This week, the most trending topic on social media is the transformation of Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn Jenner. For society at large, this event is forcing people to grapple with questions about how to react personally and socially to the issues that arise when a person lives with us and wants to participate in community who has chosen to change their gender. For many people, this is a very difficult and emotionally uncomfortable topic. I admit that I am one of those people. I make very difficult attempts to wrestle with my thoughts and feelings about what I perceive the impact of changing one’s gender to be on the community in which one lives.
I choose to keep my swirling thoughts about gender and identity within myself at this time. They are not formed enough that I feel it is appropriate for me to engage adequately in discussion about them in a public discourse. However, it is fair to society that I admit that I am not perfectly equipped to be as tolerant as I would like to be.
Today, I learned about a related thing that disturbs me greatly; and I do feel qualified to discuss it.
There is apparently such a thing as transableism. It means precisely what it sounds like it means: a person intentionally becomes disabled. When I first read an article about this, I was revolted, if that can even be classified as a word. The article described in graphic detail the process that the person went through in order to decapitate himself and make it seem as though he had had an accident, and do it in a manner so as to prevent cure.
The concept of people attempting to live as disabled when they are not is not new to me. I have been a participant in a cross-disability group for a number of years; and we have discussed the topic of people who have fetishes pretending to live as though they are disabled. But this is the first time I have heard of a person intentionally injuring the body in order to become disabled. I cannot fathom why a person would do such a thing. Does it occur to them what they are taking on?
I often say that I don’t feel negatively about my life. This is true. But I would not intentionally choose life with a disability.
I share the following not in order to gain pity but as an example of what life with disability is like. I spent my day today attempting to advocate for better accessibility on a web site that provides skills testing for freelancing job sites. Freelancers take the tests, gain immediate scoring feedback, and can post the scores on their profiles. A good score will help clients to have confidence that a freelancer possesses the skills claimed in a job bid.
My advocacy was not successful. The company representative claimed that there was little funding for making things accessible. Ironically, he ended his correspondence by telling me that accessibility was a high priority for the company. This kind of doubletalk is often the way that advocacy attempts go for people with disabilities. It leaves us feeling that we are not really valued members of society.
Is this what people have in mind when they want to become disabled? Or do they have some romantic notion that they will be more sexy and be able to play some particular role in their relationships? I don’t know about the latter, but the former seems apparent when I read from The Transablism Phenomenon:
The website biid-info.org makes a distinction (presumably articulated by O’Connor himself) between an ‘impairment’ and a ‘disability’:
“Many people who have BIID say they want to be disabled. Many other say they don’t want to be disabled,’ they ‘just’ want to be amputees. We argue that the two are not necessarily contradictory. Anecdotal evidence shows that a majority of transabled individuals do want an impairment, but do not wish to have a ‘disability.’ that is, they want to be amputees, paraplegic, etc. but they do not want the perceived loss of independence, nor the disabling experience.”
The lived experience of disability is an experience that includes the perception of the body and people’s reactions to it, the experience of discrimination based on those reactions, and the frustration and intense emotions associated with being unable to do things and unwanted socially. It bothers me deeply that people find disability sexy, or fascinating, or anything else worth romanticizing enough to want to disfigure themselves and lie about how it happened. I have a disability that people fear more than they fear physical death. Are we soon going to hear about people exploding things into their eyes, giving themselves chemical burns, so that they can experience blindness/ Somehow I doubt it, because blindness will remain the scourge of death.
Ethically, there are serious implications from this kind of practice. Resources that people with disabilities need are already severely limited. Did you know that people with severe disabilities who need nursing care in their homes cannot get enough hours, and their families end up performing duties that should be performed by a licensed nurse? Did you know that specialized housing for people with severe disabilities who need supervision has been dut, and these people are often noww living on the streets? Did you know that the unemployment rate among some groups of people with disabilities is as high as 80 percent? Did you know that even with new health care programs, people with disabilities still have the most difficult time accessing insurance programs?
When a person intentionally disables him/herself, that is one more person accessing badly needed resources that other people need. Kevin and I discussed this over dinner and debated the question of whether the person should be denied services if it can be proved that the disability was created intentionally. The fact is that whatever the cause, that person is now disabled and still needs the services. There is no going back. What that person has done to their body affects a whole community of people.
I cannot, for any reason, support a model of disability that is based solely on identity. In promoting such a model, the field of disability studies has unwittingly put itself in a dangerous situation.
Let us not make disability into the latest cool thing to put on. Instead, please, let us work toward a society that actually enables everyone to participate and live together!
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