All the hoopla around Bruce Jenner’s drag queen persona “Caitlyn” (as far as I know, he is not going to remove his genitalia and remains sexually interested in women) including a proposed award and a veritable orgy of congratulations on “courage” and continued demands that we all participate in celebrating his choice in the interests of diversity.
Yet just how far is this to go?
When he cut off his right arm with a “very sharp power tool,” a man who now calls himself One Hand Jason let everyone believe it was an accident.
But he had for months tried different means of cutting and crushing the limb that never quite felt like his own, training himself on first aid so he wouldn’t bleed to death, even practicing on animal parts sourced from a butcher.
“My goal was to get the job done with no hope of reconstruction or re-attachment, and I wanted some method that I could actually bring myself to do,” he told the body modification website ModBlog.
People like Jason have been classified as ‘‘transabled’’ — feeling like imposters in their bodies, their arms and legs in full working order.
“We define transability as the desire or the need for a person identified as able-bodied by other people to transform his or her body to obtain a physical impairment,” says Alexandre Baril, a Quebec born academic who will present on “transability” at this week’s Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Ottawa. […]
Researchers in Canada are trying to better understand how transabled people think and feel. Clive Baldwin, a Canada Research Chair in Narrative Studies who teaches social work at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B., has interviewed 37 people worldwide who identify as transabled. […]
Some of his study participants do draw parallels to the experience many transgender people express of not feeling like they’re in the right body. Baldwin says this disorder is starting to be thought of as a neurological problem with the body’s mapping, rather than a mental illness. […]
“It’s a problem for individuals because it’s distressing. But lots of things are.” He suggests this is just another form of body diversity — like transgenderism — and amputation may help someone achieve similar goals as someone who, say, undergoes cosmetic surgery to look more like who they believe their ideal selves to be.”
Since when do we allow body mutilation as a substitute for fixing the mental issues?
Oh, when there is no objective standards and we live in a society where we reward victims – including those who find new ways to define victimhood and self-select for it.
Of course, only the politically popular feelings are to be celebrated and enforced. Try claiming to be recognized as a person of a different “race” because you feel like it, or demand respect for your religious feelings as a Jew or Christian.
Yeah, right.
h/t Ed Morrissey who adds
We’re celebrating the end of natural and objective truth, and turning dysfunction into virtue on the basis of celebrity. Not only that, but many people suffer from disability without much choice in the matter — my wife, for one, who lost her sight at 24 from diabetic retinopathy. This turns their challenges into sport or status symbols in a very odd manner, and mainstreaming it the way Baldwin suggests legitimizes the fetishization of their pains and struggles.
I don’t wish Caitlyn Jenner any ill will, and I have no problem addressing people by the names or pronouns they wish. That, after all, is their business. However, don’t expect me to wave flags as the parade of self-mutilation keeps processing toward eventual oblivion, regardless of whether that makes me out of step and hopelessly old-fashioned. Western society has become unmoored from objective truth in favor of anything goes, and I don’t think the end game looks terribly promising — especially with the parallel tyranny of the Tolerance Police punishing any dissent along the way.
i think you have the progression wrong
cutting off an arm is sort of a stage *before* cutting off your dick I think
I have no problem addressing people by the names or pronouns they wish. That, after all, is their business.
Morrissey doesn’t get it. By requiring us to address Bruce Jenner as “Caitlyn,” we are being required to play along with his delusion. Sorry, Jenner does not get to define reality for the rest of us.
i don’t feel like anyone is *required* to call him caitlyn, especially if he ain’t chopped off his dick yet
Since when do we allow body mutilation as a substitute for fixing the mental issues?
If the region of the brain that recognizes “self” is damaged for one of the limbs, there’s not much you can do about it. Talk therapy and medication cannot repair missing cerebral programming. We just don’t have the technology to tinker with the brain at that level.
People with that type of dysphoria are driven to (and over) the edge by the fact that their brains won’t stop lying to them. (“That’s not your hand.” “That’s not your hand.” “That’s not your hand.”)
And why is it a question of what “we allow” someone to do to relieve irreparable suffering? Given that people are willing to perform their own amputations, that should give you an idea of how unbearable their condition is.
Get back to me after you’ve endured a few decades of unrelenting torment from your own brain, torment that you’d love to ignore or be distracted from but can’t because, well, IT’S YOUR OWN DAMNED BRAIN that’s betraying you.
Does hacking off the offending limb stop the lies? I don’t know. But let’s not assume that “we’re” the ones get to allow and disallow.
As for Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner, there’s a good chance that his sex change will not relieve the dissociative disorder that’s been nagging him all this time: it usually doesn’t, because the real problem isn’t that he’s not a woman but rather something else.
This man at The Federalist did the full monty with the transition to a woman thing (and back) and strongly advises against it. As someone who suffered through it himself, he’s a better source for info on that subject than I am.
The way Jenner’s transition is being used as a shibboleth for dividing the Star-Bellied Sneeches from the Plain-Bellied is as awful as it is predictable. He’s also foolish to be doing this in public, but I guess if you’re in the Kardashian clan, that’s what you do.
On the other hand, “dude ain’t a lady” is not a point that needs making, either. I’m pretty sure Jenner is clear that he’s XY and that his native plumbing is decidedly male. Don’t want to buy into his delusion? Don’t want to join the chorus of self-congratulatory “acceptance” that’s infesting the tubez?
That’s fine; you probably shouldn’t. I know I don’t.
But I also know what it’s like to be betrayed by my own brain, and hearing people play Captain Obvious is more like piling on than any kind of recognizable compassion. You don’t dump someone out of their wheelchair and lecture them on how legs were made for walking, nor do you instruct a cystic fibrosis person on how to take deep breaths.
Don’t mock a pain you haven’t endured, no matter what fools they’re making of themselves. For all you know, given the same circs, you’d be coping much worse than they.
Just cut the guy some slack, yeah? He’s still got a tough row to hoe. Probably tougher than before.
he ain’t gonna be getting much hoeing done with just the one arm
“Coupling” had an episode called the “man with two legs” (it was about getting caught in a lie). Sorry to think about something funny.
I wonder if there is some kind cybernetics feedback that could help. If people can learn to use and accept robot arms why not “re-wire” for your actual limbs?
Just wild-ass speculation.
Dicentra, I largly agree with you, and I have no problem calling the Athlete formerly known as Bruce whatever he likes, same as if Joe wants me to call him ‘moose’, that’s fine. Plus, I see no reason to treat such people with contempt, yet…Jenner is purposely making a spectacle in service of an agenda as well as fame and fortune. THAT is what is grotesque.
As for the amputation thing, I gotta digest that for a while, being brand new to me. My first take is it’s basically just body modification, more on the extreme end of the spectrum and creepy as extreme piercing, but it’s no skin off MY nose.
I don’t know. When was the first sex change operation performed?
1930
Sounds right.
Medicine was netoriously unfettered by moral principles those days.
Probably sex change beat the shit out of a labodomy, if one had to choose…
1931
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_reassignment_surgery#History
War on Human Nature: The Celebrity Fantasy Dress-Up With ‘Caitlyn’ Game
Bill scrapping marriage licenses hits Alabama House after passing Senate
If people want to cut off their own body parts because of whatever issues they might have that are beyond the skills of mental health professionals, they cannot be stopped, any more than they can be stopped from killing themselves, if the disorder is bad enough.
However, if they do the self-amputation, and somehow manage to survive, they should be barred from collecting taxpayer benefits for disability caused by the self-induced lack. Giving them disability because they are suddenly shy one wing is akin to Lyle and Erik Menendez asking for mercy from the judge because they were orphans.
di
If anything, I’m fed-up-to-here with the political asses who are exploiting Jenner and his issues. I’ve read Heyer’s pieces before and he states unequivocally that surgery is not the answer, indeed, it’s quick-promise-of-rainbows-and-unicorns is not only worthless, but dangerous.
Yes you don’t tell a CF sufferer to take deep breaths, but you don’t also hand them sugar pills, pat them on the head, and send them on their way telling them the yummy taste will make them happy and happiness is all they need.
(I had two first cousins die of CF… one a toddler the other at age 10 and that ten year old worked damned hard to survive)
Johns Hopkins stopped doing sexual reassignment surgery because they found out it isn’t a cure.
And while the Leftists are busy trying to stop gender-confused kids from getting any kind of psychotherapy that doesn’t conform to the fetishized gender “fluidity” movement, Johns Hopkins found out that 75% of the kids who identify as the other gender while young, return to their bio-sex id on their own.
75%
Where will Jenner be when his/her 15 minutes of cover-girl status is over?
This isn’t going to end well since surgery is a way to avoid the underlying mental issues, not ameliorate them.
Eh, that’s a pretty bold statement. Dude isn’t young, seems pretty laid back, and it wasn’t a rash decision. I’m thinking he’ll be fine. He will write a best seller, get his own reality show, and bask in his celebrity happy as a clam.
Or not. Either way, you have to respect his free agency, and let him work out his own issues. Frankly, I find our voyoristic society about as sick as him. I mean, what’s up with some of those reality shows? Just the Kardashisns success alone is a sign of the mental illness rampant in our society.
fyi
>
‘Before the Law’
Barbara C. Sproul
December 8, 1983 Issue
Rudolf Battek was fifty-nine on November 2. A prisoner of conscience, he marked this anniversary as he has so many others in a jail cell in Czechoslovakia. A sociologist and former member of the Czech parliament, Mr. Battek has a distinguished history of political activism. Like the man from the country in Kafka’s story “Before the Law,” he has always thought “the Law should be accessible at all times and to everyone.”
Employed in communal administration in 1956 when revolution in neighboring Hungary was brutally suppressed by troops of the Warsaw Pact nations, Rudolf Battek protested by refusing to take part in the Czech general elections. He was dismissed from his job in consequence and for the next four years worked as a laborer in a steel works, where he eventually became editor of the house magazine. From there he went on to the Sociological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and a job as a sociological researcher.
During the “Prague Spring” of 1968, Mr. Battek became deputy chairman of the Club of Committed Non-Party People (KAN) which was established in an attempt to create an alternative to one-party communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Between July 1968 and November 1969 he served as a member of the Czech National Council (the Czech national parliament).
After the Warsaw Pact tanks moved into Prague and crushed the brief flowering of Czech liberalization, Rudolf Battek cosigned the Ten Point Manifesto denouncing the occupation. That was his first encounter with the door-keeper of the Law: he was arrested and spent thirteen months in prison.
When elections were scheduled in 1971, Rudolf Battek wrote and distributed leaflets reminding people of their constitutional right to abstain from voting; he explained the legal procedure for doing this. Another knock on the door of the Law. This time Mr. Battek remained in prison for three and a half years. When he was released (and for the next nine years), he worked as a window-washer—the only employment permitted him. <
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1983/dec/08/before-the-law/
also
>Still he believed the Law should be accessible at all times and to everyone. And so in 1977 he signed the Charter 77 Manifesto calling on the Czech government to respect the human rights constitutionally guaranteed its citizens. He became one of the most active members in the newly burgeoning Czech human rights movement, joining the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS) at its founding in 1978 and becoming its official spokesman in January 1980.
During 1979 and early 1980, Rudolf Battek was arrested on four different occasions. Each time he was questioned, held for several days, and released. Between arrests, he continued his activities in the Committee for the Unjustly Persecuted. It was his task to maintain contact with the international socialist movement, and in this connection, along with several other Czech and Polish scholars, he wrote essays analyzing the political situation in those countries. They titled their collection “On Freedom and Power”: a third knock at the door of the Law.
Arrested in June 1980 and held for over a year in pretrial detention, Rudolf Battek was regularly denied appropriate medical care for the severe asthma attacks he suffered. His condition became so serious that his wife and other members of VONS undertook hunger strikes to protest his treatment. Finally he was admitted briefly to the prison hospital and permitted some visits with his family and an attorney.
In July 1981 Rudolf Battek was tried and sentenced to seven and one-half years’ imprisonment and three years’ “protective surveillance” for “causing bodily harm” and for “subversion.” The first charge referred to Mr. Battek’s allegedly having knocked off the cap of a police officer when he was being detained; the second charge—“subversion on a grand scale”—involved his contribution to the anthology of essays On Freedom and Power. <
Transabled? So they’ll let me transfer my brain into a Bolo Mk XXXIII?
I promise to not use the Hellbores on anything that doesn’t deserve it.
Lee
Jenner can do as he likes — but when strolling down the beach and looking at the clouds, I’m certainly not denying him his free agency when I point out the pit along his path that he is heading towards.
And I am not out-of-line by finding the crowd cheering his possible destruction contemptible. Even those who complete their sex reassignment surgery have a 41% chance of attempting suicide.
I find Jenners cheerleaders like the crowds who gather below the ledge where a suicidal person stands chanting “Jump!”
PS
Never once have I mentioned Jenner before the VF cover and I’ve never seen one episode of the Kardashians.
But the political giddiness that has accompanied his “courageousness” is alarming.
>Lies and post-totalitarianism
What made Eastern European totalitarianism so distinctive was its penchant for lies. The lie was a political force, it was institutionalized, disseminated, indoctrinated, developed and taught, all on the shoulders of a massive bureaucracy dedicated to one thing: to further increase the power of lies. Some would say that this story sounds familiar; after all, Arendt has always insisted on how lying in politics is a mark of totalitarianism, well before Eastern Europe experienced it. The Nazis lied just as much, and their ferocity in supporting lies rivaled any Eastern European apparatchiks. But the difference between the early totalitarianism that Arendt is famous for describing in Origins, and what Havel calls the “post-totalitarianism” of Eastern Europe , is the degree of belief in the system’s lies. Whereas Fascism, and Stalinism for that matter, was rife with calls for voluntarism, dedication and enthusiasm for the cause, post-totalitarian power “only” required automatic performance of the ritual: “we are no longer governed by fanatics, revolutionaries, or ideological zealots. The country is administered by faceless bureaucrats who profess adherence to a revolutionary ideology, but look out only for themselves, and no longer believe in anything.” [10]
This volte-face of post-totalitarianism has a historical reason. Trailing further and further away from the enthusiastic beginnings of communism, more and more burdened by murders, abuses and lies, the post-totalitarian power was forced to give up a now futile exercise in convincing. Instead, it was forced to blindly embrace its own doctrine. The rigidity of the system increased until no more space was left for any personal opinion let alone ideological debate. Post-totalitarianism emerged as the bastion of the automaton over the revolutionary, of the empty ritual over principled action. Thus, “the fanatic whose unpredictable zeal for the ?higher cause’ might threaten this automatic process has been replaced by the bureaucratic pedant whose reliable lack of idea makes him an ideal guardian of late totalitarianism’s vacuous continuity.” [11] The key in post-totalitarianism is hence a change in the function of ideology, from a tool of persuasion into a ritualistic code of submissiveness. Post-totalitarian ideology is form without essence, a philosophical shadow of its former Stalinist self.>
http://www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2006%20Papers/Delia%20Alexandru.shtml
>Right becomes wrong and the reverse, the innocent become guilty and the guilty innocent. The social and political compass is reset to spin to the tune of the system. The introduction of this ethos of lies has a devastating effect: the loss of the moral compass of individuals. Going through life, job or politics without knowing whether you are “right” or “wrong,” guilty” or “innocent,” or rather changing from guilty to innocent at the mere whim of the system, creates an atmosphere of supreme insecurity. Disarmed of his capacity to tell between right and wrong, the individual is left to struggle with a world of lies. Helplessness and apathy “cripple the will to live one’s life.” [15] We need little imagination, Havel says, to realize that living within a lie leads only to the “breakdown of all criteria of decency, and the widespread destruction of confidence in the meaning of values such as truth?sincerity, altruism, dignity and honor. Amidst a demoralization ?in depth,’ stemming from the loss of hope and the loss of the belief that life has a meaning, life must sink to a biological, vegetable level.” [16] This is the automatism and thoughtlessness that allows for post-totalitarian oppression to thrive.
This logic is reminiscent of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Writing Eichmann, Arendt was surprised, like Havel , with the human capacity to suspend reason and unquestioningly accept the logic of a regime. She too believed that this was the mark of a crisis in morality that is hard to explain and even harder to understand. She coined the phrase “banality of evil” to point out this shocking new face of oppression that “contradicts our theories concerning evil.”(p18 RJ) It is useful to point out once more that Eichmann represents a change in Arendt’s perspective on totalitarianism. In her earlier work, most notably “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt discusses what she calls the “radical” or “absolute” evil of totalitarianism and she insists that because of its radical character such evil cannot survive long, it is fated to fall as meteorically as it appeared. In Eichmann, for the first time, she gets a glimpse at a different kind of evil, the kind that can endure and “could spread limitlessly across the earth.” [17] This portrait of evil has a lot more in common with the advanced totalitarianism Havel describes and can shed better light on it.
Thinking and responsibility
“No wicked heart?is necessary to cause great evil.” [18]
The parallel between Arendt and Havel is striking because they both seek to understand the significance of people’s inability or refusal to think about the world they live in. Thoughtlessness seems to emerge as the greatest plight of modernity and the main accessory to totalitarianism (especially, in Havel ‘s view, post-totalitarianism). The conclusion they both reach about the refusal to critically engage the world is that it leads to irresponsible behavior. <
“It used to be the case that people became famous because they were special. Now they think they are special because they are famous.”
btw
NOW Jenner & those cheering him are getting backlash from the more-victim-than-you Left becuz his pic on Vanity Fair is stereotypical heteronormative standards of gender-binary ‘beauty’
Darleen wrote: And I am not out-of-line by finding the crowd cheering his possible destruction contemptible.
You most definitely are not.
With the accepting of the Perverse as Normal and the branding of the Normal as Perverse, it is no surprise that what we see again and again these days, as we see in this case, is: the grotesque being cheered-on by the grotesque.
Everybody Sing!…
Ahyep.
Greetings:
When I broke my wrist playing football, Father Carney, my English teacher used to call be “Single Wing”.
Drizzle, Drazzle, Druzzle, Drome, time for this one to come home.
Be just what you is, not what you is not. Folks what do this has the happiest lot.
Early on, and after an unacceptable performance by his team, Bears head coach Mike Ditka only broke his right hand (the piker) punching a (locker?), in disgust.
Next game, cast-sporting coach quote, “Win one for Lefty!”
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