April 8, 2024 - 1:00pm
Sensational news from late last week, that doctors amputated two fingers for a 20-year-old patient to alleviate the young man’s mental distress over being able-bodied, contained a buried clue: “He related his condition to gender dysphoria.”
It’s long been asserted by patients and doctors that the bodily dysphoria experienced by transgender people is very similar to another condition that is treated by cutting off body parts. Until recently, both conditions elicited horror, but today the gender variety is treated as heroic, while the other still evokes revulsion.
The amputee-wannabe condition was formerly known as apotemnophilia but is now called body integrity disorder (BID) or body integrity identity disorder (BIID). This condition is hugely important in our era of trans flags and nonbinary pronouns, not because a 20-year-old will live out the rest of his life with eight fingers but because it suggests another way of looking at “gender affirming care” without ideological sugarcoating.
The parallels between BID and the trans movement go back decades, as explored in 2000 in an astonishingly prescient article in the Atlantic, titled “A New Way To Be Mad”. “Clinicians and patients alike often suggest that apotemnophilia is like gender-identity disorder,” the piece states, “and that amputation is like sex-reassignment surgery.”
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, when transgenderism and apotemnophilia were both exceedingly rare, the Atlantic prophesied that such disorders are ripe for social contagion: “when so many people profess uncertainty about who they really are, is it possible that the desire for this particular identity might spread?”
Now amputeeism is finally catching up. A 2018 ethics analysis in a Cambridge University Press publication concludes that there is “no logical difference between the conceptual status of BIID and transsexualism”. It goes on to say that, “given that individuals with transsexualism are offered gender reassignment surgery it seems to us that individuals with BIID ought at least to be considered for treatment, including elective amputation in some cases.”
This brings us to the 20-year-old patient who turned to medical professionals to alleviate his mental suffering, to validate his identity, and to prevent him from performing self-amputation. “His determination grew to find a method to get rid of those fingers he perceived as intrusive, foreign, unwanted,” his case study states. “Working in a sawmill, he considered building a small guillotine to cut his fingers.”
But what would it mean to accept the amputee identity at scale, the way we have accepted trans rights as a universal humanitarian movement? Drawing exact parallels, we would likely see a total saturation of amputee culture, from amputee story hour to centring amputee voices in DEI training, and doctors warning parents of the very real suicide risks for amputee-identifying children whose parents refuse to accept them as surgically modified cripples or invalids. Advocates would talk of being “assigned able-bodied at birth” to persuade activist teachers and medical associations to adopt the absolutist position that any attempt to talk kids out of amputee surgery amounts to “conversion therapy”.
The journalist Mia Hughes recently asked readers to imagine a society in which amputee advocates enjoyed the same cultural and political victories as trans advocates.
“Imagine there were a sudden 4000% increase in teens identifying as amputees, but we were all forbidden from being concerned. Instead we were supposed to celebrate it,” she posted on X. “Imagine schools teaching children as young as kindergarten that some people have amputee identities, that they get to choose how many limbs they have. Posters promoting body mutilation adorned the walls of many classrooms.”
As Hughes made clear, there will be no end to a radical egalitarianism that reduces the boundaries between health and illness to political power dynamics.
Based on the civil rights paradigm, once accepted as a protected identity, amputee rights would demand equitable representation in all spheres of public life — athletics, employment, arts and literature, K-12 curricula, Hollywood casting and Google search results.
The days of the amputee identity being classified as a “disorder” may well be numbered, and profuse apologies will be forthcoming from psychiatric professionals who ended up on the wrong side of history. And in the era of “amputee-affirming care”, perhaps the public will one day behold the apotemnophilia flag fluttering prominently at the White House.
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SubscribeBrilliant article. I’d give my right arm to read something like this in the mainstream press.
More and more I’m coming across things that I could happily go to my grave not knowing about.
So what? I am far from certain they should have done so on account of anything, and, no matter what the man thought his circumstances did not resemble gender dysphoria in any way.
It is usual and healthy to have a brain dimorphize sexually into a male or female pattern. It happens at a consistent rate that it does so incompletely, and also in a way not congruent to how the sex develops. This is perfectly analogous to visibly intersex conditions.
There is no analogy there to not having fingers.
There’s also the replacement religion aspect to this. In the past, many religions equated bodily disfigurement with spirituality. Indeed even today, disfigured people are sometimes revered as embodying some higher truth. There have even been cases of parents in India disfiguring their children to get money from gullible ‘worshippers’. Surely this isn’t a million miles away from those Internet parents pushing their child’s gender identity and marketing it to the audience as a thing of wonder.
We’ll soon be able to watch a video livestream (à la Jazz Jennings) of the amputations of children’s other bits and pieces for the entertainment of the ever more deranged public. How about a quiz show like ‘Sale of the Century’ where people make bids to be present in the oppo theatre when the sufferer’s BID (geddit?) is sorted out? I’m thinking of Jeffrey Marsh as a compère, or maybe Philip Schofield. Then the bits and bobs could be turned into an avant-garde art installation on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square by Damien Hirst.
I can hardly wait…
I think in India disfigured children are just more effective as beggars, aren’t they? I recall a news story a while back in which an Indian child from a very poor family had hare lip surgery and her mother was furious because the child would no longer earn money for the family.
It’s no different than Jazz’s mother who won’t even let Jazz leave home, because her mutilated son is her gravy train. Jazz weighs almost 250 pounds on a 5’1” frame. He is a mental wreck. But hey! People tune in to see this poor kid fall apart. It’s entertainment!
Has any one been following the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard? It’s a documentary but also an ongoing story in the news.
I also believe that in India eunuchs (not the men who want to ‘become’ women by lopping their genitals off) can have a ‘good luck’ role where mother’s take their babies to be ‘blessed’.
The new mania… right here, and right on cue!
Might as well (as the author suggests) let it peak as quickly as possible, but surely there can be a competitive element to this? How many digits/limbs can one individual have amputated before they end up as a head on a stick, sans eyes, ears and teeth?
Where’s Ivan Illich when you need him?
IT could become even worse. The successfully treated could demand to eat the amputated parts, just as modern placenta eaters currently do. There are few limits to human perfidy.
Perversity?
Mao Sugiyama did something similar around 2012. He cooked his own amputated genitals and sold tickets to the dinner party. Unbelievable.
The horrors of Modernity never cease…
Now I need to go watch that Vigo Mortensen movie ‘Crimes of the Future’. It’d be like skipping ahead a couple chapters.
Modernity is just fine. This is post-modernity, which is not a real thing, it’s just the lies that a certain kind of person like telling.
I said this right at the start of the gender politics nonsense a few years ago, and I recall getting laughed at for suggesting that body dysmorphia (as it was then called) might possess commonalities with gender dysphoria.
I can’t say it’s much fun being right about this, though.
Stop giving them ideas
I see we can add fetishistic amputation to the slippery slope chart just after transgenderism and before ‘minor attracted persons’.
“Slippery slope” is… inexact, though not wrong:
“Now amputeeism is finally catching up. A 2018 ethics analysis in a Cambridge University Press publication concludes that there is ‘no logical difference between the conceptual status of BIID and transsexualism’.” (emphasis added)
“No logical difference.”
That is, it’s perfectly rational, on the ethical account that we have chosen. As the 2000 Atlantic piece entitled it, it’s “a new way to be mad.” Insane. Psychotic.
But only if you think that we have a purpose outside ourselves, and must ultimately give account for our response to said purpose.
I’d like to know more about this phenomenon but I find it hard to believe it would ever become a big thing.
A few years ago I watched a film about this fetish called Crash, where some people are sexually aroused by amputated limbs, or car crash wounds. I was horrified and dismissed it as fantasy. Today, breast or genital removal surgeries (I refuse to use their euphemisms) are performed regularly by doctors. Are they real doctors? Have they not taken the oath of first do no harm? Or have they been brainwashed or coerced by the collective trans mania / inclusion madness?
Unbearably terrifying and distressing that care and sense are in such short supply in so many ways and different contexts.
Amputeeism, like transgenderism (which is often transvestism is disguise), seems to be a mostly male phenomenon. Why?
Testosterone.
Statistics on this? I watched a program (can’t remember details) with a woman who had chosen to be blind!
One big difference between apotemnophilia and transgenderism is that in the case of the former the procedure does actually achieve its stated aim.
Cut your arm off and you will in fact be a person with only one arm.
Cutting your p***s off just makes you a man without a p***s.
It’s like some horrifying parody by Jonathan Swift – but real. We are truly, truly on the precipice of disaster, if we aren’t already over the edge.
https://pairodocs.substack.com/p/removing-unwanted-appendages
There is a straight line that starts in the Renaissance, runs through Neitzsche, the death of churches, post-modernism, and logically has lead us to solipsism and self-definition. When people have “lived experience” and “my truth”, who are we to say they are not an amputee or hermaphrodite “born in the wrong body”? Who are we to say that they shouldn’t be euthanized for their sore knees, headaches, or depression?
In a post-modern medical system, “The Customer is Always Right”.
Doctors and researches ‘go along with this’ because they see us as machines because they are used to using a medicine, based on machine-thinking (a pill for an ill). If the medical community would finally wake up and start accepting that we are very complex non-linear beings and accept therefore that medical approaches better suited to this complexity would gain their interest, we shall make progress, otherwise we shall keep trampling water and stories like these will remain the news….
Reading this I started to feel physically sick. Just realised it was actually a feeling of fear, terror, horror. Disgust, repulsion… Are there words for such a sickness in thinking? It reminds me of the Frankenstein’s monster films.
There is a hilarious scene in Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman?” wherein the interviewer asks a surgeon (male, but transed) if there might possibly be a connection between these two disorders. Highly recommended.