The Trans Imperative

I was recently requested to explain how someone could “know” they were the wrong sex.  Rather than going into the usual hyperbole and say things like, “the need to be the other sex is a hundred times stronger than anything you could ever know,” I think I can be a bit more concrete.

A feature of the brain has recently been discovered called the “brain body map.”  It is an image that the brain holds about what the body is supposed to be like.  The map says that you are supposed to have two arms, two legs, and just one mouth. It also tells whether you are supposed to have a penis or a vagina.  The brain body map is present from birth but it does change somewhat as people mature.  Otherwise our brains would be telling us all that we are supposed to be babies.

People don’t notice the map when the body corresponds to what the map says it should be like.  But when the body and the brain body map do NOT agree, problems arise.  These problems generally are expressed as profound depression.  Amputees go through a period of intense melancholia seeming out of proportion to the loss of any mobility.  A good portion of this depression can be attributed to the body and the body map being out of sync.  The reverse can also happen.  There are people with defective body maps that say that while they may actually have two fully functioning legs, they are really supposed to have one leg.  They view the offending limb as a foreigner.   One man felt the depression so severely that he froze his leg to force surgeons to remove it.  Once it was gone, his depression disappeared and he reported feeling “complete” for the first time in his life.

Bodies out of sync with body maps are more common than people realize.   The map seems to become fixed after puberty.   As a people age, their bodies becomes more and more out of sync with their body maps.  If you’ve ever looked at yourself in the mirror and thought “those wrinkles…that gut….that’s not me.  I’m not supposed to look like that.  I don’t even recognize that person looking back at me,” you are suffering from a body out of sync with your body map.

The transgender need to be the other sex is a result of an out of sync body map.  It is very much related to the unfortunate souls that have maps with missing limbs.   Our bodies can be perfectly healthy and well-proportioned examples of one sex.  We may even be considered attractive.  But when we look in the mirror, it’s all wrong.   It’s not just our gut that is wrong.  Every square inch of our bodies is wrong.  That’s not us.  We aren't supposed to look like that.

When I bathed as a small child, I was fascinated by my penis.   Not fascinated in that I was proud of it or thought it was really wonderful (as I hear a lot of boys think) but fascinating in that it didn’t seem to belong with the rest of my parts.  Legs, check. No problem.  Arms?  Didn’t even give them a passing thought.  But those naughty bits were something else.  I didn’t hate them. They were just weird.  This feeling only intensified as I grew older.   For most of the time, it would manifest itself as an inability to see myself as attractive when women were practically throwing themselves at me.  I was so unable to see what they saw that I actually thought they were mocking me.  But when I was naked or having sex, my disjointed mind became foremost and overwhelming.  I was completely female and my body was totally wrong.  As my hero Myra Breckenridge said, “Oh this dick has got to go!”

I was a man for forty years.  During that time a day did not go by that I didn’t think about killing myself at least once.  It was more or less intense, but it was always there.  Forty years of just wanting to end the farce.   Forty years of being in and out of therapy and of taking every anti-depressant known to science.  Nothing helped.  When I finally decided to end the farce and kill myself, I decided to give cognitive therapy one last chance to convince me not to do it.   The therapist I found asked me one simple question.  “Did you ever consider,” she asked, “that your suicidal thoughts and your transgender issues were the same problem?”    That one question solved the riddle that I had been trying to solve my entire life.   I started transitioning from that day.  

Four years later and at the other end of that transformative journey, I am now a woman and can safely say that my depression has disappeared.  I still get sad days and stressful days, sure. But that profound hatred of my image ...the thought that my whole existence is a mistake... is gone.  Life is good.

Now if I could just do something about that gut 'cause I'm not supposed to look like that.