EN
FR
STEVEN TUCKER,
Last week on the Daily Sceptic, I wrote about the attempts of Government and campaigners to effectively make being female into a form of officially recognised disability as regards the menopause. Yet, as such a move would apply to only half the population, would it not be potentially discriminatory in nature? Why should only women be able to claim they’re disabled when they’re not? Can’t transgender males get in on the act too? And if not, why not?
An equally valid path towards a potential life on disability benefits would be simply to begin self-identifying as being disabled in a general sense, even though in actual fact you are completely able-bodied. Once, such ideas were considered fit only for poor-taste comedy-skits like those of Lou and Andy on Little Britain. Now, there is a whole social movement devoted to the idea out there. It is called ‘transableism’, and it makes mere transgenderism sound positively sane by comparison.
No Legs Good, Two Legs Bad
There has always been the occasional individual who has posed falsely as being disabled: to wrongly claim disability benefits, to avoid military service, to elicit undeserved sympathy or charity from others, or even to gain easy sporting success, as with the completely healthy Spanish basketball team who fraudulently (but quite amusingly) won gold at the 2000 Paralympics.
Transableists are fundamentally different. Not simply out for personal gain, they really seem to believe what they are saying. An excellent example would be Jørund Viktoria Alme, a 53-year-old able-bodied male senior credit analyst from Oslo, who self-IDs as a disabled woman confined to a wheelchair. Whilst still a five-year-old schoolboy, Alme saw a classmate using a splint and crutches, causing him to feel intense jealousy: “As I understand it in retrospect… it was I who should have been there.”
As waves of trans-mania swept the West during the late 2010s, the demonstrably male, demonstrably able-bodied, Alme suddenly came to understand his ‘true’ identity – not only as a woman, but as a woman who had been born paralysed from the waist down. So, he bought a wheelchair and a wig and went around acting like one. And then, in 2022, he appeared on Good Morning Norway to brag about his situation, arguing he wasn’t really doing anything wrong because – his genuine example – he never made use of a Disabled Parking space.
A Farewell to Arms (and Legs)
The technical clinical label for transableism is Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), a term coined in 2005. But the apparent goal of more recently relabelling BIID as transableism is to link it directly back to the wider phenomenon of transgenderism, thus to lend the condition spurious but fashionable social acceptability by association. After all, if someone with a penis can now be a woman, why can’t someone with fully working eyes be blind too?
There are now actual academics – or people who self-identify as such – who make these arguments. Clive Baldwin is a Canada Research Chair in Narrative Studies at St. Thomas University in Newfoundland: the fact he teaches a specious Critical Theory sub-discipline specifically called ‘Narrative Studies’ indicates how, for many such people, the very ideas of being ‘disabled’ or ‘able-bodied’ in the first place are simply fake, time-honoured social stories, not objective physical facts at all.
Baldwin has interviewed transableists from across the world, finding many who take matters into their own hands and arrange handy ‘accidents’ to cripple themselves for real. One man dropped a heavy concrete block onto his leg, hoping it would necessitate amputation. Tragically, unsympathetic doctors cruelly saved his leg in the operating theatre: “He limps, but it’s not the disability he wanted.” Another such individual, known only as ‘One Hand Jason’, deliberately lopped off his right arm with a “very sharp power-tool”, like in Evil Dead 2, but only after responsibly practising on “animal parts sourced from a butcher” first.
The most horrific such self-mutilator is Jewel Shuping, who arranged a sympathetic psychologist to pour drain-cleaner into her eyes back in 2006 in order to finally become blind, something she had dreamed of ever since a little girl. As a four-year-old, Jewel’s mother continually wandered her home in the pitch-dark at night, and soon progressed on to deliberately staring at the sun after being told it would destroy her eyes. Once into her teens, Jewel started wearing dark glasses like Roy Orbison, using a white stick, and learned braille, a process she dubbed “blind-simming”.
In 2006, the drain-cleaner did the trick, Jewel’s left eye becoming so damaged it had to be removed entirely after collapsing in on itself like a rotten oyster, whilst the other became an unusable mess of glaucoma, scars, webbing and cataracts. Although her family disowned her as a freak, Jewel herself just felt misunderstood: “I really feel this is the way I was supposed to be born, that I should have been blind from birth.” Just as we have long had women born trapped inside men’s bodies, so we now too have blind women born trapped inside sighted women’s bodies.
Total Wannabes
Those who aspire to become physically disabled by their own efforts are, within the realms of their own little deviant subculture, called ‘wannabes’. Slightly less devoted are the ‘pretenders’, who simply method-act as being disabled, like Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, but slightly less Oscar-worthy.
Such 24/7 thespians, interviewed semi-anonymously by the press down recent years, would include persons like ‘Elisabeth’, “a U.S. resident with two healthy legs but… the body-image of a double above-knee amputee” who goes to parks, supermarkets and even church in a wholly unnecessary wheelchair, but would not be willing to deliberately tie her legs down on a railway-line and await the inevitable for real. However, “If it [a leg-severing accident] happened to me, it would be great to end up as a double-knee amputee… [But] I wouldn’t want to be paraplegic. My image is definitely in the amputee category.”
It would be heart-breaking indeed for such a ‘wannabe’ to actually be involved in a serious accident, and yet crawl away with the wrong disability altogether – imagine going blind when what you really want is to be deaf! This actually happened to ‘Anthony’, inaccurately described as “a pretty average uni student”. Yes, “pretty average” apart from the fact that, “in the back of his mind, almost constantly, a part of him longs to be a high level quadriplegic… [with] a lack of corporeal control and mobility, incontinence and even the need for a ventilator to assist with respiration”.
Imagine Anthony’s displeasure, then, at subsequently being involved in a serious accident – but not nearly serious enough! – which ‘only’ left him confined to a wheelchair with severely limited use of his legs. Not only did the accident disappointingly fail to render him completely immobile with an inability to prevent himself from shitting and pissing himself for nursey on a daily basis, he always preferred to “see myself [becoming quadriplegic] not [by] getting injured, but more… as a result of some condition such as ALS or transverse myelitis”. When interviewed, Anthony was a trainee medical student. Did his first patient end up being himself?
The sacred lived experiences of people like Elisabeth and Anthony, their Narrative Studies-style academic defenders have sympathetically suggested, are (as Canadian newspaper the National Post reported such sentiments a few years back), “just another form of body diversity – like transgenderism”. As if to ram this interpretation home to readers, the Post illustrated its piece with a large photo of what appears to be an unconvincing transvestite in a wheelchair with his legs placed in callipers. This, it would seem, is the next aspirational avatar that ‘diversity’ is slated to take within our increasingly sick society: Stephen Hawking with moobs and some bright red lipstick smeared across his gob.
Doctor’s Disorders
In some more reasonable clinical interpretations, BIID – not ‘transableism’ here, do please note – may actually have some genuine underlying neurological basis. In very rare cases, some doctors and researchers guess, the internal ‘map’ of our body we all carry around with us inside an area of our brains called the right superior parietal lobule, can become distorted, removing the cerebral ‘representation’ of one or more limbs from our grey-matter. When this occurs, our internal body-map, and our actual external physical body, do not match, making the limbs in question appear alien to sufferers. Hence, statements from BIID-sufferers like the following: “I can feel exactly the line where my leg should end and my stump should begin. Sometimes this line hurts or feels numb” or “I feel myself complete without my left leg… I’m over-complete with it.”
In this way, certain forms of BIID may be considered the reverse-equivalent of ‘phantom limb syndrome’, a genuine condition in which amputees, due to their way their internal brain body-map still contains a relic representation of the old, but now-missing, limb, continue to feel genuine pain in their amputated legs and suchlike, even though they no longer have them. The difference with sane doctors who think about such conditions in this way, however, is that they consider them purely as regrettable brain disorders, not wonderful examples of diversity in action which should be embraced and celebrated by all.
Contrariwise, philosophers Tim Bayne and Neil Levy – the latter of Oxford University, sad to say – argue in their 2005 paper ‘Amputees By Choice’ that transabled people who desire amputations should be able to seek them from “reputable surgeons” on freedom of choice grounds (in 2000, Scottish surgeon Dr. Robert Smith caused controversy by actually doing so). If people can have plastic surgery to make their external body conform to their inner idealised image of themselves, by having larger breasts implanted, or getting their penis snipped off and replaced with a pseudo-vagina, then why not allow those who self-ID as Abu Hamza get their hands sawn off and replaced with miniature coat-hangers?
Moral Paralysis
Canada seems to be the current hub of pseudo-academic transableist activism. Such folk’s most persistent champion is perhaps Alexandre Baril, a transgenderist herself. Who she? According to Baril’s own proud online academic blurb:
Alexandre Baril (PhD, Feminist and Gender Studies) is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Ottawa. [Her] work, carried out from an intersectional perspective, is situated at the crossroads of gender, queer, trans, disability/crip/Mad studies, critical gerontology and critical suicidology.
“Critical suicidology”? That’s a new one. Baril hasn’t successfully managed to kill herself yet, but appears to be doing her best to push the West as a whole into throwing itself over the civilisational cliff nonetheless, as can be seen from his many exceedingly niche papers – shamefully published by major academic presses like Routledge – such as 2015’s ‘How Dare You Pretend to be Disabled?: The Discounting of Transabled People and their Claims in Disability Movements and Studies’.
Baril uses her paper to help dispel “negative discourses” around such highly discriminated-against persons by “helping to expand the category of ‘disabled people’ [note the inverted commas] and make it more inclusive” – i.e., by including non-disabled people in that category too. But there is a problem. Baril censoriously notes that many truly disabled people strongly disapprove of their transabled peers as being parasites or perverts, competing for scarce welfare state resources.
Baril views this simply as disabled people, brainwashed into false-consciousness by evil capitalism, “conform[ing] to neoliberal concerns for cost and productivity”. Instead, it would be far more desirable, from a Far Left perspective, for the disabled and transabled to come together as one and “fight against political and economic austerity” of the penny-pinching kind which wickedly seeks to limit disability benefits only to the genuinely physically disabled.
To this end, Baril pushes a new conceptual category, the ‘cisdisabled’, i.e., people ‘privileged’ enough to have been born already blind, for example, rather than needing to seek out some drain-cleaner to become artificially so. One brainwashed capitalist cisdisabled bigot is quoted complaining as follows:
Do you know how hard it is for many of us [genuinely disabled people] to get state benefits? I do not think it is fair to a person born with a disability to be denied a wheelchair while someone with BIID is able to have the state purchase a chair for him or her.
How sickeningly selfish. Such uncaring cisdisabled scum possess an unjustifiable “sense of entitlement to define disability”, Baril argues. In 1996, it turns out the Amputee Coalition of America proposed a rule to exclude people who were not actually amputees from attending its meetings. Most persons may think this restriction quite reasonable, but of course these days we have men in dresses being allowed to attend women’s refuges or rape-therapy sessions, so why not non-amputees attending amputee support-groups too?
Crippled Logic
Any arguments to the contrary are histrionically decreed to be a form of “violence”. You may not have previously considered bed-ridden quadriplegics to be terribly capable of acts of “violence”, but for many a 2020s Leftist, conceptual violence is today considered far worse than its mere physical counterpart, in terms of its wider systemic effects upon society as a whole.
In the words of one activist Baril cites, it would be far better for everyone to quickly cave in and admit that “you are disabled if you say you are”. Just as the gender-binary between men and women must henceforth be dismantled, so too must the corresponding “disability essentialism” binary of hierarchies between the disabled and the non-disabled. We can no longer afford to think of “good disabled people”, disabled from birth or via accident, and “bad disabled people”, who just pretend to be so, or else go around lopping their feet off with lawnmowers in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
One excellent way to facilitate this utopian social transformation would be to officially decree that, as most people might initially presume, the transabled are profoundly mentally ill. If so, then mental illness is generally accepted as being a form of disability in itself, is it not? Therefore, argues Baril, mentally ill people claiming they have no limbs when they clearly do, because you can see them, is just yet further proof that they really are disabled after all… or something.
The “involuntary/voluntary disability binary is rooted in a simplified conception of ‘volition’”, Baril explains, i.e., these loonies just can’t help themselves. Maybe, being loonies, they really can’t help themselves – but surely that doesn’t mean they should be actively encouraged to engage in such delusions, does it? Ah, but then, we are forgetting: Professor Baril is a transgenderist, and encouraging such demonstrably mentally unwell persons in their delusions is the whole basis of transgender ideology in the first place.
When we allow identitarian lunatics to take over the asylum, this is what happens – pure madness is arbitrarily redefined as being pure sanity, and our entire civilisation becomes truly crippled to the point of absolute infirmity.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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