And in one oral transsexual account an anonymous male-to-female expresses her alienation from her male body in terms of being encased, surrounded by a false skin: “I used to look at my body and think it was a bit like a diver’s suit, it didn’t feel like me inside.”
–Jay Prosser, Second Skins. Prosser doesn’t draw out what to me might be the most striking aspect of this metaphor: the diver swims in an implacably hostile environment, the coldest depths of the ocean. This metaphor expresses the basic move of Catholic theology in which, when Eve and Adam fell, the whole world changed with us, became suddenly hostile and predatory and wrong.