Surprisingly, “transability” does not refer to one’s ability to provide oneself with transportation. It’s a much sadder and much more depressing indictment of our society as a whole.
OTTAWA — 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.
To be “transabled” means that you don’t feel like your body is your own. There’s an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where a guy comes in and is convinced his foot isn’t his, so, later in the episode, he takes a chainsaw (because no one thought to remove it from the bedside of the guy who came in with a chainsaw-related injury) and cuts off his foot. It’s insane to watch, but even more insane to consider it’s totally a thing we’re seeing happen in society.
At times, it’s really hard to look at some of these trans-diagnoses on the Internet and not think “…Okay, really?” because it’s entirely possible that these people who pop up and say “My spleen is not mine!” are just attention-seeking crazy people. They don’t need news articles written about them. They need psychiatric care, and they need for an overly sensitive media to stop coddling them and say “It’s okay,” because it’s not. You are enabling people with real issues and doing them a huge disservice by letting this become “normal.”
I normally try to be sensitive when it comes to trans issues, but transability is taking things way too far. We need to take a step back and figure out where the line is, because otherwise the inmates are going to be running a lot more than the asylum.
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