OTTAWA — When he cut off his right arm with a “very sharp power tool,” a man who now calls himself One Hand Jason let everyone believe it was an accident.
But he had for months tried different means of cutting and crushing the limb that never quite felt like his own, training himself on first aid so he wouldn’t bleed to death, even practicing on animal parts sourced from a butcher.
“My goal was to get the job done with no hope of reconstruction or re-attachment, and I wanted some method that I could actually bring myself to do,” he told the body modification website ModBlog.
His goal was to become disabled.
People like Jason have been classified as ‘‘transabled’’ — feeling like imposters in their bodies, their arms and legs in full working order.
“We define transability as the desire or the need for a person identified as able-bodied by other people to transform his or her body to obtain a physical impairment,” says Alexandre Baril, a Quebec born academic who will present on “transability” at this week’s Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Ottawa.
“The person could want to become deaf, blind, amputee, paraplegic.
It’s a really, really strong desire.”
Most of them are men.
About half are in Germany and Switzerland, but he knows of a few in Canada.
Most crave an amputation or paralysis, though he has interviewed one person who wants his penis removed.
Another wants to be blind.
Many people, like One Hand Jason, arrange “accidents” to help achieve the goal.
One dropped an incredibly heavy concrete block on his legs — an attempt to injure himself so bad an amputation would be necessary.
But doctors saved the leg.
He limps, but it’s not the disability he wanted...
Read on. Much more!
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