In Canada, the National Post recently reported on a case in which our taxpayer funded healthcare system covered the surgical removal of multiple fingers from a man with "body integrity identity disorder" (also know as "transableism") i.e. there was nothing physically wrong with the fingers but he felt like a person with missing fingers. …
In Canada, the National Post recently reported on a case in which our taxpayer funded healthcare system covered the surgical removal of multiple fingers from a man with "body integrity identity disorder" (also know as "transableism") i.e. there was nothing physically wrong with the fingers but he felt like a person with missing fingers. What's next--liposuction for anorexics? There have always been fads and collective delusions, even (perhaps especially!) in medicine. But it seems like the speed and universality of these manias has been accelerated by the internet, and perhaps by a lack of confidence in our moral foundations brought on by what Nietzsche called the "death of God."
In his book _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_, Oliver Sacks mentions a man who, because of a brain lesion, felt that one arm wasn't really part of him and was quite distressed. After it was surgically removed, he felt much better. Such cases exist, and as long as we know how to amputate arms but not how to heal brain lesions, it's only humane to accommodate them. The problem with gender surgery at present is that for ideological reasons, due diligence isn't being applied to make sure that the surgery will actually help and that the dysphoria isn't only temporary. Professionals commanding nice salaries on the basis of certificates hanging on their walls attesting to advanced professional training who don't actually employ that training and instead just rubber-stamp someone's self-diagnosis are committing professional services fraud, regardless of how young or old the patient is.
In Canada, the National Post recently reported on a case in which our taxpayer funded healthcare system covered the surgical removal of multiple fingers from a man with "body integrity identity disorder" (also know as "transableism") i.e. there was nothing physically wrong with the fingers but he felt like a person with missing fingers. What's next--liposuction for anorexics? There have always been fads and collective delusions, even (perhaps especially!) in medicine. But it seems like the speed and universality of these manias has been accelerated by the internet, and perhaps by a lack of confidence in our moral foundations brought on by what Nietzsche called the "death of God."
We wrote about this recently on our Substack: https://pairodocs.substack.com/p/removing-unwanted-appendages
In his book _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_, Oliver Sacks mentions a man who, because of a brain lesion, felt that one arm wasn't really part of him and was quite distressed. After it was surgically removed, he felt much better. Such cases exist, and as long as we know how to amputate arms but not how to heal brain lesions, it's only humane to accommodate them. The problem with gender surgery at present is that for ideological reasons, due diligence isn't being applied to make sure that the surgery will actually help and that the dysphoria isn't only temporary. Professionals commanding nice salaries on the basis of certificates hanging on their walls attesting to advanced professional training who don't actually employ that training and instead just rubber-stamp someone's self-diagnosis are committing professional services fraud, regardless of how young or old the patient is.