Let me elaborate a bit, so my meaning will be obvious. (I'll try to do this as best I can, given that I haven't thought about the answer in advance for a while...[my norm is to wait].)
Essentially...it's fairly obvious from my standpoint, that the body I was given in this life has profoundly affected my experiences. This includes both the experiences coming at me, and the experiences that my body itself has had input on. That is, people see my body; because they see my body, they assume I must be a specific type of being which they associate with my visual cues. And, in addition, I have experienced psychiatrically-significant neurotransmitter imbalance. This affects the way I have interpreted the world around me.
This is without getting into what the experience of a nonhuman being would be like...though of course, we tend to project that these beings would know nothing else, and hence have nothing to compare it to from within their current life. I suppose a counterexample to this would be a butterfly, which might recall being a caterpillar; or a dragonfly, which might recall being a nymph, and an underwater life. Most people can recall childhood, however most people also don't go through a change as...impacting to their life as something like gender reassignment or gender confirmation.
For instance: I was born phenotypically female. For the first ...eleven or so years of my life, I was accepted, mostly, as unproblematically female. Around the time I turned twelve, I started being asked whether I was "a boy or a girl;" likely because I liked active play like boys, and because my relationship with my then-best-friend (female) was seen as too close and too exclusive. Plus, I didn't really see boys as "different" from myself. Hence the children around me started to be insecure as to my identity.
Age eleven to age 19, I'm slotted into the role of a lesbian by my peers (though they did not use so kind language), and for varying periods I'm largely treated as an outcast, rejected by "friends" who had once accepted me, or accepted by people older than myself. This is to the point of vocal and outright harassment by people who don't even know me (and some who do), mostly male, all age ranges, from the ninth to eleventh or twelfth grades (about 14-18 years old, for those outside the US).
If my body had been male, the issue of my supposedly being attracted to girls (I had no girlfriends, hence no confirmation) would have been normative. The issue of my liking physically active play would have been normative. My ability to outperform others of my sex at pull-ups (though to be honest that was kind of easy), and outrun most other people my age and sex, and want to play basketball and handball instead of watch from the sidelines, would have been normative or lauded; not seen as a reason for exclusion.
My habit of making ornaments for trees and hanging them in low-lying branches, however, probably wouldn't have been.
This is also fed into by, likely, my brain having been partially masculinized in-utero because of an adrenaline burst in my mother on the way to the hospital to give birth.
Early on in school, then, I was being expected to be someone I was not because of the way I looked; and my body was saying that the way I was, was correct for me. Both of these experiences were fed into by my corporeality. Because of the way I looked (like a girl), in context with who I was (excessively boyish in the eyes of my peers), I wasn't accepted. Because of the way my brain was formed, I did not have much of a choice but to be who I was, regardless of how I looked.
And I suppose I should mention that I didn't put together the idea that I was being victimized, with the idea that people were unsure of my gender or sexuality, until sometime late in the 11th grade...(up until then, I was just convinced that I was too intelligent for them to accept me as a girl, and they didn't respect girls as people at all anyway, and so because I didn't conform, they wanted to break my spirit).
If you take a look at the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) Standards of Care (search WPATH SOC)...they say somewhere deep into that document that many people who at one time believe themselves to be transgender, turn out to be homosexual and not transsexual. Now I don't have a lot of experience with sexuality...which might be expected for what I've noted above. However, to protect the confidentiality of my partners, I can just say that I very much doubt that I'm actually attracted to physically male bodies, whether the person in question has taken estrogen or testosterone blockers or not. And I have no say in that. I can't force myself to like something I don't.
That's another way that my body is shaping my experience.
I've experimented with this -- exhibiting feminine gender cues while dressed as a man; exhibiting masculine gender cues while dressed as a woman. To a large extent...it's really very stupid; people see the clothes and from the clothes they assume what gender you are, to the best of my recollection. This is
regardless of what you actually are; if you are female-bodied and dress as male and "pass", they will SEE you as male. They will see the clothes and the body and slot you into whatever variant or outlier (heh -- more laughing at myself here than anything) of "male" they have in their mind in which they can include you. This is regardless of whether you
want to be treated as male or not (though I suppose they assume you do. But I would not be surprised if there were many male, man-identified people who actually want to be pretty like women). I do believe that in most people, it does boil down to wanting to be kind, but the dynamic is...inane. Especially as not everyone has the privilege to be
able to "pass," or even wants to.
When Adrian has been fronting -- which includes one very clear memory-imprint of acting as a man while wearing a skirt and probably a women's tank top, and having his non-dress gender cues clearly ignored -- it's very clear that his version of masculinity is feminine-tinted, as he has access to the majority of the memories we can still recall (at least we so believe), and essentially, he's sharing a brain with a woman-loving woman. If this body had been male, he would not have had that perspective. He would have had other experiences coming at him (like, possibly, being discouraged from making jewelry because that's something "men aren't supposed to do"). He would not have the insight into our female condition that he does. He would probably have been excluded from the women's in-crowd, which is one of the things that we really do appreciate about being female. He isn't a man's man, and he's happy he is not.
I was born into this world as a person of unclear race, unclear gender, and gynecentric sexuality. All of those things, in cultural context, have powerfully shaped who I am today. They did not tell me how to accept or reject the experiences that came at me,
but they did to some extent, determine my experiences. If you're human, cultural context matters, and what you look and sound and smell like, in cultural context, matters. That is, your body has an effect on your experience.
That's without going into species differentiation. My perspective -- or rather, Adrian's -- as questioning whether he is demonkin, and as being dark-oriented,
does affect his outlook. It affects the angle from which he approaches things, in a way that I'm not sure those who approach the same phenomena from a "dominant" perspective ever have to question.
I'm being called away, but will be back later.