.  From one day to the next I don't recall.

I have had to go off testosterone as it may have been a contributing factor to my having a stroke at 62.  But I know who I am and am thoroughly back to myself as male.  I still wish I could have top surgery but am now aware that my health is touch and go.  Men's clothes and short hair and my tiny dusting of beard will have to do... and my insistence that I am a man.

As it is I am proud to have pulled off this post.  I have been unable to write anything more than emails.  My speech therapist will be thrilled.

Anyway knowing that I can expect the respect I get as transgender from my doctors and from the hospital means all the world to me.  Hurray for the Seattle area.

Imposing Acceptabillity on a Historical Transman

MY LAST SKIRT: THE STORY OF JENNIE  HODGERS, UNION SOLDIER by Lynda Durant

I have written about the subject of this nook, Albert D. J. Cashier, for various sites dedicated to transgender figures in history.  Albert was born Jenny Hodgers in Northern Ireland and emigrated to America in about the mid-1800s.  He lived as a man for over 60 years and served with the Illinois 95th as an infantryman during the American Civil War, fighting in the siege of Vicksburg under Gen. U. S. Grant.  His biological gender was only found out when after he broke his hip in an accident the doctor and nurse examining him removed his clothing.

When I bought this book I was under the impression it was an autobiography.  That was what I had gleaned from sources and passed on in my own articles.  I was disappointed while reading it to discover that it is at best a fictional "autobiography", a novel really penned by Lynda Durant.  Before I go on to explain how much this disappointed me, I will say that the book is very well written, engaging, and offers what appears to be a terrific eyewitness account of the lives and battles of Civil War foot soldiers.  As fiction, the author tries hard to create a more complete story than real life can provide, giving Jenny a credible story and a love interest.  I appreciated the battle scenes enough to recommend the book to my friend and battle consultant Jack.

But... but.. it is fiction.  How much I can't tell by the afterword.  The love interest is a fictional character based on a real person, a man who wrote detailed accounts of his comrades in the battles pictured in the novel.

The problem is that it is part of the fate of so many GLBT people in  history to have their lives reinterpreted by historians as much as historical novelists to "clean them up", make them not GLBT and even inventing sweethearts to prove the person did not in fact lean toward same sex relationships or an alternate gender identity.  Perhaps the authors don't approve of who these individuals may actually h ave been, or they want to identify with them, or maybe they just want to sell books and feel they must gloss over the less seemly issues.  I just hate that.  The whole reason I have been writing GLBT historical fiction is to repair just this erasure of people's lives from the record, if b no other means than, as Mnique Wittig wrote, "invent" plausible interpretations.  It reminds me of all the stories I read as a teen of women who fought as knights, hoping against hope to find a heroine I, as someone who believed she was female, could regard as a role model, someone I could relate to.  It never happened.  All I found were stories of women who lived as knights until the right man came along to show them being loved by a real knight was better than being one.  Now that I am living as the transgender man I am, finding this reinterpretation of Albert Cashier was an even worse disappointment.

Before I realized the book is a novel and not a true biography I started to question whether "transgender"  was the right term for Cashier's gender identity.  I have been leaning to a definition of someone who at least chose to be believed to be identified as the opposite gender from their bodies.  How can we really know except in rare cases what the individual him or herself intended?  It seems clear that the Chevalier d'Eon by her own insistence saw herself as female, and Billy Tipton went so far as to marry a woman long before same sex marriage was legal anywhere.  But did surgeon James Barry who passed as a man to gain entrance to medical school and continued to identify himself to others as male until his death actually believe himself to be male, somehow accepting as valid what we now know is truye for transgender people, the gender of one's brain being the factor rather than the genitals?  In Cashier's case I was about ready to throw in the towel and admit he was not, in fact, a transman but a woman masquerading as a man.

Now I am not so certain.  I now know that the conditions that influenced me were Durant's invention.

Just as Durrant may have wanted to write about someone with whom she could identify, I want to identify with him as well.  I want to write about him as a transman.  Which is more valid?  Probably neither and both.

I will however quibble with the details imposed on Cashier's story, in particular the love interest and also the guilt Cashier feels for pretending to be a man, lying to everyone, regretting how lying separated him from others.  Then in the Afterword the author philosophizes about how isolated Cashier must have felt, lonely hiding her true nature from others.  Well, yeah, especially if he was a transman and his "autobiographer" chose to cram him into the trappings of a heterosexual female, never even considering , for so it seems, that Cashier may have been transgender.  Shades of all the gay men in history who have had their stories retold so they could fit into "acceptable norms".

I also regret that Durant's novel is lost to transgender youth and adults as a story of someone who lived true to his inner nature bravely and without hiding from the life he wanted to live.  Like biographers who insist that Pres. James Buchanan was either thwarted in his love for a woman or was actual asexual in spite of fifteen years living with another man wand together called "Mr.and Mrs. Buchanan as well as "Aunt Nancy and Uncle Fancy"", I find myself angry that GLBT people's lives can only fall into two categories, utterly overlooked or in fact fraudulently reinterpreted.  It just makes me sad, as I felt in a novel where a character who committed suicide because she could not live the life she preferred as a transwoman is completely reinvented by the male name on her headstone.  It is, as Shakespeare wrote, "the unkindest cut".

When you consider all the historical figures who have been "cleaned up" to make them safely heterosexual and cisgendered, I call this just plain mean-spirited.  Do historians and novelists insist all great women were really men and all great members of other races really white?

An FTM Novel by an FTM

REFUSE by Elliott DeLine

So many transgender novels I have read are light, humorous, safe, but not this one.  The dark mood of this novel as an authenticity not often found in the genre,  baring the self-absorbed and sarcastically pitiable world view of late adolescents.  It follows transgender student Dean as he enters college and starts to find his fellow transmen.  Obsessed with the British indie rock band The Smiths Dean is drawn to his new roommate, himself a musician bound for success in the indie rock industry, also a transman but one with a girl friend.  Just like Real Life, the thrust of college life for Dean is the social environment rather than the classes, as a young person learns to cope in the world no longer dependent, albeit resentfully, on the family of origin, no longer able to rely on that excuse.  Dean manages to make his way through it, more or less successfully, finding his place in his insular community of transmen and his voice as a writer.

I'll be honest, I did not much care for Dean throughout much of this novel, but I know full well that liking a main character is not the point of reading a novel.  I found him self-absorbed, adolescent, unstable, but then that's who he is.

Consider the lack of models for transgender people.  Just who should Dean turn to for someone to show him how to be in the world?  So often the only community we have is our  peers, just as directionless and lost as we.  How can I expect Dean to be wiser, more philosophical or more mature than those young people who have precedent to guide them?

His relationship with Teddy, a transwoman is the most moving part of the novel and showcases DeLine's exquisite prose as no other.

He placed the angel on the footer beside the silk plant. He realized it would seem a typical talisman to passersby, just as Theodore Patrick Foley would seem a typical man.  The gesture felt powerful nonetheless. He curled up over the grave, hugging his knees. He put his lips to the dirt between the grass and closed his eyes. After a few moments, he whispered into the ground, a variation of something he’d accidentally memorized by heart “And alien tears will fill for her Pity’s long broken urn. For her mourners will be outcast men And outcasts always mourn.”

I am reminded that even people with whom I could never get along have some gift for me if I pay attention. In this case it is grace.

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 .