Understanding Transgender, for Cis Folks
It’s not a trend or a social construct. It’s biological reality.
Imagine you wake one morning to find a third arm, fully formed from the elbow down, extending from your solar plexus right in the center of your chest. It looks like your other limbs, you can move it just as easily, and it senses touch and hot and cold and pain just like the others.
And yet, it feels alien. Like something foreign that has been implanted inside of you and grown out on its own. Not really “your” arm at all.
What do you do?
Do you think, “Ah, well, now that’s convenient! Now I can type and drink coffee. This is super!” Or do you think, “My God, how can I get this thing removed?”
Chances are, it’s gonna be the latter. That’s because our physical apparatus is neurally wired to the brain, and any parts that don’t have a place in our brain’s “map” of our body will feel foreign and invasive. The sensation is so disturbing that we may risk doing great harm to ourselves attempting to detach them. By the same token, lost body parts often leave behind “phantoms”, very real physical sensations of pain or contact or the internal sense of its (nonexistent) location.
