Real Life: Transgender Children (2012)

Self-identity and self-consciousness and that about ourselves of which we are aware is only a very tiny fraction of the totality of the human psyche. The rest lies below the surface in the hidden waters of the unconscious.

If you want to read some neuroscientific research on this, read some papers on the default mode network (aka the "selfing network"). The Andrews-Hanna paper on the Functional Anatomic Fractionation of the Default Mode Network provides a good starting point as it contains a summary of many other people's work.

I have no idea if any of that research is known in the trans community or if it conflicts with research you have been reading.

According to my understanding of the neuroscience, conscious self-identity is just a little rider on top of a giant beast of unconscious machinery and from that perspective.

The nature of the body and the psyche which functions automatically and unconsciously is what I'm referring to when I say the "truth of the physical body". The pumping of the heart, the breathing of the lungs, the processes of digestion, and all the functions of the unconscious psyche are included in that. According to the neuroscience I've read, the conscious self-identity, the ego structure, and the conscious persona are all a very tiny fragment of a person's psyche, and all stand in a compensatory relationship to the truths contained in the unconscious and in the physical functioning of the body.

Let me postulate that mammalian and human brains are differentiated based on sex hormones. There is plenty of science to back this up. There is much more to physical sex than gonads.

What do you mean by "differentiated"? What is it that was undifferentiated and which then becomes differentiated by means of hormones?

If your brain was altered so that you identified as female,

What does it mean to "identify as female"? And what is the thing that does the identifying? The way I'm reading what you wrote, it sounds like you're implying that there is some sense of self that is more primary than either male or female but which can identify as either male or female.

no amount of wanting to accept a male body would do the trick

Well, yeah. It takes most people years of self-reflection and inquiry and contemplation/meditation to begin to understand and see clearly how their past experiences shaped their self-identity. You can't just will it or want it into existence.

I spent years self-reflecting before I was able to access a memory where I was 2 years old and humping the floor because it felt good and my mom freaked the fuck out and I immediately associated the notion of "wrongness" or "badness" with what I was doing.

I carried some echo of that experience into my 30s, totally unconsciously, but once I recognized its origin and re-processed the experience through the lens of an adult, I was able to free myself of that association and re-integrate that experience.

It doesn't stretch my imagination to think that frightful or painful experiences in infancy or shortly thereafter can have a profound affect on determining a person's psychological identity. I know this to be the case in myself and I don't fancy myself so unique that other human beings don't operate in this way as well.

I'm not opposing or trying to prevent anybody from doing whatever they want with their gender and their mentally-constructed identities. This is just how I see things.

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