This is a very interesting piece and is very eye-opening to someone who has never experienced what you have experienced. I appreciate your candid view and acknowledgement of the sort of ontological issues that naturally arise when discussing things like identity, consciousness, and the like. You said:
"Anyway, what we might mean by 'trapped in the wrong body' is that the body I desire to have is different from the body that I grew up in (but what does it mean to grow up 'in' a body?) And it’s different in a way that is fundamentally gendered."
Would you be so kind as to expand on this idea a little? By the way the discussion is framed, we are accepting that the identity is separate from the body. I am imagining the self as the "passenger" in the "vehicle" of the body. Based on this frame of thinking, in my personal experience, I see gender on the level of the vehicle, but I never really thought of the passenger as being gendered. This very well could be due to the fact that I never experienced the feeling of "being born in the wrong body" that you are discussing in your post, but I am curious about the experience of gender in the abstract identity/self that I am referring to as the "passenger." I realize this is a difficult question and might be difficult to explain, but could you expand a bit on how this feeling is "different in a way that is fundamentally gendered?" Thank you for your enlightening work!