ABSTRACT
As Julia Serano explains in Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, cissexual people experience "their subconscious sex and physical sex as being aligned". Just as white people have a race and straight people have a sexual orientation, cis people have a brain sex. Cis people have a hard time understanding why someone would need to change their body in order to express their gender. People born with differences of sex development are distinct from trans people, who generally have typical male or female anatomy. Neuroscience researcher V. S. Ramachandran has shown that the brain contains its own innate map of the body that is separate from the physical body. Ramachandran proposed that being trans is similarly caused by an incongruity between the physical body and brain's internal body map, which evidently includes details of sexual anatomy.
