Blog > Thoughts > Sean's Thoughts > Looking Normal And Accepting BIID
Looking Normal And Accepting BIID
Written by Sean on Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Body Integrity Identity Disorder is a rare and rather weird condition. Those of us with BIID want need an impairment. We need to be paralysed, or amputees, or blind, or deaf. Even by the most open-minded criteria, it’s bizarre. And when we think of transabled people, it’s easy to start thinking of people who look as bizarre as the condition we have.
It’s like we expect transabled folks to have a third arm growing out of the forehead, or have eight eyeballs, like a spider, or *something*. Even myself, I’m guilty of it. It’s like I sometimes expect that if we have BIID, we have a big mark that stains us in some visible way. But we don’t.
There is nothing visible to mark us apart.
We look, in fact, quite normal.
Nobody can tell, just by looking at us, that we have BIID.
Over the years I’ve had opportunity to meet a few other transabled people. Some guys, some gals. Some were tall, some where short. Some were thin, other weren’t. Some had long hair, some had short hair. Some dressed like hippies, some dressed like business people. I was recently given to learn the identity of one of the readers of this site (no, I won’t disclose your identity), and it really struck me just how normal she looks. You could be sitting beside her in the bus and the only thing likely to come to mind is "she’s good looking", not "she’s got some weird shit going on in her head!".
So, why is it that so many of us can’t accept ourselves the way we are?
Tags: BIID, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, Normal, Transabled
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6 Comments
We don’t accept ourselves the way we are because we are caught between our need to be disabled and our inability to become so, IMHO.
Why do we have a problem with this? Because it is not normal. Forget about a clinical definition of normal.
People do not openly discuss this at the water cooler, because most people do not have this. We are social creatures, like it or not. I think we are all hardwired right from the gitgo to socialize and interact with others. We learn from experience that we are not normal, and we also learn to be accepted in one social group or another, good or bad, that we must conform or at least hide our non conformity in order to appear normal and be accepted.
People are not normal. For me, one of the great joys of being social is the one on one interaction. If you start revealing who you really are and make yourself vulnerable, the other person is made to feel safe and will do likewise. Everybody has stuff going on. They are alcoholic, or they are gay, or they have been raped, or they have attempted suicide, or they have assorted psychological disorders, or they have physical impairments, or they feel unloved. Such is the normal state of being. Some people are better than others at pretending otherwise.
I like to talk about BIID at the intersex support group. It feels good to get things off my chest. People understand the parallels too. They understand that they are not the only group of people who find it hard to tell others who they really are, who frequently think of suicide, who think that nobody could ever really accept them in a relationship, who hide their real selves from public view, who have had this thing going on since early childhood, who feel different, who feel ashamed of who they are.
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1 On 10 February, 2009, Chloe said:
We had a friend over today. He’s only known me in leg braces or wheelchair. I have done countless transfers in front of him by now. We were watching a movie at home. One of the characters was paralysed and in a wheelchair. Afterwards our friend asked me if I thought the actor had done a good job portraying someone who is paralysed, especially in transfer scenes. I said yes. Then he commented that it must be difficult for someone who is not paralysed to act as if they were paralysed. I had a very brief moment of paranoia, and then I said “Hmm, interesting point; I suppose it might be”. No, nobody ever knows that you have BIID unless you tell them so.