as small as a world and as large as alone, What do you think about this new "transable" thing...

11:09am August 4, 2014

Anonymous asked: What do you think about this new "transable" thing that's been going around. Like people who say they are disabled on the inside.

I’ve had a lot of feelings about it for a long time.

I first discovered them at a time when I had been wrongly accused of faking being disabled. So I wanted to find out, “If I really had been faking being disabled, what sort of person would I be?” So I went and did a lot of research on the DPW community. That’s Devotees (people with a fetish for disabled people), Pretenders (people who pretend to be disabled), and Wannabes (people who actually wish they were disabled, full-time). A lot of that is centered around amputees, and also around wheelchair users of different types (especially paras and quads), but not exclusively.

I spent a lot of time reading their writing: both fiction and nonfiction. And trying to figure out how they see the world. I focused on the pretenders and wannabees, because devotees didn’t interest me given that I was being falsely accused of pretending or wanting to be autistic, not being accused of having a sexual attraction to autistic people.

Some of them made me really angry. These were people who had made a fetish of sorts (whether a sexual fetish or just a… fetish… it’s hard to explain) out of disability stereotypes. Especially the stereotype that we are frail and helpless. The idea of people getting off on the idea that disabled people are weak, helpless, childlike, etc… it made me sick to my stomach and very uncomfortable. Especially after meeting someone offline who I am almost certain was doing something like this. (Our meeting was not coincidental, she saw me as representing a lot of what she liked about those stereotypes, which made me feel doubly uncomfortable because that’s the last image I want to present to the world.)

But a lot of them did not make me angry at all. They just seemed like people who, for whatever reason, wanted to be disabled. Some of them were simply fascinated by mobility equipment and wanted to use it all the time, wanted to learn what it was like to navigate the world in a wheelchair or on crutches or with leg braces. Many of these people had started very early, as children. Some of them reminded me of a friend (who is not a DPW at all) who is autistic and has a special interest in medical equipment – they regarded it purely with an almost scientific fascination. For some reasons the ones who made me the most uncomfortable were always the ones with the sexual fetish component to things, and I think it’s because when they wrote about it, they’d say things like “and I dragged my poor helpless legs out of my wheelchair and crutched across the kitchen”, it was like they couldn’t go more than half a sentence without calling attention to how helpless they were or what mobility equipment they were using. I’ve rarely talked to a real crutch user who describes walking as “crutching”, but it’s super-common in the DPW community.

I do remember feeling somewhat amused at the way some of them wrote stories. It reminded me of science fiction, the way every piece of technology is lovingly described in exquisite detail. It’s like that, only the technology involved is disability-related equipment or medical equipment. I kept thinking of how un-science-fiction my whole day seems, and how it would seem if I actually wrote about my day, or even thought about my day, in the very equipment-focused manner that many DPWs see disability.

But I found myself feeling less offended than I expected. There was a lot of “What’s the big deal about this?” I was only offended when people fetishized negative stereotypes of disability as if they were real. The “my poor helpless shriveled little legs” stuff made me want to smash things. But that was a surprising minority of pretender and wannabe stuff I read. Most of them, for reasons I didn’t fully understand, just wanted to either be disabled, or to act disabled in public. And none of these things offended me anywhere near as much as I expected. It wasn’t the pretending, it wasn’t the wanting to be disabled, it was some things that were sometimes attached to those things that bothered me. But those things were by no means always attached, or even attached most of the time.

I’d already noticed that when it came to wannabe amputees and some wannabe paras, some wannabes seemed to have something neurological going on. Like, they really didn’t see their limbs as part of them, and it seemed like more of a clash of body maps. Like the opposite of phantom limb syndrome. And that made sense to me. It didn’t account for all pretenders and wannabes, but it made sense that it would account for some. Some of them had done drastic things, life-threatening things, to remove these limbs that seemed like an alien piece stuck onto their bodies. And that didn’t seem like the act of someone fetishizing helplessness or just trying on something for size.

And of course, eventually, all of my websearching and research led me to the transabled site, where I had a lot of mixed feelings.

I was uncomfortable with the way the guy had just wholesale taken entire words and ideas from trans people’s experiences, without actually doing anything for trans people. (Although he’s been wrongly accused of creating the idea of Body Integrity Identity Disorder, a diagnosis that mirrors Gender Identity Disorder in its language. Wannabes have nothing to do with the creation of that disorder, it was created by psychiatrists and neurologists, and those psychiatrists and neurologists are the ones you should take it up with if you’ve got a problem with the resemblance between BIID and GID.) And I understand why some trans people will see that and want nothing to do with his site or anyone who goes there.

But I’ve read his site in depth, and while I see a lot of ignorance when it comes to trans people’s experience and how trans people might feel about the idea and words of “transability”. I also see a lot of people who’ve been drawn to it because of the writing and charisma of the owner, and who have stuck around because they’ve found a community that supports all kinds of wannabes, not just amputee or para wannabes. Some of the wannabes on the site are actually disabled already – something most people don’t bother to notice. Some of them have unusual reasons, like I think there’s someone who wants to be blind because his visual sensory issues are so severe that just looking at things is painful. I can relate to that.

I find it unfortunate that the biggest clump of disability wannabes on the Internet have met together under the banner of “transabled”. I find it unfortunate because with a name like that, many trans people will never take them seriously, and will be offended by them from the outset. With good reason. But what they’re actually doing – wishing they were disabled, and/or pretending to be disabled, or wishing or pretending to be disabled in a different way than they already are – doesn’t strike me as a bad thing. As long as they’re not fetishizing some stereotyped idea of helplessness, or doing or saying other things that actually actively harm disabled or trans people, I just can’t find it within myself to be offended by their existence.

Which was weirdly freeing. I remember worrying endlessly, “What if I was really pretending to be autistic?” and after reading stuff by people who (at least online) are very up front about pretending or wanting to be disabled, I just can’t see what’s so horrible about it. So now my response is like “What if I was? So what? I’m not, but if I were, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.” Most of these people are not harming anyone. They only harm people when they deliberately emulate negative stereotypes of disabled people, or when they wrongly compare their experiences to trans people. But the majority of pretenders and wannabes aren’t doing either of those things. The ‘transabled’ ones are just the most visible, especially because they make an easy target for SJ people and anti-SJ trolls alike, everyone loves to hate them and get the flamewars rolling. And I’m highly suspicious of that dynamic, it feels like a setup happened somewhere along the line.

But actually Ps and Ws don’t bother me for the most part, and I don’t think they’re doing anywhere near the damage that is done in witch-hunts to root out fakers in the disability community. Most of them just quietly do their thing, in the privacy of their homes, or out in public, and most people don’t notice them any more than they notice any other disabled people, and I can’t bring myself to give a shit.

By the way, DPWs have been around forever, it’s nothing new. The only thing new is that some of the Ps and Ws have broken off and started calling themselves 'transabled’, which is guaranteed to inflame actual trans people. And now people have picked up that name and started spreading it everywhere, which is horribly unfortunate, but a field day for trolls I’m sure. (And I’m sure that trolls are doing at least half of the spreading, just like they did all of the spreading of 'transethnic’, which never actually existed for real. BTW these same trolls, while they love pitting transgender people against made-up 'trans-*’ identities, have no respect for actual transgender people either, and I wish other trans people noticed that. They hate us just as much as they hate all these other groups of people they’re either making up or exaggerating the numbers of.)

Mind you, my opinions of this are my own, they are by no means the opinions of the entire disability community. This is a very controversial issue. I just don’t feel like I have the anger to waste on pretenders and wannabes, although the 'trans’ thing bothers me as much as it bothers anyone. But the actual people, I have few problems with, aside from the ones I’ve already talked about.