Transgender is so yesterday; let's talk about the transabled!



"Chloe Jennings-White adjusting her leg braces at her home on May 16, 2013 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Chloe-Jennings White wears leg braces and uses a wheelchair, even though her legs work fine, and she does not need them."



National Post

"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.

His goal was to become disabled.

People like Jason have been classified as ‘‘transabled’’ — feeling like imposters in their bodies, their arms and legs in full working order.

...

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.

But this has been met with great resistance in both the disability activist community and in transgender circles, argues [researcher Alexandre] Baril, a visiting scholar of feminist, gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut [who also happens to be both disabled and transgender, and Canadian].

“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, adding people in both transgender and disabled circles tend to make judgmental or prejudicial statements about transabled people. “Each try to distance themselves.”"

See also: A New Way to be Mad

"The phenomenon is not as rare as one might think: healthy people deliberately setting out to rid themselves of one or more of their limbs, with or without a surgeon's help. Why do pathologies sometimes arise as if from nowhere? Can the mere description of a condition make it contagious?"