Anonymous asked:"clearly the body has a sex [...] what does it mean for [it] to not match the brain? the brain doesn’t have a sex." no, but it does have a map of its body's physical location and shape: consider eg. proprioperception or the cortical homunculus (both real neato). obviously there are social factors as well, but i for one will be extremely surprised if the evidence doesn't eventually stack up for somatosensory mismapping or misidentification.
hmm that’s interesting
but it immediately makes me wonder: if this is a thing that can happen, why are there no other flavors of mismapping? why do we not have people born with, i don’t know, phantom limbs? i can’t seem to escape that type of question; every explanation i’ve heard still makes trans sound unique in some way. and that seems unusual for the squishy and inexact human body over billions of trial runs.
i wonder how this would happen, too. do we know how self-perception develops? i’d thought it came from experience and is most of what babies are doing right at the beginning of their lives: figuring out what all these weird parts do. i’m not sure someone without a Y chromosome would even have a way of knowing what male sexual characteristics feel like. (but then, a lot of what we ascribe to Y also lives on the X. could be possible.)
human brain is fuckin weird man