ncbi.nlm.nih.govPosted Nov 8, 2019, 5:03 AM UTC
However, in 4 subjects the ‘not feeling complete in their own body’ was not the main motivation for body modification: one subjects' reason to modify his body was to feel sexually aroused, two subjects because of the attention it draws
Sounds about right.
Exactly right. Four subjects classified as outliers, but not exempt from the study.
Nice cherry picking there.
I strongly suspect that the actual number of people in the study who were seeking voluntary amputation because of sexual arousal and/or desire for attention was significantly greater than that. The other ones were just smart enough to spin a more sympathetic narrative.
Nice cherry picking there
You selected one report looking at 54 individuals - you are cherry picking too.
Actually, I didn't go out of my way to find it. I was sent it just today, found it interesting and relevent, and decided to get other opinions. If you know of any better reports feel free to share them.
I think they are referring to the 'results' part
Fifty-four BIID subjects completed the survey and indicated that the main rationale for their desire for body modification is to feel complete or to feel satisfied inside. Sexual arousal concerning their BIID (i.e. being aroused when seeing someone disabled resembling their BIID or when imagining themselves being disabled) was present in almost half of the subjects, but was never the primary rationale for their desired body modification.
Edit: oops sorry they weren't referring to that!
They weren't "referring" to anything, they were providing a direct quote from the article paired with a vague and passive-aggressive sentence fragment.
But onto the subject of the results.
While maybe the presence of arousal may be significant, I think it's telling that it was not a primary driving factor. Tbh I think some may point to it being a kink, but in order to really figure that out there would need to be more data, including on whether or not naturally disabled people are more likely to be attracted to other disabled people.
Tbh I think some may point to it being a kink, but in order to really figure that out there would need to be more data, including on whether or not naturally disabled people are more likely to be attracted to other disabled people.
Also would be interesting to see if the "Arousal when imagining themselves as an amputee" correlates with natural amputees. Tbh - i don't think it will so something else is going on.
I agree - and GC women have been saying this is a parallel for years.
Now do you think if an able-bodied person has their leg amputated, they should be able to access support groups and resources for amputees who are suffering from the loss of a limb?
Support groups, specifically trauma support groups? No.
Resources? Only if it's a necessary resource, they're dirt poor and have no other options, and even then they shouldn't get priority.
For simple get togethers and events and such for amputees and people who've lost limbs? In most scenarios, why not?
They should be able to use disabled washrooms and parking imo.
I disagree. Why should they take a parking spot from someone who needs it for reasons not of their choosing? Should they be allowed to enter the Paralympics in your opinion too? I think it would make a mockery of the other participants.
I think it would make a mockery of the other participants.
How so? Does their BIID need to be made known? And anyways if they participated in the paralympics they likely have had way less practice than everybody else.
I realize I didn't think through the parking lot one, it's not really something necessary for functionality and is a limited resource, so maybe not in that case.
People who have overcome circumstances that were imposed on them shouldn’t be made to play make believe with people who chose their disability. In my opinion simply having chosen their disability makes it an insult to those who never had a say.
I feel the same way about trans identified males.
For simple get togethers and events and such for amputees and people who've lost limbs? In most scenarios, why not?
Ppl w natural disabilities (pplwnd) might want to chill w people who have similar life experience, for one. Do they have the right to exclude? They might even feel uncomfortable at the thought of someone cutting off their own limb on purpose (bcoz the pplwnd would never have done that!) and be like "look, we have two very different experiences ... we didn't ask for this..." If pplwnd wish to exclude the BIID ppl from the pplwnd simple-get-together groups (and suggest they create their own BIID groups) would that be understood?
Ppl w natural disabilities (pplwnd) might want to chill w people who have similar life experience, for one.
Nobody's stopping them.
And anyways if they want a group without people with BIID then that's their right, but they should write it into the original policies of they want it to be clear.
Kinda like designating things as for women from the get go?
GC feminists have been making this comparison for years too and it perfectly illustrates our arguments. People who voluntarily amputate limbs should not have that paid for by the state (and I'd argue it violates the hippocratic oath for any doctor to do it at all so it should not be a possible surgery for cosmetic/mental illness reasons), they should not access resources for amputees or people born without limbs, whether financial or social, and they are obviously mentally ill. Research into BID, while reasonably scarce, also shows that people do not seem to be "born" with BID but develop it as a response to observing people with amputated limbs, often in sexual contexts but generally in social contexts and eventually developing a fixation on having a body part removed themselves. This tends to occur sometime during childhood or adolescence, but it's exceedingly rare in people not socially exposed to amputees or disabled people in their early lives. There is a long history in the psychiatric literature of BID being researched as a psychosexual disorder, to such an extent that now some researchers deliberately distinguish between the two (previously it was referred to as Apotemnophilia but as this was considered a sexual paraphilia by most, it was renamed BID in an effort to reclassify it as a body plan incongruity disorder rather than a psychosexual disorder).
Note the population overlap between people with gender dysphoria and BIID also.
EDIT: I just want to add that this is a fairly unflattering comparison for transgender people specifically (almost everyone with BIID is male and BIID almost always has a sexual component), but beyond that a lot of trans activist arguments would seem absolutely batshit crazy in a BIID context. For example, arguing that people with BIID "really should have been born with" amputated limbs or doctors "falsely assigned them 2-legged at birth" or that they were "socialized with only one leg" would be rightly seen as blatantly ridiculous by most people.
More info in blockquotes if anyone's interested:
Desire for amputation of a healthy limb has usually been regarded as a paraphilia (apotemnophilia), but some researchers propose that it may be a disorder of identity, similar to Gender Identity Disorder (GID) or transsexualism. Similarities between the desire for limb amputation and nonhomosexual male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism include profound dissatisfaction with embodiment, related paraphilias from which the conditions plausibly derive (apotemnophilia and autogynephilia), sexual arousal from simulation of the sought-after status (pretending to be an amputee and transvestism), attraction to persons with the same body type one wants to acquire, and an elevated prevalence of other paraphilic interests.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16799838
Based on reports of nine individuals, triggering experiences are referred. In contrast to other children, often these subjects were fascinated by the sight of a handicapped person.
...
These people rather have an ideal of a "perfect" body minus one arm or leg. Most admire the beauty of a stump, and see amputees as "heroes" who still master their life in spite of their handicap. BIID is not a homogenous disturbance, one should separate three axes: 1. Strength of neuronal dysfunction, 2. Psychic components (e. g. secondary morbid gain) and 3. Intensity of sexual interests.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19101876/
A first description of this condition traces back to a series of letters published in 1972 in the magazine Penthouse. These letters were from erotically-obsessed persons who wanted to become amputees themselves.7 However, the first scientific report of this desire only appeared in 1977: Money et al described two cases who had intense desire toward amputation of a healthy limb.7 Another milestone was a 2005 study by Michael First, an American psychiatrist, who published the first systematic attempt to describe individuals who desire amputation of a healthy limb.2 Thanks to this survey, which included 52 volunteers, a number of key features of the condition are identified: gender prevalence (most individuals are men), side preference (left-sided amputations are most frequently desired), and finally, a preference toward amputation of the leg versus the arm.2
...
Some years later, while reports on apotemnophilia and BIID continued to be published with one or the other nomenclature (Table 1), the 2005 survey was highly criticized by Helen De Preester.8 De Preester analyzed in detail the percentages found by First and suggested that looking at these numbers from different perspectives rules out a diverse explanation for the amputation desire. In more detail, De Preester suggested that it is impossible to exclude the sexual component when studying apotemnophilia/BIID. She reanalyzed the data, looking for “pure” cases; in other words, for those individuals in whom the sexual motivation (or the identity motivation) is totally absent. The percentages of “pure apotemnophilic” and “pure identity” individuals appear to be very low (around 10%).
...
Finally, a recent study disconfirmed the hypothesis of Ramachandran and McGeoch: symptoms related to the desire for amputation did not disappear after CVS: the converse of what happens with somatoparaphrenic patients.32 These results seem to preclude this condition being as simple as a “developmental somatoparahrenia”9 and cast new doubt on a pure neurologic etiology, despite the promising results of the other imaging studies.
Finally, a recent study33 explored the neurological hypothesis, starting from a different perspective. In this work, the authors administered a set of tests to 7 individuals with BIID, which were aimed at exploring facial expression: recognition and disgust responses. The basic premise was that the insula, indicated in previous studies as a possibly dysfunctional area, is involved in body representation34 and also in emotional processing.35 A second starting point, which convinced the authors to follow this path, is that psychiatric disturbances are usually comorbid with emotion recognition impairments.36 Differently from previous studies that focused on body representation per se and neglected the sexual and psychiatric components, this study adopted a neuropsychological methodology and explored both the neurological and psychiatric etiologies. It is relevant that the authors treated the data as single cases, avoiding the problem of grouping together individuals with different clinical features. The results of this study showed absence of emotion recognition and also expression impairments, in all individuals. However, subjects who sought unilateral amputation showed a different pattern in regard to the evaluation of images depicting amputated limbs (not amputated individuals, but amputated limbs, excluding any sexual component of attraction toward an amputee). These individuals rated these images as “not disgusting” – a behavior converse to what can be expected from known models of disgust toward body envelope violations.1,37 Such models postulate that disgust is a defensive reaction toward danger; consequently, violations of the body representation elicit this emotion.1,37 It appears that BIID is characterized by a compromising of emotion, selectively related to the body, but only in some individuals who share specific clinical features.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4094630/
In the last part of this paper, we discuss the <<grey>> scientific litterature about apotemnophilia and BIID. We support the idea that BIID can be considered as a culture-bound syndrome, a contemporary frame for psychological suffering. We think that BIID does not have neither intrinsic nor unequivocal psychopathological meaning. It is a <<new way to be mad>> (Elliott), a common pathway for the expression of very different kinds of psychological suffering.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18033151
The justification of BIID sufferers was multifaceted. The reasons included triggering childhood events, restoring a congruence between sentiment and body, feeling attracted by people with physical disabilities, a fascination for physically impaired people, as well as the perception of body impairment as a proper way of living.
((an interesting note: the study reported Sex (m/f) 21/1 for BIID sufferers.))
Concerning the development of the desire, the hypothesis was confirmed that both, BIID sufferers and transsexuals, show a beginning of their desire in childhood or early adolescence. First doubts about the identity as an intact human being or about the gender identity were seen in the BIID sufferers at the average age of 10.76 years (SD=±5.27) and 13.00 years (SD=±11.73) in the transsexual subjects.
Concerning the influence of sexual components a significant difference between BIID sufferers and transsexuals could be revealed: a sexual component amplifies the desire for surgical alteration (BIID: M=6.33, SD=±3.61; transsexuals: M=3.83 SD=±3.60; U-value=132.0; significance (U-test): p=.029). ((out of ten I believe.))
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7ecf/6014d52f8b0f5223df10fa59ad1bebbaf541.pdf
Really interesting links thanks.
I have zero objection to grown adults having parts removed or bodies modified for whatever reason. If it helps with their mental illness then all well and good. It still won’t turn a man into a woman or any imaginary other sex. Or vice versa.
A compelling essay on BIID and its growth in tandem with the internet: "A New Way to be Mad". The author also discusses the parallel between BIID and gender dysphoria.
It's interesting to me that you see comparison with BIID as a defense for transition. Most people, myself included, balk at amputating perfectly healthy limbs as a treatment for mental illness.
It's interesting to me that you see comparison with BIID as a defense for transition.
I don't see it as a defence, I just see it as a better comparison than body dysmorphia.
I do think the two parallel and dysphoria may be more like BIID than BDD but still, I feel like it’s a mental illness (which a lot of trans people either say it’s a hormonal disorder, birth defect, or just refuse that dysphoria is likely mental illness), and should be treated as such. I do not care what adults do. If an adult wants to transition then that has nothing to do with me, but I am not going to recognize a dysphoric transitioning male as a woman or a dysphoric transitioning female as a man. I also don’t think that someone that intentionally makes themselves blind or wants a limb amputated should have access to the exact same resources as someone that was either born blind, or was in an accident and needed amputation/health issues that led to amputations. That’s not to say that I don’t think they should get accommodations because they chose it, but I don’t think they should be eligible for say scholarships related to the blind, or something that may be for amputees. I just think that’s not okay and taking from those that had zero say in their disability. I also don’t think anyone should be forced to participate in their mental health issues which is what we are forced to do for trans individuals essentially.
BIID is a neurological disorder that affects the parietal lobe. I have family members in the medical field who have had patients with it and I’m not sure it’s the same thing. For example, family member had a patient who had a stroke and developed BIID. They stopped washing their left arm up to a specific point near the elbow and didn’t see it; it was pretty gross. But the brain no longer recognizes that body part. It’s usually limbs.
ETA: BIID is controlled through medication and therapy.
None of this is actually true... I mean your story may be true but that's not the typical etiology of BIID and it's typically not "controlled through medication and therapy" ...
I would recommend looking at science journals. UCLA has done some excellent studies and for some ethnographic work I did for my PhD I looked at BIID.
ETA: if interested, Neurologia is probably the best up to date medical journal in neuroscience.
Yeah, I did and posted many excerpts in this thread prior to your comment. Maybe you should take a look.
I already did. Listen, I’ve been studying BIID for fifteen years and my cousin is a neurologist. I won’t argue with someone on reddit.
I think it’s an interesting idea to compare them. At first glance they appear quite similar too. I think the main issue with the comparison is there is no role difference akin to reproductive roles for amputees and non amputees. I think a big part of gender dysphoria likely is the feeling that the reproductive role that the individual should be able to fill is not one they can fill. I don’t think that ever case of gender dysphoria is like that I feel like most cases of late onset gender dysphoria have a much stronger comparison to BIID. Also people who have suffered abuse as children likely have a closer comparison to disorders like that. As far as I can tell though I just have gender dysphoria because I am incapable of fulfilling the female reproductive role.
Tabeling whether they are psychologically similar, The difference on the ground is a loss of functionality. Hiring breasts doesn’t impede my life. Fixing my genitals didn’t I pair any relevant function but vastly improved my life.
Removing an arm would impair functionality.
Okay, but why do we all have to participate in your disorder?