Daryl wrote:Why won't you accept the idea that mind and body are intrinsically connected, inseparable in fact? The entire idea that a mind merely inhabits a body is what I am challenging, and you are missing that. The idea that a person can be in the "wrong" body is based on that very religious idea.
I have certainly been missing something here and I think that when we consider the third point of the Sex - Gender - Society triangle, we might come a lot nearer to agreement.
When a baby is assigned a Sex at birth, it is assigned far more than just a medical description of its genitals. Society, which includes parents, relations, teachers, religion and the law, all use Sex to assign a person to the artificial categories they have created for convenience. Children are brought up to know their place in society from the way the rest of society treats them, they are put in boxes and told what they can and can't do because of the Sex they were assigned at birth.
Some of these children grow up to feel they have been put in the wrong boxes; for the lucky ones, this is merely a discomfort that makes it difficult to fit in with the life they know they are supposed to be leading (according to society), for others it is such a strong feeling that it makes their life completely unbearable and they a faced with the choice of either transition or suicide. By 'transition' I mean doing something that will get them assigned by society to the boxes where they feel they belong. They don't do this on a whim, they agonise about it, sometime for decades.
All this misery stems from one simple mistake: not their assignment at birth but society's interpretation of that assignment. Change of assigned Sex on a birth certificate and a new name would only partly solve the problem, society expects a certain type of bodily appearance so that they can neatly drop each person they meet into a convenient box. Society also includes the person themself, they would like to fit in with these expectations too; not only would they be addressed and treated the way they prefer, they would also feel a lot happier about their own body. This is what the shorthand "born in the wrong body" is really about, it is a quick way of summarising the situation for the layman but it isn't accepted as accurate by quite a lot of transpeople.
The only form of 'transition' used to be full genital reconstruction and beginning a new life well away from anyone who might know your past. It was then found that, as society became more enlightened, most post-transition transpeople didn't need to hide away and could continue to work in their previous jobs and keep most of their friends (at least, those who were real friends to start with). We now appear to be entering a new phase (in the U.K. and some parts of the U.S.) where the surgery is not essential in every case and some transpeople find they can manage without it -- as long as society can manage too.
So the real culprit is not the transperson's body, but the way society (including the transperson themself) has been brought up to respond to it.