Cutting Desire by Jesse Ellison (BIID Reaction)

            We view people who harm themselves as unstable or unhealthy, because who in their right mind would purposely make themselves feel pain? They are viewed to be alongside people with mental health issues, needing psychiatrists and medication to get rid of their depression and insecurities. How far along those lines would wanting to be disabled be? Body Integrity Identity Disorder is an exceedingly rare condition characterizing by an overwhelming desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs or become paraplegic. People with this disorder have kept it a secret, but over the decades, an online movement has been started.

            According to the article “Cutting Desire” by Jesse Ellison, scientists suspect that Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) is most likely linked to other body image disorders including body dsymorphic disorders, anorexia, and gender identity disorders which are also linked to the brain. Many people online strongly believe that the only solution to their disorder is to have a legal surgery. The 1,500 visitors of the website “transabled.org” describe BIID to be an overwhelming “urge to right themselves”. Ellison writes, “Controversially, some people who say they suffer from BIID draw parallels to the transgender community. They point out that it took years for people who felt they were born into the wrong gender to convince the medical and psychiatric professions to recognize their plight, and that transgender individuals are now protected by anti-discrimination laws in many cities and states.” This idea is significant to me because it seems that every few years, there’s something that society would consider unjust as a new evolution to people in society.

             “Psychotherapy doesn’t work. Psychiatry doesn’t work. Medication doesn’t work. I’m a pretty typical example of someone who’s attempted a [number] of ways to address the problem, done years of therapy of many types, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, and nothing helps”, says Sean O’Connor, who runs the websites transabled.org and biid-info.org. This is essential because if there’s no way to mentally cure the issue, and people are going to risk the danger of harming themselves to fix the problem, what other solutions or treatment do we have for these people besides to give them what they want and legalize surgery for them. For example, there are studies of people who froze their leg off or shot it off with a shotgun because of this disorder. It’s their body; it should be ultimately their decision. They would be disabled, and have to live their life without a limb, then that’s their decision as long as they could still survive, in my opinion, I think we should just let them get their surgery. I believe that these people are not mentally healthy because it doesn’t seem rational to want to cut off your hand or leg, which is used every day for the justification of an overwhelming feeling. There has to be a medication.

            The article asserts that most people with BIID seem to be middle-class white men, which is interesting to me. What is it that they’re doing, or that they have in their genetics that makes them feel like they need to become disabled when they’re extremely healthy? Does environment take part in it, does what they eat, or is it just genetics, or a mental disorder? At the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, neurologists have started studying the brain scans of people with BIID. McGeoch says, “What’s suggested from this is that because of this dysfunction in the right parietal lobe, this sense of unified body image isn’t formed, the senses don’t coalesce. So, for a leg, for example, they can feel that it’s there but it doesn’t feel like it should be there. It feels surplus. Something’s gone wrong.”

My reaction to someone choosing to be disabled is that mentally there is something wrong. I don’t understand when living in a world with so many disabilities and disorders, someone would want to live their healthy life that way. In the article, it is talked about how people whom are disabled are repulsed by the idea that someone would intentionally disable himself or herself. Nancy Starnes, the Senior Vice President of the National Organization on Disability, believes that although the Americans With Disabilities Act states that anyone who appears to have a disability is protected, people with Body Integrity Identity Disorder “would be treated the same way anybody with a mental health problem would be treated.” I agree completely with her view on this issue, as I don’t think it should be socially acceptable for people to just start removing parts of their bodies because of a mental feeling. There should be a medication made to deal with this disorder.

Body and Health Perfection

           Have you ever walked into the gym just for a quick run on the treadmill or the bicycle and just watched all the people who have been there for hours going as hard as they could? Lifting weights that are heavier than you? People who eat, sleep, and live at the gym? People view working out as a form of discipline over their bodies and a lot of the time reaching a specific body goal. Having good health doesn’t necessarily mean a person has to body build or work out every single day; it’s someone taking care of themself physically, mentally and emotionally as well as having a good diet, hygiene and being successfully comfortable with a good paying job. Although they illustrate health and perfection differently, two portrayals are Roxanne Edwards and Heather Cassils.

            When focusing in on Roxanne Edwards and Heather Cassils, the question of whether there is a single form of health comes to mind. Roxanne Edwards is a woman body builder who views body building to be about nothing but absolute failure because there’s always more to achieve. In her interview, “Roxanne Edwards is superhuman” by S. Adrian Massey, there is a discussion about how people view women to physically look which is usually a thin flat stomach, big breasts and an hourglass figure, and Roxanne Edward’s addresses her pride in who she is and what she looks like. After being asked if she felt herself to be considered superhuman by her appearance and her lifestyle, she elaborates on how she views herself to be a different kind of a woman, and she just wants to be socially accepted. She says, “I wear my strength outward. Many women are strong but they choose to keep that shit to themselves,” and she later talks about femininity being about how someone carries themselves using drag queens as an example of true femininity. “I learned from drag queens how to walk in heels. They taught me a lot about what it’s like to be feminine.”  

            “If it comes to me and some chick who’s lighter, not saying she’s white, but just lighter than me, and we’re the same size, we’re the same look, and I have better muscles, she’s probably going to get picked better than me. She’s marketable, she’s more acceptable to be mass marketed.” She then asserts herself and states her reasoning for being so determined in the body building world; it’s not about defining herself, but showing other women that they can define themselves in any way that they want to. This is significant because Heather Cassils, a transgender person, purpose is to achieve a body that cannot be characterized as a man or woman.

            Heather Cassils is a physical trainer and uses working as a social experiment to see what a woman’s body can be pushed to become, and to explore what it’s like to be a transgender in modern society. In the article “Cuts” by Heather Cassils, she talks about what she had to do in order to achieve “a confusing body that ruptured expectation”, including hiring a bodybuilding coach, nutritionist, and although she is against steroids, steroid use. This is essential and connects to Roxanne Edwards as Cassils uses steroids as a last option to reach her best, and Roxanne has the attitude that whatever can benefit her, steroids in this case, she will use and she really doesn’t care about it. 

Roxanne Edward's Interview and Photos

Many people believe that a healthy body image for a woman is to have a thin figure, with muscular calves, skinny thighs and a flat stomach. I think that people have a hard time referring to Roxanne Edward’s body image as what is considered to be the “usual healthy body” because she does have a lot of muscles, and is not the typical woman who we see walking around everyday. In my opinion, Roxanne Edward’s body image is not the icon healthy image for a woman but there is nothing wrong with it. After being asked if she felt herself to be considered superhuman or transhuman by the way that she takes care of her body and lives her life, or if she sees herself to be more superior than the women around her, she elaborates on how she sees herself just to be a different version of a woman, and she just wish she were accepted.

Roxanne Edward’s started lifting at thirty years old, which may be viewed as kind of old to start the habit considering woman begin to have a harder time maintaining a work out schedule after they reach a certain age. She takes multivitamins every single day, and she has taken steroids that were “harder on stage” as she became “see-through” with her lungs being visible on stage and only appearing to be “muscle, eyes and teeth”. I would not consider the way she treats her body to be the same way I treat mine, as I do not work out. I’ve stayed fit through my dancing hobby since I was a little girl. I do take vitamins but if I were to miss a few days, it wouldn’t be a big deal to me. Her lifestyle may be much healthier than mine but it is similar in the aspect where we both have fast metabolisms and can eat whatever we like without worrying about it hurting our figure.

In her interview, Roxanne discusses her views on femininity, and race as a body builder. She says, “I wear my strength outward. Many women are strong but they choose to keep that shit to themselves.” Roxanne believes that she should be able to express her femininity in her body, and by bodybuilding. She further elaborates talking about how she feels that femininity is how you carry yourself. She uses drag queens as her example when she says, “I learned from drag queens how to walk in heels. They taught me a lot about what it’s like to be feminine.”

“If it comes to me and some chick who’s lighter, not saying she’s white, but just lighter than me, and we’re the same size, we’re the same look, and I have better muscles, she’s probably going to get picked better than me. She’s marketable, she’s more acceptable to be mass marketed”, she says and further elaborates on how she’s not going to quit because she doesn’t do it to define herself but to show other women that they can be defined in any way that they want to. “I would never knock another woman’s hustle. You gotta’ do what you gotta’ do to pay your bills.” She further uses repetition to get her point across that she feels strongly about this as she says, “and I show up”. That’s powerful to the people listening to her interview because they can tell how seriously she feels, and it can be seen as much more inspirational.

The photo gallery repulsed me a little because I couldn’t really tell that she was a woman as none of her body parts seemed feminine or girly to me. My reactions are coming from what I’m used to seeing as a very girly girl, and what I could consider being a girly and feminine body. I can understand why people wouldn’t feel comfortable with a body like hers and why it may be hard for people to look at or understand as her body looks a lot like a male’s ideal body.