Trans Somaticism

Depending on who you're talking to René Descartes is remembered for his mathematics (Cartesian geometry), his philosophy or, at the very least, his famous quip; "I think, therefore I am." Among his contributions to Western History was his establishment of a mind-body duality. That is, a immaterial mind holds sway over the material body. In fact, it can even be said that Descartes' Dualism has been as long lasting as his oft parodied existential quip. The Western world has not yet snapped out of its dual trance handed down by Descartes.

To this day it isn't clear if mind is merely a symptom of the brain,
or if brain is merely a vehicle for the mind. Furthermore, perhaps
the body is just a mechanical container for both. A shell.

A major blow, literally, to the mind-brain duality arrived in the year 1848 when 25 year old Phineas Gage,
a railway track layer, suffered unbelievable head trauma after an explosion that resulted in an iron bar
piercing his cranium, jutting through his brain. Gage's frontal lobe was completely removed and his life
was saved. However, the absence of this area of his brain altered his personality in the most polarizing
of ways. Whereas before Gage was unanimously described as an affable person; after the injury he was
described as obnoxious, noisy, unstable and impulsive. Gage's doctor illustrated him as giving "scant
respect to his colleagues...becoming impatient and occasionally very stubborn." Personality had long
since been believed to be a product of the soul, but it seemed that Gage's accident became unwitting
proof that behavior, personality and even emotions were anatomical in nature.

Of course, there's always the possibility that Gage's change of personality was more a change of heart
then a change of brain. After all, there is an experiential consequence from having an iron bar slammed
through one's head that must be factored into the equation. Affable people who lose their arms or legs
to accident or disease are also described as having abrupt changes in temperament.

Whatever the case, Gage's situation shifted the conversation on mind-brain duality. It would seem that
there was no duality. They are one and the same things.

A full century after the Gage accident, British born Laura Dillon would undergo 13 surgeries that
would forever transform her into the person she really was – Michael Dillon. In fact, "she" would
have been a designation that Dillon would have disagreed with even while he had the anatomy
of a woman. Even when he was Laura Dillon, Michael Dillon knew, without a doubt that he was
not a woman. He just happened to be trapped in the wrong body.

What Michael didn't know was that he was re-opening the old case of the duality between
mind and body. In fact, the term "Trans-Sexual" had yet to be coined when he first woke
up and realized that he was wearing the wrong body. The only word during his time was
"homosexual" and that didn't quite describe Michael. While he was "Laura" and still outfitted
with breasts and a vagina, "Lesbian" was not quite the descriptor for his attraction to women.
Inside, Laura was a man with a heterosexual attraction for women. Dr. Henry Benjamin,
a German endocrinologist who became famous for his work with Christine Jorgensen,
was praised by the New York Times as "the first student of transsexualism to discern that
it was different from homosexuality or transvestism." Laura, and others like him, were simply
in the wrong body.

Dillon was himself a physician, who had managed to smuggle himself into medical school
as a man, though at the time he was still anatomically a woman. Having been born in 1915,
he was a product of the emerging consensus of man being the sum of his biological parts.
While working at a research lab in the South West of England, Dillon handled dissected
brains and came to question the certitudes that any particular part of the brain accounted
for someone's identity, especially as it pertained to their gender. As long as it was believed
that Dillon's male-mind was an anatomical glitch – a symptom of the brain – then the clinical
solution would continue to be changing his mind about himself through psychiatric treatment.
In Dillon's own words, the "body (must) be made to fit his mind." Not the other way around.

Michael Dillon took on a new body exactly 101 years after Phineas Gage became a new person
following injury to his brain. Dillon would be the first person to switch his body from that of a woman
to man, a surgical procedure that he began in 1946 and concluded in 1949. He may have even been
the first person to pop testosterone pills for such a purpose, which he started doing as early as 1938
at the age of 23, almost the same age as Gage when he sustained his brain-changing injury.
These pills, of course, gave Dillon the trademark "manly" voice and swelled his body into something
more indicative of a man. All of these characteristics, including the eventual penis, were just symbols
of manhood. Just like the signature pipe that became a mainstay of Dillon’s manness. They were there
more for society than himself. Even without them, he was a man. But because society demanded them,
Dillon gave it to them. Trans-Somaticism was born. In 1946, the year he began his surgery, he would
go on to publish his book on altered bodies titled, Self.

So where does this leave the divide the between Self and Body?

Eugen Steinach, a physiologist and endocrinologist, showed that switching the sex organs on guinea
pigs also switched their behavior. Was this proof that maleness and femaleness were simply the hormones
produced by organs? The hallmark of science and medicine is to describe in great detail what something does. But does that
also describe what something is? Or more to the existential point – who someone is? Laura Dillon's genes said, conclusively,
that he was a woman. His body did everything that a woman's body is supposed to do: it produced estrogen, it grew breasts,
it ovulated. His genes did everything to make Laura’s body into a woman, except do the same with Laura the person.

In other words, the body will not tell us who a person really is. They are separate entities. Genes will tell us everything we need
to know about the body but not much about the person. The secrets of person and personhood are not found by the poking or
prodding of the surgical knife. To find out who a person is, we need only follow the simple advice posed by Michael Dillon: Ask.