All: What do you think about body integrity disorder?

It's real just like sex dysphoria.

And just like sex dysphoria, indulging in it and cutting people's limbs is the least reasonable way to treat people who suffer from it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/dtaiih/for_those_of_you_who_insist_on_equating_body/

FWIW, I don’t oppose allowing people with BID to amputate certain body parts causing them distress, but they need to go through extremely thorough, intensive, and prolonged counselling and risk assessment first.

While I agree on the whole BID bears a lot of similarities to sex dysphoria (SD)—

• social contagion / cause

• sexual cause

• successful patients report improved quality of life thereafter, and there’s usually an (albeit still extreme) stopping point to body modification, unlike with sufferers of ED or muscle dysphoria

• it’s important to keep detransitioners / the equivalent term for those that might regret BID surgeries in mind

—there are some less significant differences as well.

• no requirement to ‘pass’ as amputees for BID vs. a general age window to start transitioning to ‘pass’ for SD

• BID who’ve removed their limbs become exactly like the amputees they’re become vs. TM&TW cannot

BID is very real - otherwise healthy people don't stick their hands in dry ice because they dislike their human fingers.

I see a lot of similarities between body dysmorphia, BID, and gender dysphoria/sex dysmorphia, mainly that individuals focus negative thoughts and trauma into one aspect of themselves and obsess over removing that to eliminate the supposed source of that negativity. At the same time, I believe treatment should not be physically altering the body to match the affected person's dysphoria/dysmorphia, but therapy to alleviate the psychological origins of placing those negative emotions onto those traits.

One similarity is that BID is often pursued for reasons of sexual gratification. Another is that it affects mostly men. They start out imagining themselves as amputees and get erections while pretending with braces and slings and clever camera angles, first in private then in public. They seek out women who are disabled or amputees. They often harass such women at group support meetings and get amputations so they will fit in better and have a right to the space.

I don’t know if it leads them to seek out sex with men who have had amputations.

I accept that it's real, and I have said at least once before on the internet--albeit in different words--that I believe if gender were abolished, the number of trans people would be similar to the number of people who experience body integrity disorder.

It's a variant of gender identity dysmorphia. They should be treated the same way and not pandered to.

A disorder that causes an obsessive desire to self harm needs extensive therapy and absolutely zero humouring or indulgence in those desires to hurt themselves.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3326051/

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. 79.6% were males, 96.3% were of Caucasian origin, 64.8% had a university degree, and age range was 18–76 years.

My initial question is what is mentally wrong with white males in general? Why are they so disordered in general?

This is a nice article in BIID, doing also parallels with GID

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/

It is a thin line to walk. There is evidence that amputation is an effective treatment on above-thresshold cases, but the result of the treatment makes one dysfunctional in certain physical terms, so what is the net outcome is not clear. On the one hand there are people who definitely benefit from amputation, but making amputation more accessible will inevitably make people who would otherwise find ways to manage their disorder in other ways, to become more dysphoric and failing to find other ways to manage it. So even the creation of medical standards to make perfectly sure that regrets do not exist would not be able to control the social impact on the sub-thresshold cases.

I think that late onset GID and BIID are very very similar. It is actually, imo, one of the best arguments from Blanchardianism, in relating paraphilia (autogynephilia and apotemnophilia, respectively) with identity disorder. The main differences are that gender roles/norms play a central role in development of GID, that gender transition treatments have less negative impact in functionality (if one is ok with being sterile, there is little to care about apart from health risks, but health risks associate with any medical treatment in general) compared to becoming physically disabled, and, finally, that becoming an amputee is possible, but being the opposite sex is not possible. So, in simple terms, amputation for BIID is far more effective than hormone/surgeries for GID (as in latter case it can lead to an everlasting chase for impossible outcomes), but the net outcome for BIID is disputable, while in GID there is no direct impairment in functionality as a result of the treatment (apart from sterility).

I don’t think it’s related. Regardless transition makes trans people more functional, lopping an arm off does not make someone more functional.

Doctors also call it xenomelia. Here is an interesting article on the disorder: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3634160/

It's real but it is different than gender dysphoria and the treatments aren't really comparable, I think.