Trans . . . ableism?

Your FFS on a Friday night . . .

So I still check the Fox website, even though they stabbed me and about three million other people in the back last Monday . . .

And I found this . . .

The article goes on to explain:

A troubling societal issue called "transableism" is attracting attention these days. 

Transableism is a newer term for BIID, or “Body Integrity Identity Disorder,” in which a person actually "identifies" as handicapped.

I know this sounds like something out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel, right? A parody to “own” the transgender movement, but it’s not. It’s real!

Here’s one case, from the article,

Jørund Viktoria Alme, 53, a senior credit analyst in Oslo, Norway, identifies as disabled and uses a wheelchair, even though she has no physical handicap.

Alme is also transgender, according to Heraldscotland.com. Alme said on the morning TV program "Good Morning Norway" in 2022 that it had been a "lifelong wish" to have been born "a woman paralyzed from the waist down," the same source noted.

And lest we think that Alme is an aberration and Fox News is pulling a chicken little, this is from the website Pink News from 2017, an outlet dedicated to the alphabet crowd:

“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, an academic who will present on ‘transability’ at a Social Sciences and Humanities session at the University of Ottawa.

“The person could want to become deaf, blind, amputee, paraplegic. It’s a really, really strong desire.”

Did you hear that? It’s a really, really strong desire.

Well, I suppose, since they want it really, really badly.

The “Pink News” article does contain this little bit of common sense:

However many trans and disability activists have expressed reluctance to the idea.

Feminist academic Professor Baril, himself trans and disabled, says: “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 fetishising or romanticising disability reality”.

“Steal resources from the community.” Like this jackass?

And that’s what’s going on, or at least partly what’s going on. According to the Fox article,

The point of “changing the identifier’ from a psychiatric condition (BIID) to an advocacy term (transableism) is to “harness the stunning cultural power of gender ideology” to the cause of allowing doctors to “treat” BIID patients by “amputating healthy limbs, snipping spinal cords or destroying eyesight,” according to Evolution News and Science Today (EN), which reports on and analyzes evolution, neuroscience, bioethics, intelligent design and other science-related issues.

If you can’t tell by the focus on “intelligent design,” Evolution News and Science Today is probably not exactly “mainstream,” but JSTOR is!

Philosophers Tim Bayne (Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia) and Neil Levy (University of Oxford, in England, and Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia) make the case that transabled people who seek amputations should be allowed to get them from reputable surgeons. They write:

Given that many patients will go ahead with amputations in any case and risk extensive injury or death in doing so, it might be argued that surgeons should accede to the requests, at least of those patients who they (or a competent authority) judge are likely to take matters into their own hands.

They also cite the issue of autonomy. If people can choose to reject life-saving treatments, the authors ask, why shouldn’t they be allowed to elect a surgery that will leave them disabled? If a person can elect to have plastic surgery, which is often used to make the body conform better to social ideals, why shouldn’t people also be allowed to change it in ways that society is less comfortable with? Lastly, they argue that according to the limited data available, people who seek and achieve their desired amputations feel relief from their suffering, a relief that they are unable to get by other means.

JSTOR gives the idea about as much pushback as Pink News, citing Daniel Patrone, a philosopher at State University of New York Oneonta:

Even if we set aside the interests of family, other patients and those who must bear the financial costs of providing for the patient’s lifelong disability, those who have a disorder that causes them to desire to maim and disable their bodies cannot meet this standard of voluntarily accepting the burden of choice that makes the practice of respecting autonomy acceptable.

I’ll just let an Arizona internist cited in the Fox article sum it up:

“In my opinion, both transgender and transabled persons suffer from a delusional disorder,” Jane Orient, a general internist in Tucson, Arizona, and executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, told Fox News Digital via email.

“The Oath of Hippocrates adjures physicians to do no harm,” Orient said.

“Mutilating the body is an objective harm even if makes the patient subjectively feel better,” she added.

“The disability is lifelong and imposes burdens on others — and neither patients nor physicians can duck responsibility for that.”

Orient also noted, “With transgenders the follow-up is generally very short — not sure about the [follow-up with] elective amputees,” she said. 

"The ‘no other way’ [to cope with the condition] excuse is a cop out; we need to find other ways," she also said. "Denial of reality is anti-scientific."

What the hell has happened to us that we’re even having this discussion?

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Thanks for reading my Friday night rant. If you see any typos (Libertarian?), let me know. I got an edit button and I’m not afraid to use it! And feel free to weigh in and help me rebalance. I’m starting to feel like that old Ron White routine:

All the way to the scene of the crash.