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Close-up of scrub nurse taking medical instruments
Image Credit: Liudmila Dutko - Adobe Stock
Humanize From Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism
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What Comes after Transgender? Doctor Amputates Man’s Healthy Fingers

Originally published at National Review
Categories
Health Care
Patient Care
Transgenderism

I have long predicted that normalizing transgender surgeries would be followed eventually by doctors intentionally disabling patients with Body Identity Integrity Disorder (BIID). These patients obsess that their “true selves” are quadriplegic, or amputees, or blind, and they yearn to be made that way. It is a real and anguishing condition. Some are now even calling the affliction “transable” (get it?).

Well, here it comes. A doctor in Quebec “treated” a BIID patient by amputating two of his healthy fingers. Otherwise, the patient was threatening to mutilate himself. From the National Post story:

The fact that there were only two fingers involved in the Quebec case, as opposed to a complete limb, made the decision to proceed easier for the medical team, Nadeau said.

For the patient, amputation “proved to be a highly satisfying curative treatment,” she reported.

“He is now living a life free from distressing preoccupations about his fingers, with all his symptoms related to BID resolved,” Nadeau wrote. “The amputation enabled him to live in alignment with his perceived identity.”

Is anyone surprised, given the current cultural trends? After all, what is the material difference morally and in principle between surgically altering transgendered patients’ genitals and amputating healthy limbs or snipping the fully functioning spinal cords of BIID patients?

I fear the worst. We are creating a world in which the subjective primarily matters. Radical individualism is now our societal avatar, with powerful forces — transhumanists, the medical establishment, bioethicists, the LGBT lobby — all urging that self-identity become the be all and end all of life, even when that means doctors disfiguring healthy bodies.

But Wesley, very few people suffer from BIID. True. But that’s also what they used to say about transgenderism. These things tend to be socially contagious.

The medical disciplines are being reconceived and redefined into technocratic functionaries. Unless this cultural moral bleeding is stanched, I give it ten, maybe 15 years before disabling surgery is permitted in Western hospitals — all covered by health insurance or government benefits.

What the next step will be after that is more than I can imagine.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.