I am not a woman, but I couldn’t help myself with the old song reference. That song played the other day and it got me thinking about the whole tran-sexual argument/question/movement, whatever it is. That isn’t meant to sound flippant, but I come by the question of what it is honestly.

A lot of people say that the trans condition comes from “being a man trapped in a woman’s body” or the reverse. I began to wonder what that felt like. I don’t believe that I could ever know, and I am not sure anyone could.

So like I said, I am not a woman. I have the equipment of a man. I am married to a woman who I am attracted to, and I am pretty happy. So the inference that society makes is that I must feel like a man because of the parts I carry around and the things that I do.

What I know is that I feel like me. My wife is a woman and I guess that she feels as society defines her. She grew up very much a tom-boy on a farm though. I also grew up on a farm and did many of the same things she did. When I ask her what it feels like to be a woman, she tells me what she feels. So is my tom-boy wife’s feelings generalized enough to say that what she is feeling is good enough to extrapolate into what a “woman” feels like? I am not sure.

We both came out of the Ozarks of Missouri, and we live in a “traditional” relationship. My assumption is that we can make the claim to being a man and a woman. But can we assume our feelings are equivalent to what men or women from Chicago, or Zimbabwe, or any other place feel?

Do the roles make a determination as well? What if my wife was one of four Muslim wives?

To head down a different track, what if I lost a body part? How about a leg? I think I would still feel like me without a leg. Would I feel like a “man” without a leg? I couldn’t honestly say. Having only ever been me, I can’t define what a cookie cutter man feels like. Just about anything could happen to my body and I would “feel like me” with whatever difference there was.

I am sure that hormones would make me feel different. A change in my appearance like “top surgery” may change the way others interacted with me, probably mostly those who didn’t know me before. But I would never know if any change made me feel like a woman. We are told the ability to have a child or menstruate does not define a man or woman, so that has to be thrown completely out of the discussion.

So as a “normal male,” what if I went through all of the surgeries and hormones to transition to what is referred to as another sex? I think I could be classified as having gender dysphoria at that point. I would argue that I would still feel like me, but with different parts. My feelings about myself will most likely change, but I could never say that I felt like a woman, because I have never known what that is.

The most accurate statement may be that I feel like me, but that I feel wrong. Maybe the medical community should start there instead of jumping irreversible sex change procedures.