involves people wanting to do a lot of different things to their bodies, is it considered a substantial possibility that the disorder (Maybe it should be called an anomaly) is actually a complex of different conditions which are related only in that they involve individuals seeking amputation of a body part? Something which, to the average person, appears that drastic might be the result of one rather extreme mental circumstance in all cases, but since different parts of the body and different degrees of removal are involved, it seems conceivable that a variety of influences are at work. I also have to wonder, having seen some really striking tattoos on BME, whether certain individuals' desires for various types of tattoos might have a relationship to that kind of identity disorder.
And you have to figure that some of the people who might outwardly appear normal, apart from their desire to have some body part amputated, might actually be clinically insane--or perhaps there is a spectrum of sanity levels in the people involved. That wouldn't be surprising, since it seems to be the case in other types of disorders.
Which raises the question of whether the presence of both disorders, or anomalies, simultaneously, Gender Identity and Body Integrity Identity, characterizes some archive members. Also, are there historical records that show a persistent tendency in small numbers of people to want amputation of parts--or, as Post #1 suggests, is this perhaps a result of environmental factors which have only been present in modern times? As I suppose many of you know, cancer rates today are thought to be many times as great, for certain types of cancer, as the rates were prior to the industrial
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revolution some two and a half centuries ago.
You make some very good points. I'm not an expert in anyway but I think (and its only an opinion) its clear that if you have serious mental illness that causes you to want to remove your arms and legs it is a serious "disorder." "Curing" this type of individual by chopping off his or her limbs would be treating the symptoms and not the disease. I think if you have a certifiable "sane" person who has a gender disorder and wants to undergo hormone treatments and SRS that your addressing the source of the problem and not a symptom. *Unless there is some new magic treatment that causes a person with gender disorders to be "fixed" back the other way that I've never heard of. I tend to see things in a rather black and white way (No Black jokes!) Thus I am not too keen on the "Fetish" slant on genital surgery for example.
So this is all probably to simplistic but thats my 2 cents worth.