BORN IN THE WRONG BODY: The Dangerous Doctrine of the Disembodied Body - Part 2
The Embodied Body vs the Disembodied Body
Born in the Wrong Body
Part 1 of this series critiqued the notion of a mind/body duality especially as it is manifesting in the pseudo-psychological medical practice of “transing” aka body mutilating drugs and plastic surgeries. The nouveau trend of transgender ideology whose essential claim holds that one’s identity (mind) can be at odds with one’s sex (body) is rooted in a highly dangerous form of body dissociation in which medically endorsed self-harm and lifelong drug dependence is normalized as part of a healthy path to authenticity. The idea that a person can have a mind/body mismatch is a misunderstanding of the nature of our embodiment, which is wholistic. We are our bodies. There is no other thing to be.
As I have mentioned before, transgender propaganda uses highly manipulative linguistic ploys and marketing strategies to achieve public acceptance. One slogan used over and over in transgender lifestyle documentaries, books, and ad campaigns is the phrase, “born in the wrong body.”
Books, documentaries, celebrity news stories, and fashion campaigns have all used the slogan “born in the wrong body” as the reason why adults and kids should take endocrine-altering drugs and receive radical cosmetic surgeries to disguise their sex.
The recent release of Audrey Hale’s journal by the Tennessee Star reveals how the girl’s depression and anger that led her to go on the Covenant School killing spree was fueled by the belief that she was “born in the wrong body.” As Hale’s story tragically reveals, to hate one’s body is to hate oneself.
“Born in the wrong body” is shorthand for a mind/body mismatch. This is the psychological and physical practice of dissociation. To be dissociated is to ignore the physical signals of one’s body, to mentally and literally sever parts of one’s body, and to deny the wholistic integrity of one’s self. Although the drugs and surgeries are sold as a path to authenticity, true authenticity is not congruent with deceptive practices performed in a dissociative state. To be in a state of true authenticity one must accept one’s embodiment and be responsive to one’s adaptive signals and senses.
Regardless of what we think about ourselves, or even how much we attempt to dissociate, we are always sensing ourselves in our embodiment as men or women. Our sensed embodied experience is not only foundational to our ability to listen and respond to our primary safeguarding instincts but is necessary for the development of healthy bodily autonomy and boundaries.
I Sense, Therefore I Am
We are born into the world not thinking beings but sensing beings. At birth, a baby can’t analyze, rationalize, or to any complex mental cogitations, but a baby does feel everything. While it is humans’ highly developed prefrontal cortex that allows us to process abstract concepts, before an infant’s prefrontal cortex is even formed she is already responding to her environment with her senses. In order of operations, sensing is primary to cognitive awareness. Sensing comes before thinking. Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty observed that “underneath the conceiving body is the perceiving body, the body as it actually experiences things, prior to all conceptions. The body initiates all and suffers all.”1 This is a very simple but revelational observation about our relationship to our own meaning-making capacities. Before we can conceive, or create mental judgments and analyses about our situation, we perceive or sense our situation through our body first. An infant does not even know what the words “I think” mean, and yet she feels pleasure, pain, hunger, and comfort, and responds to familiar faces, emotional facial cues, and voices. Within her limited range of movement, she already has the instinctual capacity to move toward nourishment and away from pain. She senses the environment by instinctually grasping, smelling, tasting, looking, listening, balancing, moving, and internal feelings.
Whether or not we are consciously aware of our senses, we are always in a feedback loop with our physical sensations. As you are reading this essay, you may be so focused on the visual cues in front of you that you may lose track of the sounds and smells in the room, but you can tune into them at any time and they are there.
I Sense Therefore I Am: The Experiencing Self is not the Mind but the Body
Contrary to the Cartesian conceptualization of our essential being as a thinking self, our sensing or experiencing sensing self is our most primal level of self-awareness. And our thinking self is necessarily reflective. Thinking always comes after the fact of direct sensory perception. Even thinking that involves the most futuristic sci-fi imaginings is based first and foremost on primary experiencing. Without a primary sensory experience, there would be nothing to think about, question, know, or imagine. That is, without a foundation of sense experience in the world, there would be nothing to reflect upon or build inventive theories from. Merleau-Ponty said that “at the heart of even our most abstract cogitations, the sensuous and sentient life of the body itself,” is primary. We are sensuous material beings living in relationship with the sensual material world. Our bodies are our point of contact with the world. The sensual material world makes up the substance of all our concepts and all our imaginings. The “living body is thus the very possibility of contact, reflection, thought, and knowledge.” The starting point of all thinking is sensed experience. We sense first, and then we know: I sense, therefore I am.
Those who claim a trans identity may make claims that they “feel like they are born in the wrong body,” but the fact remains that there is never a time when they stop sensing the body they exist in. They are always sensing their body as the primary foundation of their experience. Whatever mental conception they hold about their identity, whether it is an opposite-sex identity or one of the alternate identities such as non-binary, agender, transage, transspecies, or demi-flux, they are always directly sensing and experiencing their body as a living whole which includes their sexual reproduction organs.
External alterations made in the name of identity congruence are just that, external, superficial, and cosmetic. Our physical being remains constant. Body-altering drugs and extreme plastic surgeries are only external measures that do nothing to alter our primary developmental pathways. Thinking does not change sensing. Whatever someone who claims a trans identity “thinks” they are, it does not change their “senses.” Men continue to sense their male body. Women continue to sense their female body. And no one can sense a body they do not embody.
The Embodied Body vs. the Objectified Body
We are born as embodied beings in relationship with the world around us. We are born sensing ourselves as our bodies which are particularly situated and in relationship with the world around us. In contrast to the notion that we each exist in a state of separation, we are not disembodied and isolated minds, rather we are always experiencing ourselves in relationship with our particular situation, and we are always experiencing our bodies. Merleau-Ponty observed that “our body is not an object for an ‘I think,’ it is a grouping of lived though meanings which moves towards its equilibrium.” He observed that rather than thinking, embodiment is the essential element of human existence. The world and myself exist prior to any analysis about the world or myself.
We cannot perceive the world outside of this intimate involvement with our body in which we are constantly engaged. This is to say there is no objective place where we can think ourselves outside of our bodies. All our thoughts are perceptions are mediated through our bodies. We are always subjectively and particularly situated and engaged with our bodies. We are always feeling a constant flow of sensations from our bodies. We are always in a state of communication with and responsiveness to our bodies.
Our bodies find meaning through experience. This is to say our body is not a “mind,” an “ego,” or a “conceptualizing mechanism.” Our bodies find meaning through experiencing, feeling, and perceiving, wholistically, all at once. Our body is its own field of awareness, knowledge formation, meaning formation, pre-cognitively.
Embodiment is the state of fully occupying one’s body, to be at one with and in integrity with one’s body, sense perceptions, and instincts.
Rationalization, empiricism, objectivism, consumerism, and capitalism are all lenses through which one can look at the world. But as is the case of lenses, they influence the perspective of what is presented. The lens of consumer capitalism commodifies and objectifies the living world. This lens looks at the world and sees commodities; a tree is not just an individual tree but a forest which becomes 80-105 tons of timber per acre at a price of $4,000/acre, a run of salmon becomes 180,000 pounds of fish at $1.35/lb. Everywhere you look, the world is a sea of objects that can be commodified. Everything is a “thing” that can be bought or sold, and whose value is in the price it fetches in the world market. This is a lens that changes relationships between living beings.
Trans ideology is another lens through which one can perceive the world. It is a world-organizing belief that conceptualizes humans as separate from their bodies. This lens is dissociating, dehumanizing, and commodifying.
Our bodies are not just "a part" of our humanity, our bodies ARE our humanity. And all it takes is the simple act of observation to see that having different sex bodies influences experience differently. This is a neutral observation. It is also a meaningful observation. Our bodies carry our experiences and help us make meaning out of those experiences. The act of dissociation keeps us from valuable insights, intuitions, and wisdom.
I Am My Body
I AM my body.
I don't "have" a body. My body is not my possession.
I AM my body.
I'm not "in" my body. My body isn't a suit that I take on & off.
I AM my body.
I don't "identify with/as" my body. My body is not a projection of my inner beliefs.
I AM my body.
My direct sensory experiencing of myself as my body is prior to all mental concepts I formulate about my body.
I AM my body.
Embodiment is the first and only way in which I perceive the world. Every experience is mediated through my body.
I AM my body.
There is no "objective place" in which I can think myself outside of my body. I am always subjectively and particularly situated and engaged with my body.
I AM my body.
I am always experiencing my body, I am never not experiencing my body.
I AM my body
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2008). Phenomenology of Perception. New York, NY. Routledge.
Wow!
I am my body!
I've always appreciated your critique of cartesianism. His ethos only makes sense in philosophy classes and academia. Not the real world. Not unlike many contemporary ideologies.
Thanks, Amy. Sending lots of love!
Great piece!
You may not be aware but your insight is supported by research spanning psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, cybernetics, neurobiology, statistical thermodynamics, neuropharmacology, even AI and computational anatomy and other fields of thought relating to self-organizing systems.
It’s unusual to read excellent focused writing in a complex subject.
Not only are we and our mind our body but our body is also perpetually constructed by our mind. The state of being conscious involves neural systems constantly predicting what our embodied self will sense, to maintain life through homeostatic processes including maintaining the integrity of our body.
Should the mind predict one thing through a model it maintains of the world (projective reality), and the body sense another, the difference between prediction and sensation (often called “surprise”) causes the mind to use energy to either update its model (allostasis) or direct the body to adjust environment (homeostasis). That’s a large part of what consciousness means in an abstract way.
Should “surprise” persist it can be exhausting and debilitating because the constant energy we expend to minimize cognitive error between prediction and perception. A small amount of surprise is managed all the time through our “default mode network”. Big surprises trigger other very energy intensive networks (Ventral Attention, Somatomotor, etc.)
This is well characterized mathematically in cognitive science through the Friston Free Energy principle.
A problem occurs when the model of the world (reality) neural systems maintain is irrevocably faulty. In general psychosis, the conscious mind presents a reality that cannot be confirmed by sensation - you see things not there, hear things and so forth; the neural system cannot track reality presented by embodied senses, energy intensive networks are activated (SN, DAN, CEN, Limbic for “fight or flight”)
An organic example of this is the time-tested striking issue that in various psychoses (one being schizophrenia) eyes cannot accurately track moving objects - “Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements” (SPEM). Cognitive systems in such individuals cannot effectively model the position of moving objects and send signals to the eye muscles to accurately track them. It is a semi-conscious reflexive ability which is entirely predicated on our cognitive system being able to, with millisecond accuracy, predict reality. The effect is so strong and specific - and heritable - that you can accurately assume that 1st degree relatives of people with faulty tracking are also faulty, but may not necessarily have psychoses. This SPEM is irrevocable. Drugs to moderate psychosis have a neutral or negative effect on this state.
Another key example of an irrevocably faulty neural predictive system is in patients which have phantom limb sensation. It’s somewhat known that patients who have had a limb amputated will often, permanently, retain a variety of sensations, including pain. What’s not widely known is that people who are born without limbs can also have phantom limb sensations, as has been documented for centuries. The result of this fault is that the person’s cognitive version of embodied reality is perpetually wrong and the signals the mind creates to correct the phantom error are ever present, a recipe for exhaustive unhappiness; dysphoria. Imagine constantly feeling you are in imminent danger of body damage.
Why this is important is the opposite case - not where the person’s mental model of their body has a limb not present, but when they have a cognitive model which doesn’t include part of their body. The effect is somewhat the same.
As I started out saying: should the mind predict one thing through a model it maintains of reality, and the body sense another, the difference between prediction and sensation (often called “surprise”) causes the mind to use energy to either update its model or direct the body to adjust context.
An “extra” leg or a “missing” leg both cause persistent irrevocable distress due to faulty predictive modeling, or what we think of as reality and consciousness.
Genitals are part of the body, and are also subject to the same problems of embodiment and projective reality.
Men who have had for different reasons genitals amputated often still feel an utterly realistic phantom penis, even erections, and orgasms. Women with breasts or genitals removed can similarly feel the phantom organs, even penetration of the vagina and orgasm.
That’s where the fundamental problem and paradox with trans lies.
Considering trans men, some tiny percentage of them who are not fetishists or delusional, some group of them will feel that their real penis is not part of their body because their cognitive model of the body has no genitals (though of course they still feel their penis) as some people feel a real leg is not part of their body because their cognitive model has no leg. It is not because they necessarily believe they are “female” it is because they do not believe they have a penis. For these men, it’s possible that everything else about the reaction to their cognitive misprojection of their body is an attempt to rationalize the condition as being female. They also get exhaustive triggers to high-energy neural systems as though responding to a threat.
[Considering Intersex individuals, genital amputations and mutilations can never “match” their body to anything. Unless they had an irrevocable cognitive defect, the model of reality presented to their consciousness is that of the genitals they have. Altering them is a tragic example of iatrogenic (medical) damage. ]
With trans the paradox lies in the fact that removing a penis doesn’t actually remove the penis from their cognitive projection of reality. They can continue to sense a penis, felt not to be theirs, as part of the body and in (phantom) sensation.
If you have a fetish of being female, or a delusion, or a cognitive failure to feel your penis is yours, even removing it will not obliterate it from consciousness. There is no way out except to learn to cope with the feelings the fetish, delusion, or cognitive failure.
Your body and mind are created together and are inseparable; consciousness relies on the body to perpetually confirm reality, projective reality without body sensation is psychosis or delusion. Mind and body cannot operate independently. Should the mind and body not confirm reality together it is the result of irrevocable defects. These defects are exhausting since the mind and body the perpetually attempt to remediate the lack of confirmation, errors or surprise through activation of defensive cognitive processes. These ideas are true for all categories for mind-body reality projective errors.