Delegitimizing Trans Part 2: Limb Amputation

…and I confess that I was so offended by the idea that someone would want to have a healthy limb amputated that my reaction was, “well these people are crazy. And the only reason to bring them up is to leverage that craziness with the superficial resemblance to SRS to delegitimize us.”

In other words, it wasn’t a very pretty reaction. But it does show how much these arguments about SRS are basically political forays, intended to undermine rather than illuminate or (heaven forbid!) ameliorate transgender issues.

There is now a growing body of research, not to mention a lovely article in (where else?) the New York Times, explaining a sound neurological basis for BIID.

Delegitimizing Trans Part 1: Limb Amputation

For some time now, since the rise in medical recognition of Bodily Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), it has been fashionable in some quarters to compare it to transsexuality. BIID patients, you see, want to have perfectly healthy limbs surgically removed. While transsexuals want to have perfectly healthy… well, you get the drift.

This is not, as such arguments are, advanced in any way to help transgender people. Its sole purpose is to delegitimate – and discourage – Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS). This is motivated by the antique and charmingly naïve conviction that SRS is not already sufficiently discouraged, at a time when firing transpeople upon transition is not only common but perfectly legal in almost every state, and when more than 70 transgender young people 30 and under have been murdered in just the last dozen years or so.

Linguistic Holes

According to classic liberal theory by way of Rousseau, the Social Contract is an implicit agreement that each of us accepts by becoming members of society: we accept the rule of law and certain social responsibilities, and in exchange we get companionship, safety in numbers, access to food and all the other benefits group membership can offer.

For Monique Wittig, with a good postmodernist’s focus on meaning and power, the first social contract is language. By becoming a member of a speech community, we implicitly agree to an enormous number of implicit stipulations about meaning, emphasis, naming, and so on. It is this silent agreement that must precede any other.