LOOKING FOR MERCY STREET/WHERE YOU’RE INSIDE-OUT: Ch 2: “A Skin of One’s Own: Toward a Theory of Transsexual Embodiment.” This is my favorite chapter. So rich and chewy! There’s so much to talk about here, so I’ll just pluck out the thing I love most.

Prosser connects narratives of people with bodily agnosia–a brain disorder in which their body parts, for example legs or a hand, feel completely alien–with narratives of people who have sensations in “phantom limbs.” For both of these sets of people, their sense of their own body is visceral, physical, provoking real loss of sensation or presence of sensation… and yet this sensed body doesn’t match up with the visible flesh. Prosser quotes a lot of transsexual autobiographies describing alienation from the parts of one’s body associated with the sex one was assigned at birth, and a sense of homecoming and integration after (or even in preparation for) surgery. He draws an analogy: It can be said that a transsexual woman suffers from bodily agnosia toward her penis (and presumably also Adam’s apple and other physical markers of maleness?) and a “phantom limb” sensation in the breasts and vagina (and again, presumably, womb?) she doesn’t yet have. And vice versa for a transsexual man. Their post-reassignment surgery bodies are the homes they were never able to dwell in before. A post-surgery transsexual woman is not a mutilated man, or a man made into a woman from parts you can find at home, but a woman who has had major reconstructive surgery. The basic argument is summarized by Prosser’s subsection heading, “From Mutilation to Integration: The Poetics of Sex Reassignment Surgery.”

You can see why this resonates with me, since it sounds so much like my usual Eden-via-Plato “all knowledge is memory” shtik. The idea of a home we’ve never so much as visited, but which we remember and which is real, is one which makes a great deal of sense to me. In fact, the world-in-general doesn’t make sense if there isn’t such a home, or if we’re utterly unable to recognize it when we encounter it.

On a side matter, I’ll note that if Prosser were willing to assert forcefully that sex difference is a core difference, rooted in human nature, ontologically prior to many other differences, he’d get out of some of the minor traps in this chapter, like his quick and I think too-blithe acceptance of cosmetic surgery.