37
universal human condition/experience of living in a seemingly broken world: “the world of our
experience….is fundamentally distorted and radically alienated from its true being”. 132 Kohak describes
these two experiences as a primordial dichotomy in how the human heart responds to living in an
obviously broken world: “the vast difference between what happens to be and what truly is.” 133 This
common, human struggle against suffering adds a bittersweet ingredient to lived experience; meaning,
significance, and value in daily endeavors easily become subordinate to the burden of relieving
suffering. Contrary to this tendency, authentic lived experience does not concede the struggle of life to
suffering.
Do people live for what happens to be, or what should be, what truly is? Should people live for
one over the other? The meaning of the human body remains hopelessly nebulous, if we do not answer
these questions.
Kohak offers hope with his insight. The human body carries meaning in two ways: 1) as what it
happens to be, which includes genetic defects, physical brokenness, and mental incongruence of some
form, or 2) what it truly is beneath the ornaments of defect and disorder, what the body would be if free
of impediments to its proper form. When people make the claim that they have lived-though a terrible
ordeal, what they mean is that they were forced to endure what happens to be. People do not rightly
live for pain and suffering. People live for the congruence between what happens to be and what truly
is, as if what truly is will eventually return. This thesis opines that the transgender experience cannot be
rightly understood, or properly sympathized with, without first admitting to the common human
experience of living in a fallen world. In regards to the human body, “The body I have and am is my most
intimate entry point into the world”, 134 thus is what truly is. But incongruence between the body and
mind – as radical as the transgender experience or as particular as the weakness of a body trapping a
strong mind – is what happens to be. Such suffering often enough compels us to believe that what
happens to be is in fact what truly is (who I am and what my body means to me derives from the defect
or disorder afflicting my body or mind). When people believe disorder to be natural, the intuition of our
bodies as belongings fades, and the body newly emerges as a kind of intimate possession, an instrument
to be used for escape.
Is there any good reason for believing that the mental image of oneself cannot err, while the
physical body can be radically incongruent to the person as a whole? In writing about the popular sense
of gender, this thesis referenced body schema as essential, and that the body’s importance lay in desire
and love. Kohak’s distinction between a belonging and a possession also appealed to desire and love as
132
Erazim Kohak, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 135.
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid, 105.