Our friendly neighbors to the North have brought to light a new subsection of people, and they’re really–what’s the scientific word … WEIRD! Meet the “transabled” people of Canada who want to mutilate themselves. From wanting to be blind to having one’s genitals removed, “transablity” is defined as “the need for a person identified as able-bodied by other people to transform his or her body to obtain a physical impairment, according to Alexandre Baril, a Quebec academic who is quoted in Canada’s National Post on this bizarre tale:
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.
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Researchers in Canada are trying to better understand how transabled people think and feel. Clive Baldwin, a Canada Research Chair in Narrative Studies who teaches social work at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B., has interviewed 37 people worldwide who identify as transabled.
Most of them are men. About half are in Germany and Switzerland, but he knows of a few in Canada...
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Many people, like One Hand Jason, arrange “accidents” to help achieve the goal. One dropped an incredibly heavy concrete block on his legs — an attempt to injure himself so bad an amputation would be necessary. But doctors saved the leg. He limps, but it’s not the disability he wanted.
The transabled are very secretive and often keep their desires to themselves, Baldwin says. One 78-year-old man told Baldwin he’d lived with the secret for 60 years and never told his wife.
Some of his study participants do draw parallels to the experience many transgender people express of not feeling like they’re in the right body. Baldwin says this disorder is starting to be thought of as a neurological problem with the body’s mapping, rather than a mental illness.
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Can we all agree that arranging accidents to achieve this desire of disability to be highly aberrant to the point of a mental disorder? They obviously know at some level that it is incredibly strange given the 78-year-old's six-decade silence on the matter. I’m sorry, but this is just ridiculous, abnormal, and highly disturbing.
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