Canada: Amputations of Healthy Limbs

When health and self-image are conflated into one concept, there is no standard at all for what counts as “medical care.”

Canada–which has been having huge trouble providing basic medical care to its citizens–has jumped feet first into the critical medical studies pool of mind-melting acid. Not only are they all-in on mutilating “gender-affirming care,” but the country is now paying to lop off healthy limbs if the patient desires it. 

“in the era of “amputee-affirming care,” perhaps the public will one day behold the apotemnophilia flag fluttering prominently at the White House.”

There is no doubt in my mind that this could happen.

Brilliant piece by @johnmurawski https://t.co/c2WvrkINpA

— Mia (@_CryMiaRiver) April 8, 2024

Wait times for medical care in Canada are at record levels–although I hear that you can get killed by a doctor on an expedited basis. 

Among the provinces, Ontario recorded the shortest wait time at 21.6 weeks—still up from 20.3 weeks in 2022. Nova Scotia recorded the longest wait time in Canada at 56.7 weeks.

Among the various specialties, national wait times were longest between a referral by a GP and plastic (52.4 weeks), orthopaedic (44.3) neurosurgery (43.5). Wait times were shortest for radiation (4.4 weeks) and medical oncology treatments (4.8 weeks).

Patients also experience significant waiting times for various diagnostic technologies. This year, Canadians could expect to wait 6.6 weeks for a computed tomography (CT) scan, 12.9 weeks for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, and 5.3 weeks for an ultrasound.

Forty-four weeks for a neurosurgeon. If you need to see a neurosurgeon, those 44 weeks would be pretty stressful. Five weeks to begin cancer treatment. Seven weeks for a CT scan. And 13 weeks for an MRI. 

Geez. Imagine breaking your hip and waiting 44 weeks to get treatment. 

It makes sense that you have to wait, though. Doctors are too busy cutting off healthy limbs. 

Sensational news from late last week, that doctors amputated two fingers for a 20-year-old patient to alleviate the young man’s mental distress over being able-bodied, contained a buried clue: “He related his condition to gender dysphoria.”

It’s long been asserted by patients and doctors that the bodily dysphoria experienced by transgender people is very similar to another condition that is treated by cutting off body parts. Until recently, both conditions elicited horror, but today the gender variety is treated as heroic, while the other still evokes revulsion.

The amputee-wannabe condition was formerly known as apotemnophilia but is now called body integrity disorder (BID) or body integrity identity disorder (BIID). This condition is hugely important in our era of trans flags and nonbinary pronouns, not because a 20-year-old will live out the rest of his life with eight fingers but because it suggests another way of looking at “gender affirming care” without ideological sugarcoating.

No, this is not a bad joke. This is modern medicine, which for some reason is determined to affirm mental illness rather than treat it–even if “affirming” it means making a person less healthy. 

Actually, we already know the reason: this is the result of critical theory, which holds that reality exists only in the mind. This is why obesity is healthy, gender dysphoria requires surgery, and a person who desires an amputation or to be made blind or deaf should be accommodated. 

God forbid we try to actually help the person become mentally healthy, or at least reconciled to their condition through counseling. 

In Canada, suicide hotlines are for ordering, not for helping people overcome their depression. Do you feel you want to die? We can help! I promise you won’t regret it or complain about the outcome! 

Not one complaint yet. What other medical treatment can boast that record?

The parallels between BID and the trans movement go back decades, as explored in 2000 in an astonishingly prescient article in the Atlantic, titled “A New Way To Be Mad”. “Clinicians and patients alike often suggest that apotemnophilia is like gender-identity disorder,” the piece states, “and that amputation is like sex-reassignment surgery.”

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, when transgenderism and apotemnophilia were both exceedingly rare, the Atlantic prophesied that such disorders are ripe for social contagion: “when so many people profess uncertainty about who they really are, is it possible that the desire for this particular identity might spread?”

Now amputeeism is finally catching up. A 2018 ethics analysis in a Cambridge University Press publication concludes that there is “no logical difference between the conceptual status of BIID and transsexualism”. It goes on to say that, “given that individuals with transsexualism are offered gender reassignment surgery it seems to us that individuals with BIID ought at least to be considered for treatment, including elective amputation in some cases.”

This was, of course, predicted. And, as far as I know it wasn’t the Babylon Bee, for which they should be very ashamed. They are usually better than this. 

No, it was in the Atlantic in 2000. And the connection to transgenderism was made even then. 

The journalist Mia Hughes recently asked readers to imagine a society in which amputee advocates enjoyed the same cultural and political victories as trans advocates.

“Imagine there were a sudden 4000% increase in teens identifying as amputees, but we were all forbidden from being concerned. Instead we were supposed to celebrate it,” she posted on X. “Imagine schools teaching children as young as kindergarten that some people have amputee identities, that they get to choose how many limbs they have. Posters promoting body mutilation adorned the walls of many classrooms.”

There is little doubt that people with BIID suffer genuine distress. Making people less healthy, though, is just sick. 

Perhaps I am just “ableist.”

The basic problem here is simple: we no longer have any connection to a higher good: Nature or God. When you remove the standard by which health or goodness or judged the only thing left is whatever makes one feel good in the moment, whether it is good or not. 

People addicted to drugs want drugs. Alcoholics want alcohol. Sexual addicts want sex. Obese people want food. Children want candy all the time. 

These desires are objectively not good or healthy, but you can only say that with reference to a standard. If the only standard is appetite, then it is impossible to call the desire a disorder. 

If making healthy people disabled is the logical result of your ethical analysis, it’s time to rethink your moral framework. 

Unless you are a Canadian.