I like having conversations like this. Even if the author didn't intend for us to read into it. I also think it is productive, if only as a way for us each to further our understanding of how this stuff works in reality (and what it implies when a character has a wildly different reaction to a situation).
Yeah, and the kind of discussion that comes up in these contexts can be quite different to discussions about things like gender experience and dysphoria in more "serious" contexts, which can be interesting. Particularly since it tends to bring in people who aren't already reasonably well informed, or even particularly interested - genderbent gag manga capture a much broader audience than serious stories that try to realistically depict gender identity issues . . .
Your brain has an internal map of the shape of your body. It knows you have arms and legs, knows roughly how far each joint is bent, which bit of nerve sits where on the surface of your skin. It can use all that to interpret the signals from those nerves into a 3D map of "the shape of the stuff which is touching you". It's why if I press my finger on my desk "here", it feels different from if I press my finger on my desk "there". Your map is informed by the shape of your body, but it's not a perfect process. People who've lost a limb can get phantom limb syndrome because the body may have changed, but the map hasn't.
Many trans people report that this internal map of themselves does not match their native physical reality. There's apparently been a few studies looking into this.
One from 2008 (warning for outdated language) and
Another from 2018. The dissonance between the map of how you expect your body to be and how it is can be very distressing. This is physical dysphoria. I think that for people who's map matches their body, or for whom the gendered aspects don't weigh very heavily, it can be difficult to understand. But I expect it would be like trying to walk, but your legs are too short. Every step you take becomes a missed stair. And because your brain is hard wired to think you're taller than you are, you'll never adjust to your new height.
That all makes a lot of sense, and matches my understanding from other sources fairly well, though as someone athletically inclined my feeling is that the "map" you have of your body is actually all about
relative dimensions and
proportions, rather than absolute dimensions. So in terms of your internal sense of how your body moves, what matters most is the proportions - limb lengths relative to torso length, hip and shoulder widths relative to limb lengths, and so forth. Simply shrinking down from six feet to five feet tall while retaining your bodily proportions would probably not be too much of an issue - cube/square scaling issues would make themselves known once you started operating at higher strength requirements, and
that would definitely be noticeable and throw you out of whack, but in terms of just basic moving around and stuff things wouldn't feel weird
internally. I also suspect changes like the difference between male and female hip and shoulder width to limb length ratios would be small enough that it wouldn't actually be noticeable most of the time - we're not exactly precision machines, after all. Walking
might feel noticeably different, but the difference would be subtle - after all, we're talking about proportional changes that probably aren't much different to flat shoes versus medium height heels.
The world around would seem weirdly big, though, particularly if you weren't constantly distracted by noticeable differences in your bodily proportions - trouble going down stairs would definitely be a thing, and I expect you'd regularly stumble with things like stepping over obstacles or side-stepping to avoid a collision, simply because of reduced absolute limb length. This is actually something I think would be nice to see explored more often in GB stories, particularly since it's something which would be a much more broadly relatable sense of physical dysphoria than the more subtle and challenging topic of gender dysphoria . . .
One other thing: I really doubt that you'd
never adjust, particularly given you'd be experiencing this new shape/size/etc 24/7. Brains are shockingly plastic, even when dealing with major physical changes - if that wasn't the case there's no way that someone could learn to walk with prosthetic limbs, let alone run races with them. How long it took to be able to function normally in most circumstances would be extremely variable, but I'd be very surprised if it took more than a few weeks to get maybe 80% of the way there, and perhaps a year or two to be fully adjusted to the change. Some things would probaly only be noticeable for the first few
minutes even - changed hip width to leg length proportions might feel subtly odd, but if that didn't go away in a few minutes I'd be very surprised (though there'd still be the occasional stumble).
Pulling numbers out of my arse, of course - I imagine there's research out there about adjustment periods for amputees and the like, but right now I don't feel like chasing the papers up . . . .
And all that isn't even touching on beauty standards for "the ideal man" or "the ideal woman". Nor does it touch on the social impact of physical difference. I know there are people who don't feel much physical dysphoria, or don't feel physical dysphoria for certain traits. But because these traits are heavily gendered, having them means the person is perceived as a gender they are not. And that gives them social dysphoria. And it doesn't touch on how social dysphoria plays into GB either.
Yeah, this is honestly the part of all this that I find most difficult to try and reason through - even though I don't really experience physical dysphoria I have a decent mental model of how brain and body interact to give a sense of physical self, so I can make a decent stab at reasoning about it; my experience of social dysphoria is far removed from anything gender related, though. I'm a white, cis, het male who barely even notices the water he's swimming in a lot of the time . . . but I'm also autistic, and that means I've had to consciously learn the social stuff that comes automatically to most people. So . . . yeah, definitely out of my wheelhouse . . .
...I should go re-read Ranma 1/2
Hah - I expect it'd be a bit uncomfortable re-reading it now, but it's been . . . probably twenty years for me? I have to admit that I'm curious . . .
