Are We Allowed To Call Transabled People Mentally Disturbed?
Meet the transabled. When it comes to self-butchery, where’s the line between sane and insane?
At The National Post today, there is an absolutely insane piece about a tiny group of people who want to cut off parts of their body or live as disabled people despite being physically fine.
This is not a parody or Clickhole or anything like that. You may have seen this disorder on Nip/Tuck or another TV show and thought it was a made-up thing, but it is not a made up thing. It’s a real thing.
When he cut off his right arm with a “very sharp power tool,” a man who now calls himself One Hand Jason let everyone believe it was an accident. But he had for months tried different means of cutting and crushing the limb that never quite felt like his own, training himself on first aid so he wouldn’t bleed to death, even practicing on animal parts sourced from a butcher.
“My goal was to get the job done with no hope of reconstruction or re-attachment, and I wanted some method that I could actually bring myself to do,” he told the body modification website ModBlog.
People like Jason have been classified as ‘‘transabled’’ — feeling like imposters in their bodies, their arms and legs in full working order.
“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 this week’s Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Ottawa. “The person could want to become deaf, blind, amputee, paraplegic. It’s a really, really strong desire.”
You can read a paper here on it from Baril, who is transgender and disabled but not transabled according to the Post.
Source: Are We Allowed To Call Transabled People Mentally Disturbed?
