Question About Transsexuality and Atheism

[Esquilax]

Many transsexuals say they feel like men trapped in a woman’s body or vice versa.  It occurred to me that this is counter to the idea of orthodox atheism, which asserts that there is no “I,” no part of a human being that is separate from the body. How can I be a man trapped in a woman’s body if my body is all that I am?

This can be explored from many different angles, and I’d love to hear what you have to say.

But there is an "I." It just so happens that this is a process bound and contained within a physical brain which is part of a body, rather than an embodied soul that can exist freely on its own. The fact that self referencing minds exist is, I would think, accepted by all atheists; the disagreement is one of origin, not of existence.

That said, what we have here is an overclocked ape brain set within physical parameters that are constantly changing, generation by generation, without any heed or recognition paid to all the other parameters. We are, in essence, physical beings barely able to play catch-up with the rest of ourselves: it's no thing at all to accept the idea that a brain and its corresponding genitals might come out of that evolutionary maelstrom fundamentally mismatched in some portion of the population, especially in light of all the other permutations- both detrimental and positive- that we observe in every species, all of the time.