Home / Thoughts / Bias against other transabled people
Bias against other transabled people
Written by Sean on Wednesday, July 25, 2007
I recently received an email from someone who has Body Integrity Identity Disorder, and needs to be an amputee. He commented that he thought transabled.org is a biased against amputee wannabes. I was somewhat surprised by this perception, even though there is a majority of paraplegic wannabes active on the site.
My correspondant wrote:
Your site seems a bit biased Re: amputees, or am I reading it wrong? AID (amputee identity disorder) is , so far, the predominant form of biid. It is unfortunantly true that paraplegia rides into recognition on its coatails. We should all pull together. We have enough other obstacles.
I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment that we should all pull together. In fact, I’ve been advocating that very idea for the last 12 years. Unfortunately, the elitism seems to have come from the amputee wannabe community. I wrote something about it earlier this year, which you may find of interest if you haven’t seen it yet.
While there is indeed a large percentage of participants on the site who need to be paraplegic, transabled.org works very hard to include all "flavours" of needed impairments.
Look at the image of the group of people at the top. There are two wheelchair users. There are also two amputees (an arm amputee and a leg amputee on crutches). There is one person using a guide dog. And the lone figure sitting on the left of the screen represents mental health.
If you read through the content of the site, you’ll also see that whenever we discuss needed impairment (other than our own), we make sure to use inclusive language, talking about "paraplegia, amputation, blindness, deafness, or other required impairment", or some such.
There are a few authors on the site who need to be amputees, and a few more commenters who also need to be amputees. We also have an author who needs to be deaf, and another who needs to be blind.
The under-representation of amputee wannabes on the site is not by design, and we welcome people who need to be amputee as authors on the site. Obviously, being transabled/having BIID is not the only criteria to be an author on the site, but if you are interested in writing on transabled.org, do let me know.
As for AID, I never thought it was a subordinate label to BIID. I was under the impression that AID had been proposed as an alternative to apotemnophilia, but that BIID had replaced AID as a more accurate and representative label (it’s also a more inclusive label, FWIW).
This entry appears in Sean's Thoughts, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You may have your say, or trackback from your own site.
12 Comments
2 On 25 July, 2007, Sean said:
Naah Sophie, I think the person in question is actually “with it”, and wasn’t using the term AID in a discriminatory manner :)
The site’s user base definitely seems to be paraplegia biased and I’m sure that taints the discussions, but I’ve always felt that TA.org was much more inclusive than any other place I’ve visited on the subject.
4 On 26 July, 2007, Marie said:
Yes it is quite heavily biased towards parapalegia. But I don’t worry! ;-)
5 On 26 July, 2007, Sean said:
There is no *bias* towards paraplegia on transabled.org. A bias implies *intent*.
Answers.com defines bias:
* A preference or an inclination, especially one that inhibits impartial judgment.
*An unfair act or policy stemming from prejudice.
*A statistical sampling or testing error caused by systematically favoring some outcomes over others.
While it so happens that a majority of people participating on the site, there is no BIAS.
In this context, a bias implies discrimation, and we’re most definitely not discriminating against any flavour of BIID
6 On 26 July, 2007, Marie said:
Ok I misspoke (missigned?): meant a large number of those desiring paralysis.
As for the perception of bias against those with amputee-identities, I suspect that may come from the articles critical of amputee-identifying people, suggesting that we are elitist or exclusionary. Whether or not it is true that that describes the majority of those who identify as amputee, it can be fairly off-putting for those who do identify as amputee.
No, there is no bias here, at least what I detect. The main contributors seem to be para wannabes. Just the luck of the draw.
9 On 26 July, 2007, Sophie said:
The main contributors are mainly para peps yes, but then that is partly because many of us have had Sean reach out to us and help us make sense of a lot of the mess. lol I’m not even sure how exactly I started writing here, it just happened. I do it more to help myself make sense of things than anything else, it’s often easier to think things through if one is writing their thoughts down. If other people happen to benefit from what I say then good :)
10 On 26 July, 2007, Sean said:
I’ll stress this point again:
We welcome any transabled individual, regardless or required impairment, who wishes to blog on transabled.org
I won’t give free authorship access to everyone, people must have something to say, be able to put a couple sentences together and make sense. But if you are interested, contact me, we’ll discuss you joining.
One might note that the outlined figures on the top of the page include 2 amputees and a blind person as well as the 2 in the chairs, and of course the seemingly frustrated person sitting apart from the disabled group. One might guess that the person sitting apart is either Sean or representative of all of us transabled who are forever frustrated at not becoming what we feel we need to become.
In my view we all need to deal with this together and Sean has never turned away the non-paraplegic BIID. Also, as far as I am concerned, the more diverse and larger our group is the harder it will be to pigeon-hole us in obscure categories (e.g. apotemnophilia). Will that lead to anyone offering to sever my spinal cord? Doubtful, but one can hope…
I’m with Sophie, until Sean got busy there really was no place for us para BIID’s to go with full understanding and acceptance, that’s the only reason there’s mostly para people here but there’s no essential reason why that should be so forever.
Post your comments
© transabled.org - 1994-2008 - All Rights Reserved.
1 On 25 July, 2007, Sophie said:
I personally think using a term like AID in an email complaining about bein biased is the very essence of being biased.