Transgender Is Here; Is Transabled Next?

by Bob Allen 

Transabled means people claim to have an inner identity that is disabled and demand that their bodies be altered to match “what’s inside.” Sound familiar?
This is not The Onion. This is a real story from the Canadian National Post: “Becoming disabled by choice, not chance: ‘Transabled’ people feel like impostors in their fully working bodies.”

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.”

Researchers in Canada are trying to better understand how transabled people think and feel. Clive Baldwin, a Canada Research Chair in Narrative Studies who teaches social work at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B., has interviewed 37 people worldwide who identify as transabled.

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.

Transgendered… transabled… people alienated from God manufacture countless ways to express that sense of alienation in increasingly grotesque and saddening forms. They suppress the truth that their root disaffection is rebellion against the Creator, and absent God’s freely offered solution in the Messiah, Jesus, men futilely seek everywhere for peace.
Bruce Jenner ascended the summit of human physical achievement in the Olympics… and found it fleeting. He married into what the world sees as the most glamorous of female satisfaction… and found it hollow. His heart, and those of the “transabled” in this article, have an ache only God can satisfy, yet each persists in looking everywhere else to assuage the gnawing pain in his or her soul. They can deface their bodies… but it will not bring peace. Only Jesus can do that. Only Jesus

We are made to seek our identity in Christ, and short of that, we find innumerable substitutes—many of them incredibly destructive to mind, life, and limb. I do not laugh at these people—and neither should you! I hurt for them. I pray for God to raise up faithful followers who will proclaim the Good News that although things are, indeed, messed up beyond recognition, God Himself has paid the full penalty for our rebellion, and offers to apply that satisfaction to our account when we acknowledge and turn from our sin, and cast ourselves on God’s mercy.
The Bible records times in history when men have gone mad in their brokenness. It’s very clear we live in such a time. Heaven weeps.