Minds, bodies and... Lucky souls??

[Piccalillipromises]

I was pondering why the idea of being "born in the wrong body" is so easily accepted by so many and something occurred to me...

The idea of souls or essences of people being bestowed upon and separate to their bodies is a concept that seems fairly widely accepted without realisation or much thought. From there, it isn't much of a leap to the idea of gendered souls.

For example, children are being told all the time in our school that they are "lucky" to be born in our country. As if it's possible that they could have been born someone else, to other parents, somewhere else. As if who they are and where they are has no connection to their parents or ancestors.

As if they were a soul floating about that just happened to land and be born here and now.

After all, this is what being "lucky" implies; that there were other possibilities!

I've noticed it elsewhere too, this idea that the body you inhabit is an accident of birth, that your psyche is a completely separate thing to your physical self, from various comments I've seen/heard people make here and there

But the more I think about it, the more I think it's actually quite an odd concept. Is it a religious hangover, or maybe an effect of the internet?

Not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but thought it could be interesting to discuss?

The mind/body connection is an area of philosophy that has a long history.

For me, the bottom line is that your body is your body - it's the only one you have or can have, and this should be the starting point for any physical intervention.

What seems bizarre is that the starting point for any disconnection would be the body, rather than the mind, unless physical intervention is completely inconsequential.

When people experience gender dysphoria/ body dysmorphia helping them to accept their healthy body should be a no brainer. Jumping in with changing the body when these changes bring known negative health outcomes is madness. Don't get me started on the insanity of even suggesting this being outlawed in medical circles.

It really is the emperors new clothes!

It really is mind boggling, I think I'm trying to make sense of how other people can think it makes sense... But it's just so nonsensical!

I don't think it's analogous to being born in another country - you could still be you if your mother gave birth in a different location, or hypothetically if geographical boundaries were changed.

People with disabilities don't really get to say they were born in a body meant for another soul. Basically what both sets are saying is that they have a problem with their bodies. I don't understand why TRAs have to invoke this notion of right/ wrong soul/ body match, and don't really think it helps any kind of understanding. If you don't like your body, you're allowed to just say that.

That's why 'trans' is a effectively a religion. A deity-less religion.

Embodying (ha ha) in law this belief in a gendered 'soul' turns our democracy into a form of theocracy.

Cartesian dualism - it's an insidious idea and utter bollocks.

I am my body, my body is me. However I might like to think I'm a spiritual entity stuck in a meat suit, it's not true.

I’m a Christian, and I do believe we have souls, and eternal life as promised by Christ and demonstrated by His resurrection.
However, it is incredibly arrogant of transactivists to assume that God is capable of making “mistakes” and putting souls into the wrong sex of body!
And don’t get me started on their regressive sex stereotypes and misogyny, threats of violence and complete disregard for child safeguarding. When I taught Sunday school I had to be criminal record checked, undergo safeguarding training, and always be accompanied by another teacher, so no adult was ever alone with the children.
The fact that Stonewall et al seem to have carte blanche to push their dangerous agenda in schools regardless of the risks to vulnerable children enrages me.

Meh to kids being told they are lucky to be born in your country.
From the way you word it, I guess you aren't thinking of the children of immigrants. It might be an idea for you to have a word with whoever says that. Those kids whose parents' country is an unlucky place to get born in can be carrying a ton of survivor guilt.

Souls separate from bodies though within them, it's such an ingrained concept for me it's simply my reality. I can't begin to imagine only being my body iyswim.

The idea of the soul is very deeply embedded in and greatly informs our culture. And often understood as something separate from the body. As is the idea of 'progess'; the suggestion that we are always improving, striving towards a promised land or heaven or judgement day.

It'd be interesting to hear more about how the 'wrong body' narrative sits within cultures that don't have Abrahamic narratives underlying much of their worldview.

Isn't the whole 'lucky to be born here' just a way to evoke empathy - ie imagining yourself to be the other person.

Sure, some of the things we have empathy for could possibly happen to us (becoming disabled on a car crash) whereas some couldn't (being born disabled). But I'm not sure it's always useful to differentiate between them when deciding how we should act (eg making choices over tax spending).

Humans do often think in a slightly fuzzy/imprecise way - but it can sometimes be a useful shortcut

I have no problem with “you are lucky you were born in this country”. It drums in the fact that humans are all equal, that we are not intrinsically better than migrants or foreigners. It’s the antithesis of “I am wealthy because I worked hard”. It acknowledges our advantage and the disadvantage of others. I see it as more an acknowledgement of statistics than souls - there are a vast number of babies born each day on this planet and most of them, through no fault of their own, have far harder lives ahead of them than those born in this country.

I don't think that being told that you are 'lucky to have been born in this country' implies some essence that is other than your body-self, in the same way that being 'born into the wrong body' does.

In the former case, the entity that is the alleged bearer of the luck is simply the person, in the normal, non-metaphysical sense of a mind-animated body. The claim doesn't invoke anything soul-like

Only the 'wrong body' case can seem to suggest the idea of an entity that is other than body, and simply gets slotted into its physical lodgings.

In any case, I don't think that, ultimately, this way of thinking needs to invoke anything soul-like (though I agree that it may often have been expressed in this way). Ppeople who talk along 'wrong body' lines may often have a non-metaphysical way of conceiving of their claims They may believe, for example, that there is a physcial component, in the brain, that creates cognition and emotion (etc) on the basis of sex, and for some reason it is cross-wired in trans people.

Also, 'wrong body' talk seems to have diminished a lot now. I think it was only ever a way of dramatising and simplifying body dysmorphia or gender dysphoria. Also, perhaps, of representing it as something so extreme and disorientating that no-one other than the people experiencing it could gain any understanding of it by means of normal investigation and research.

The shortcut for 'lucky to be born here' is stuff like the industrial revolution giving the UK 'first entrant advantage' (which itself came from luck in natural resources, climate and invasion history), the geographical location of the UK, and the actions of many historic people who are not us!

So it's not so much that we were lucky to born into this body, as we were lucky that all these things came together to make the UK a great place to live at the time in history we were born. (and it is - despite all the problems)

Interestingly although European and American cultures are heavily infused with the Abrahamic religions the idea of a soul being trapped inside a body is considered by Christianity to be a heresy known as Gnosticism. Yet this gnostic idea of souls being inserted into bodies rather than intimately and uniquely connected to them does seem quite prevalent amongst many people in the UK whether or not they have a religious faith. There was another thread on gender identity as a new religion which explored this where someone posted about it, I will see if I can find it to share here.

“They may believe, for example, that there is a physcial component, in the brain, that creates cognition and emotion (etc) on the basis of sex, and for some reason it is cross-wired in trans people.”

It is interesting though that people have a concept of the brain being somehow distinct from the rest of the body even if they don’t think of the soul in the wrong body concept. Sex is coded throughout the entire body in every cell including the brain. It is a bit like brain and soul are being used in similar ways here as something placed in a wrong body.

In fact it is people not accepting the immutable nature of their sex and putting too much importance on controlling how others perceive them which could be the root of the problem. So with psychological support people who are convinced that they are the opposite sex could learn to accept reality and to accept that their tastes and preferences not being stereotypical for their sex is not an indication that they require cosmetic surgery to make them appear more like the opposite sex.

If it is about disgust at and hatred of their physical bodies, that is something that many people experience, particularly as teenagers and which some of us may need professional psychological help to work through.

It is a religious belief and it does then impose the idea of a deity because 'wrong body' - somewhere, some bungler is getting it wrong and putting wrong souls in the wrong bodies. Which when you consider that religious beliefs towards the deity often reflects the parental relationship, rather fits with the whole belief that parents are stupid, dangerous, definitely aren't people with feelings in their own right or with equality with the child, won't understand, can't do anything right and should be cut off from if they fail to provide the expected quality of service at all times. Hence unnamed deity twit, who only matters in what they get wrong.

If you go into the beliefs around reincarnation and souls entering bodies outside of the Christian foundations it's to do with each body and life providing needed experience for the soul who will move through many lifetimes to reach a point of enlightenment/sufficient experience. And they will live both male and female lives, and their job is to make a success of each life they have.

That is a really interesting observation about the bungling incompetence of the unacknowledged deity, the perceived ignorant and obstructive nature of parents, incompetent doctors with a god complex assigning gender to babies
@Froodwithatowel

definitely seems to be something going on there.

Yes, @PomegranateOfPersephone. It does often seem that people want to misuse the idea of the brain by somehow making it 'the self' as if it were the true locus of who we are as individuals. In an even more slippery way, people may invoke 'the mind' as consituting a self that is in some sense other-than-body.

In reality, I guess, 'the mind' is a bit like 'the weather'. Despite the grammatical appearence of its being an entity ('that which rains, is windy, etc 'in the case of the weather; 'that which thinks, feels, etc 'in the case of the mind), it is really nothing of the kind. It is just a way of referring in an integrated way to wind and rain, or thoughts and feelings.

Dr Sophie Quinney, head of gender services in Wales, believes in male and female brains and that there comes a point early in pregnancy where something happens with hormone levels to create a male brain in a female body and vice versa. She is an experienced, fully qualified medical doctor.

I have heard the Head of Paediatrics at a hospital in my area talk in a speculative and not at all sceptical fashion about the same thing. Both of these doctors are female, both of them are lesbians, one of them is quite open about being autistic and one of them talks about having her own issues around her female-sexed body. Both would say they are feminists.

I found the thing I was looking for, a friend had shared it with me and I had shared it on the thread. The Roman Catholic take on souls

“A crucial aspect of the order of nature created by God is the body-soul unity of each human person. Throughout her history, the Church has opposed dualistic conceptions of the human person that do not regard the body as an intrinsic part of the human person, as if the soul were essentially complete in itself and the body were merely an instrument used by the soul.5 In opposition to dualisms both ancient and modern, the Church has always maintained that, while there is a distinction between the soul and the body, both are constitutive of what it means to be human, since spirit and matter, in human beings, “are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”6 The soul does not come into existence on its own and somehow happen to be in this body, as if it could just as well be in a different body. A soul can never be in another body, much less be in the wrong body. This soul only comes into existence together with this body. What it means to be a human person necessarily includes bodiliness. “Human beings are physical beings sharing a world with other physical beings.”

My understanding like Frood, is that religious belief in reincarnation would usually be accompanied by accepting that the body you have is the body you need to learn to accept and live in for this lifetime in order to make spiritual progress. For example putting too much emphasis on how others perceive you is quite contrary to “no-self” or overcoming ego.

Buddhist monks told my daughter when she asked why they don’t have hair that they shave it off so they don’t have to spend time thinking about it, washing it, brushing it, styling it, think about how will others like it and so on, meaning they can focus more on spiritual things and meditation. This is pretty much the opposite of what we see with gender identity beliefs where the ego is all, presentation is all and instead of feelings being viewed as transient and not defining the person, feelings are viewed as sacred, definitive of the person and not to be questioned.

Belief in a soul, whether gendered or spiritual, is interesting - but irrelevant. Believe what you will, it's not belief or unbelief that make you a functioning member of society, a pillar of integrity or a vicious criminal, it's what you do that matters. How you act, whether you impose your belief or unbelief upon others. Whether you prioritise your position over others' safeguarding.

I find it chilling that a person who believes in a gendered soul can believe that the best thing to do for someone whose soul does not fit their body, is to damage that body. How is that any different to flagellation to purge sins?

I have no issue with belief in souls, of any sort. I have major issues with that belief driving society.

I agree completely @Random789 and @JellySaurus

The part that is difficult to get ideologists to explain is the necessary logical extension of the claim.

If there is a gendered soul in the wrong body, then that soul must have existed prior to entering the body, and must continue to exist after it leaves. Which then requires explanation of where it goes, who and what directs it, and that if it is in the wrong body then it was placed there by some force that made a mistake so is some force or being with a grand plan that exists somewhere, in charge of souls.

This is in many ways a religious faith: the act of transubstantiation, the priest class, the holy fool, the original sin of (actual) women that requires penance through pain, the virtue of holiness and superiority, the behaviours towards heretics and sinners (particularly said actual women, there are those in this movement who would love to stuff non compliant women in Magdalen Laundries and would think they were a great idea) it's all there. There's a lot of ground to discuss how, when you deprive a population of a meaningful faith, they invent their own because human behaviour loves all the trappings that go with it.

But equally, the in the wrong body stuff is just an attempt to try and legitimise the idea that a male person can in some way not be male, and the wider logic doesn't exist. It never does. Because it isn't a series of questions, answers and discoveries leading to a conclusion: it's a pre destined desired conclusion (this man is in fact a woman) flailing endlessly around trying to find said questions, answers and discoveries to get everyone to buy into the desired conclusion.

When I read your post Frood my first thought was Magdalen after Magdalen Berns! I suppose she is perhaps the archetypal sinner of the new religion although of course she never repented of her “crime” of speaking the truth and not believing that men could ever be lesbians.

Another thing people are advised within Catholicism is not to compare themselves with others, either in terms of needing to keep up with the Joneses or of being happy to be materially 'better' than them. Likewise not to congratulate ourselves on being virtuous, or deem themselves unworthy compared to others.

The idea is that we should each concentrate on living our lives according to the two basic rules - Love and honour God, and Love our neighbours as ourselves. Doing those things, or trying to do them, is what is good for our souls.

Sounds simple, but loads to unpack - what is God, who is our neighbour, how are we doing on loving ourselves?

What it doesn't do is make any space for having a 'wrong body'.

Being 'lucky' to have been born in a certain place or situation sounds childish and not much to do with souls - everyone has challenges in their own lives, including their spiritual lives.

For example, children are being told all the time in our school that they are "lucky" to be born in our country.

Slight deviation from the subject but is this in the UK? - I'd find this VERY unusual if it was