Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on That’s easy for you to say.

JKR: Please explain how a man, who by definition can’t know what it feels like to be a woman, knows he’s a woman, without recourse to regressive sex stereotypes.

This is exactly the crux of it. We’re only ever given our one, single, lonely perspective on what it is to be human. The only skin we inhabit is our own, the brain/mind we use to sense, filter, and reconstruct the world is the one inside our own head. We can’t shop around to try different existences on for size, to take test drives in other peoples’ minds or bodies. Autobiography and fiction offer imaginative sketches of others’ subjectivities, but not the experience. We don’t get blisters on our feet or suffer from dehydration from reading someone’s account of their desperate trek across the Sahara. A map is not the territory. To put it trivially, does it make any sense to express a preference for a flavour of ice cream you can never taste? How could one claim to like it “better” than the one and only flavour you will ever have? All you can see is the apparent satisfaction of those eating it (each of whom is, like you, limited to a single flavour of their own). You can’t swap your tastebuds for theirs to declare a “winner”, to say that theirs is indeed, a better flavour than your own.

Without any possibility of a standard of comparison, there is no way that anyone can declare a stronger preference for, or affinity to, a different form of being, an existence other than the one they have always had and will always have. Within limits we can change our circumstances and our attitudes towards them, but we cannot step outside our own particular subjectivity and into anyone else’s. I can only ever know what it’s like to be me. I happen to be male, but I have no way of knowing how much of my “meness” is due to my maleness. Nor can I winnow out the effects of my heredity, or the effects of my upbringing in the time and place into which I was born. Would I still be “me” if I’d been born 700 years ago on an island in the Pacific? Probably not, but I can never know. I can never say that this “other, Pacific island, female me” is more the real me than current Canadian, male me. The arbitrary inclusion of different time, place, and sex are for effect only. I’m equally incapable of choosing a “preference” for the subjective existence of the person sitting next to me on the bus, whoever they are. We are each limited to who we are; you can learn, grow, and change, but you can’t step outside of yourself. You can only imagine doing so, but to live in a fantasy is not healthy, and ultimately, not really possible. You are inevitably bound to engage with reality at some times, at some level, even if it’s no more than what is required to meet the material needs of life and metabolism.

Every day on my way to work I see any number of people who seem to be bound to reality by little more than the needs of their physical bodies. Whether they are afflicted by mental illness, or the effects of drugs, they seem to be in a world only they can see or hear. I cannot imagine what it must be like, but from my own singular perspective, I can in this instance say I have a preference to stay where and who I am. But this is based solely on my perception of the external appearance of their behaviour and circumstances. As unlikely as it may seem to me, they may be experiencing ecstatic euphoria that makes them, for all intents and purposes, happier than I presently am. But I have no way of knowing this, not for certain. Their own circumstances are as unique to the forging of their experience of and response to the world as my own. This is not an attempt to romanticize or glamourize mental illness or drug addiction, it’s simply a matter of offering an additional perspective on the impossibility of expressing an innate preference for other states of being from which one is forever barred.

That’s not to say there’s nothing going on inside the head of someone who feels they are trapped in “the wrong body” , it’s just something other than what they are claiming, which is simply impossible. The person suffering from anorexia is suffering from something, but it has nothing to do with obesity. There’s something else going on. The distress is real, but the cause cited by the sufferer is incorrect. There is already some kind of disconnect between the body and the person’s body image; attempts to change the body to bring it into conformity with this distorted self-perception are doomed to failure. Trying to bend reality to match a mistaken impression of it is a losing proposition. Better to correct the mistake. Easier said than done, of course, but it’s easier than trying to correct reality (and forcing everyone else around you to go along for the ride).

One phenomenon that I believe is better captured better by the answer “Because I’ve known my whole life”? Sexual orientation.