Saturday 21 April 2012

Not only are the lunatics running the asylum but they're selling timeshare, cocktails and funny hats




Melanie Reid is a columnist for the Times .She fell from her horse broke her neck and back falling from a horse in April 2010. 
Now home after 12 months’ rehab, in todays Times ,she considers transableism.
There are some unexpected perks from my situation. One of them, if you possess a fertile sense of the ridiculous, is discovering the lunacy that lurks around the edges of disability. In this regard, one of the most spectacular bits of low-hanging fruit is a person called Chloe Jennings-White, a fake paraplegic who features in a National Geographic documentary to be broadcast next month.
Jennings-White is the best known proponent of a movement called transableism. 
Transableists claim they are disabled people trapped in able bodies and they have a burning desire either to live as cripples or get medical help to do so. Some of the transabled want limbs removed, some want to be deaf or blind and some want to be paralysed. Honestly, I’m not making this up.
Transableists are disability pretenders – they admit to doing things like deliberately falling over in their wheelchair in front of a long queue at the cinema. Oh, the fuss! Oh, the delicious outpouring of concern! 
While you or I might accuse such people of unfathomable attention-seeking, the transabled claim they are suffering from a psychological or neurological condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), first classified in 2000. 
Once medicalised, of course, the condition achieves a status that decrees it must be respected. For fear of causing offence to the afflicted. The far greater offence their actions cause to the genuinely disabled appears not to be a consideration. Funny that.
Jennings-White, a scientist in Utah, lives as a paraplegic, pretending to be paralysed from the waist down. She wears leg braces and uses wheelchairs and crutches. 
The problem, for those of us who struggle to indulge people – sorry, celebrate diversity – quite to this extreme, is that there is nothing physically wrong with Jennings-White. She lives a double life. When she’s out in the countryside, she happily gets out of her wheelchair and goes hiking. It is only in the company of others that she feels compelled to be seen as disabled.
Furthermore, she claims to want surgery to transect her spinal cord, so that she can really be a paraplegic. She calls it “Ability Reassignment Surgery”. Jennings-White, all in all, can best be described as the gift that keeps on giving. 
Often people who say they have BIID are transsexual or transgender men; Chloe, it has emerged, was apparently once Clive. Since becoming a woman in a wheelchair, she also claims to have suffered from selective mutism. (No, I don’t have a clue either.) 
On her own internet blog Jennings-White describes herself as “a disabled intersexed lesbian feminist with BIID… and deaf in one ear”.


Watch the CNN video here
Hand-to-forehead time!!!!
Indeed, in the race to see who can be the most disabled, in this age of barmy victimhood, Jennings-White puts many a nose out of joint because she is hard to trump. Especially disabled gay women, a fearsome pressure group, who on the internet froth with rage. “It is already so hard for disabled lesbians… this man is appropriating so many identities and causing so much harm,” posted one.
And who could top this comment?
 “It’s a sexual fetish parading as an identity disorder so we can all feel sorry for them, pay attention to them, be supportive of them, and in general let them drain us of energy like vampires. Let them go back to latex and leave lesbians and disabled people the heck out of their soul-sucking perversions.” 
While few people add as much to the gaiety of nations as Jennings-White, sadly the phenomenon of someone with function pretending to live a life of suffering and struggle is not that rare. 
Many a weary social worker has to deal with clients who claim to be suffering from debilitating disability, spinal or otherwise, when there is little proven physically wrong with them. 
These clients, who often have psychiatric files as thick as a brick, must be treated with kid gloves under the provisions of mental health legislation and often require expensive care packages. 
Are they mentally ill or con artists? I’m glad I’m not the one who has to make the call.
In a life where hope is measured in tiny flickers of movement, I have one other triumph. My left thumb is suddenly strong enough to press a light switch on the wall. Eat your heart out, Chloe Jennings-White.


She is what is known apparently as an "OTHER-KIN" person...."other-kin"???....I need to start drinking!!!

1 comment:

  1. Oh no! As if we didn't have enough trouble in the world, we can now throw away our good old psychiatry textbooks, they will do no good with these new conditions.

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