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Would all the posts about research actually amount to anything?
Written by Sophie on Sunday, October 15, 2006
I’m sorry most of my posts lately haven’t exactly gone in a transabled direction. To be honest lately my thoughts have been rather simple. I’m transabled. I need to be a para. Life is hard, end of story. I guess I’m doing the "ignoring it by filling my life with other things" trick again. The difference is that it’s a part of my life that I embrace. It isn’t necessarily a more important part, as other have pointed out I still need to be able to live my life.
It can be challenging coming up with "thoughts" for this site. I don’t really like to waste time stating the obvious and then bashing people over the head with it over and over until they say I’m obsessed… Honest. I’ve actually been keeping busy on the net with another website project. It’s yet another area of my life that used to be very black and white but is starting to grey. Of course I’d still like to think I’m a light grey.
There have been a lot of people doing documentaries, articles and studies lately. You’ll find at least two on every yahoo group you go to. And then there are the arguments should we really be letting BIID have this much exposure? The people in the wheelchair pretenders 2 group have come to the consensus that:
"The more press coverage, the worse off it will make the entire disability community and us. I really think that keeping pretending and BIID quiet is the best thing. The more exposure, the more people will begin trying to sort us out. Advocate for asexuality now, which we want people to know about. But people knowing about BIID and pretending, will cause us waaay more problems."
The press at our doors
I personally think that although the majority of people see this as a freak thing and it would create a lot of problems, at the same time most medical professionals see this as a rare thing and there are only amputee wannabes (which we all know isn’t true) and so the more exposure this gets the more people will have to take notice of us. Just today in The BIID Affair a new group of scientists came along talking about BIID as if it only occurs with amputee wannabes. Ultimately the good points would outweigh the bad ones. The transsexuals had to go through a lot of hell and social stigmatism to get where they are now; we are only at the beginning of that journey. We can’t expect surgery to be handed to us on a silver platter without a bit of a struggle on our behalf.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the day that surgeons allow BIID sufferers to have elective surgery. I wrote it down as a story on my website. I’m not sure if I will add to it, it was kind of a spur of the moment thing, but wouldn’t it be great if that day actually came?
[tags]Research, BIID, Transabled, Surgery, Wannabes, Transexuals, Scientists, Exposure[/tags]This entry appears in Other's Thoughts, Sophie's Thoughts, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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2 Comments
2 On 16 October, 2006, Sean said:
I agree, to some degree, that we shouldn’t “jump” on people after their first post, about having a narrow focus of only one impairment.
But I understand the frustration that derives from having scientist after researcher after reporter come to us and say they want to study amputee wannabes. Frustration also coming from the fact that many amputee wannabes seem to reject the idea that transabled individuals who don’t want to be amputees are not suffering from BIID.
So, perhaps it’s a question of being forcefull without “jumping” on people. I don’t know.
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1 On 16 October, 2006, Claire said:
It’s a good thing that the right people are becoming interested, even if they’re not getting it quite right. I think it’s our job to encourage them to continue and politely educate them. They’re new to this, but they’ve shown the open mindedness enough to want to get involved. If we jump all over them for not completely understanding on their first post, well we’re not helping ourselves much. The more they’re interested in us, the more we help them, the more they will learn, and the more they can help us ALL in the long run.
You and I may be dead of old age before something ever comes of this, but just like everything else worth fighting for, we have to take a broader view and help pave the way for future generations.
Of course I’d rather they resolved it all while I’m still young enough to enjoy it!