NGC’s Taboo is doing an episode on transablism.
In the promo for their new season, there’s a lady who is having surgery to become paraplegic, saying it will make her “feel like a complete person.”
From the NGC site:
Photo 1: Chloe Jennings-White leads a double life. A Ph.D chemist in Salt Lake City, Utah, Chloe lives as a paraplegic in a wheelchair. For the most part, people believe that Chloe is unable to walk, but she has a shocking secret. Chloe isn’t paraplegic at all.
Photo 2: Chloe Jennings-White stands beside her wheelchair. She is not a paraplegic, but chooses to live as one.
I love Taboo. It’s probably one of the smartest shows on the NGC. But this fucking blows. This is stupid Liberal moral relativism “all opinions are equally valid” at it’s most venal.
I mean, I could be wrong. Maybe they’ll do a really smart job of explaining why this shit is, and should be, taboo.
But I don’t have high hopes.
do you remember that episode of glee
where tina tells artie she doesnt really stutter
and artie says,
at the end of the day you can stop stuttering but i’ll be in this chair forever
fuck transabled ppl 4 real
cos even if they have BIID, there is no obligation for me to entertain what is quite literally psychosis as a legitimate set of social signifiers. like if she has BIID i get why she does this but that doesnt mean i have to support claims to marginalization.
If BIID is real (I have no knowledge about the subject), I don’t understand how it would be different in this case from GID. I see no difference between you saying “there is no obligation for me to entertain what is quite literally psychosis as a legitimate set of social signifiers [sic]” when referring to BIID and GID.
gender is a social construct. legs are not.
Seriously, trying to justify the CHOICE of the transabled by pointing to the issue of sex and gender, which is a valid disparity due to biological variation and social adaptation, just ironically stinks of internalized cissexism.
Two things you mention here strike me: the first is the assumption that body dysphoria is more of a choice than gender dysphoria, without any defense of that assumption. The second is that biological variation and social adaptation applied to gender, but not to ability- this is simply factually false. The biological variation in ability is every bit as robust as it is in gender, and society drastically alters how people with disabilities are viewed and treated.
I’m just going to throw my opinion in. Being transgendered and transabled are similar in that both derive from a different view of the self than the body in which the person exists. The difference is that a transabled person may (as is the case mentioned) strive to do something that removes functionality and is not necessarily in the overall best interest of the person. For that reason alone I believe it should be handled with therapy as much as possible (although, to be fair, there is no evidence provided that the person above did not seek therapy). What confuses me more than anything, though, is the amount of hatred and negativity on this post. Maybe it’s just me, but you’d think those who are for transgender rights would be more sympathetic to someone experiencing a similar lack of contentment in their physical self and would want to see them helped as best as possible as opposed to bashing a mental plight that must already be hard enough to deal with. Yes, it may be a choice to opt to go through with surgery to intentionally disable one’s self as opposed to living with a broken body image, but is it not also a choice to go through gender reassignment surgery or to undergo hormone therapy? I don’t mean to make any of this seem like it isn’t as large as it is to an individual, and I have absolutely zero animosity towards anyone based solely on their differences from myself, but I think we all need to understand that everyone is different and we can’t purely know what goes on in anyone’s head but our own. Live and let live, hope the best for those who are troubled, and strive to understand the plights of others as best as possible.
