Bradley Manning is not a woman

On that subject, elective amputations of healthy arms and legs are quietly offered as “treatment” for something we are expected to call Body Identity Integrity Disorder, which is “characterized by a burning and incessant desire to amputate an otherwise perfectly healthy limb,” in the words of Mo Costandi, a neurobiologist who writes a science column for the Guardian and advocates the procedure. The stories of these amputees trapped in amputationless bodies will sound familiar. “To date, there have been approximately 300 documented cases of BIID,” Mr. Costandi writes. “Most of these are male, almost all of whom desire amputation of a limb on the left side of the body. More often, it is the arm that is affected rather than the leg. All of these so-called ‘wannabe amputees’ know exactly where they want the limb to be cut off, to the millimetre, and almost all of them remember seeing an amputee at a very young age and thinking that they should have been born like that themselves. ‘When I was 3 years old, I met a young man who was completely missing all four of his fingers on his right hand,’ said one 21-year-old female BIID sufferer, ‘and ever since that time I have been fascinated by all amputees, especially women amputees who were missing parts of their arms and wore hook prostheses.’” Another patient says, “My left foot is not part of me.” (But it is.) There is a sexual component in many (but not all) of these voluntary amputations, a fetish documented as far back as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1906).

As with the invention of “personhood” in the abortion debate, we have created a metaphysical category — “identity” — in order to avoid talking about physical reality. In the case of sex-reassignment surgery, it is gender identity; in the case of those who want their left legs removed, it is body-integrity identity. The latter may seem shocking and exotic, but the former is no more defensible. But the question of sex reassignment is linked rhetorically and politically to the question of gay rights, though homosexuality is an entirely distinct and separate phenomenon under the emotional shadow of civil rights. It is a measure of the intellectual degradation of our times that the physical reality of these cases is considered, if it is considered at all, a distant second to the subjective impressions of people who are, not to put too fine a point on it, mentally ill and in need of treatment.