Can a Woman be Trapped in a Man's body?

It's a well known phrase in our language.  A person claims to be a woman trapped in a man's body.  This statement entails some unavoidable implied statements.  

First)  It implies that the essential self is the soul.  It's not the body.  It's that which, as Christians believe, survives death.  "You are not your body."  Even if one is an atheist that doesn't believe in souls and the afterlife, it still implies the mental self is the essential self.  Other things that are true about your body are not essential to you.  You can grow taller and still be yourself.

Second)It also implies that the gender is part of the essential self.  For, I will quickly agree that the mental self is the essential self.  I am a Christian.  But all of your mental properties cannot be essential to you.  Your mental properties can change and you will still be you.  You can learn things you didn't know.  You can forget things you once knew.  You can experience brain damage through injury, old age, disease, alcohol abuse, etc.

 

My point is this.  A lot of this debate centers around a confusion over these two categories.  We as a society are recognizing the first point above.  But we are missing the second one.  Part of the problem lies in a failure to carefully describe the first point.  Rather, we make it in slogans and stop all discussion right there.

 So since the second point is missed, we fall into a trap of assuming a person's gender is part of essential identity.  But why should that be the case?  Just because a person has a masculine or feminine personality doesn't mean that personality is an essential mental property.  Why can't a man one day learn to think like a woman and vice versa?  Why is it something you're born with?

 

Think about this from another hypothetical angle.  Imagine that people could alter their sexual orientation with only a moderate amount of effort.  What if it was like learning a skill?  For example, shooting a gun accurately is a learned skill that most people can do fairly well.  Other skills might be sewing, drawing, singing, playing piano, etc.  Are those things part of a person's essential identity though?  Just because you happen to be able to do something moderately well, it doesn't define you.

So if sexual orientation was like that, then nobody would make it part of their identity.  See, people don't say things like, "I enjoy homosexual activities."  Instead they say, "I AM a homosexual."  We've begun to see the gender as part of the essential self.  And it's even an essential part of the mental self in our eyes.  That's why we say a woman can be trapped in a man's body.

But in a Christian context, marriage is largely about a lifelong process of understanding someone of the opposite gender.  While it isn't easy, it does occur.  Furthermore, in a Christian context such a process can reach a final stage of completion after one dies.  The Bible does seem to say that sexual activity is somehow irrelevant after one dies.

What I'm saying is that I don't agree that if your gender changed you would cease to be you.  The reason is because while you are not your body, you are also not your gender.  The Bible seems to prescribe just such a process, called marriage. Here one learns to think like the opposite sex does.  But this process is best accomplished in a lifelong heterosexual union.

Instead, today we find people doing the exact opposite.  People are rejecting unions with the opposite gender because they claim to already be the opposite gender.  It's difficult for me to shake the suspicion that what really underlies this is not gender identity but rather sexism.

Anyways, I'll stop for now. This is an idea that is still in very primitive stages.  I'll keep working on it though.