You’ve heard of transvestite, and the trendy new “transgendered”, but now we have a new “trans” to whom we are being asked to grant special sympathies – the transabled – people who feel like they’re supposed to be disabled and modify their bodies accordingly.
Canada’s National Post is reporting on the new phenomenon which will be discussed this week at their Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Ottawa.
“We define transability as the desire or the need for a person identified as able-bodied by other people to transform his or her body to obtain a physical impairment,” says Alexandre Baril, a Quebec born academic who will present on “transability” at the Congress. “The person could want to become deaf, blind, amputee, paraplegic. It’s a really, really strong desire.”
For instance, the desire was strong enough for a man named “One Hand Jason” to cut off his own arm with a “very sharp power tool” because he felt like it didn’t belong to him.
Another man dropped a massive concrete block on his leg with the hopes of needing an amputation but doctors were able to save the limb. He now walks with a limp and admits it wasn’t the disability he was after.
Researchers in Canada have interviewed 37 people worldwide who identify as transabled. Half live in Germany and Switzerland. Most want either paralysis or amputation, but one wants to be blinded.
“The transabled are very secretive and often keep their desires to themselves,” says researcher Clive Baldwin, a Canada Research Chair in Narrative Studies who teaches social work at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B.
Some of his study participants draw parallels to the experience many transgender people express of not feeling like they’re in the right body, Baldwin says, and reports that this disorder is beginning to be thought of as a neurological problem with the body’s mapping, rather than as a mental illness.
“It’s just another form of body diversity — like transgenderism — and amputation may help someone achieve similar goals as someone who, say, undergoes cosmetic surgery to look more like who they believe their ideal selves to be,” Baldwin says.
The Post reports that “As the public begins to embrace people who identify as transgender, the trans people within the disability movement are also seeking their due, or at very least a bit of understanding in a public that cannot fathom why anyone would want to be anything other than healthy and mobile.”
Baril, a visiting scholar of feminist, gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, who is both disabled and transgendered, says there is great resistance within the disability activist community and transgender circles to the transabled.
“They tend to see transabled people as dishonest people, people who try to steal resources from the community, people who would be disrespectful by denying or fetishizing or romanticizing disability reality,” Baril says.
He believes the transgender community is distancing itself from the transabled because of how hard it has worked to get “gender dysphoria” removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)
The transabled, on the other hand, want their condition – known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder – fully added to the DSM-5 instead of being listed in an appendix with the hopes it will legitimize their experience in the field of medicine.
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