Helping those with BIID

Since we introduced BIID – Body Identity Integrity Disorder – as a selection in the profile options for interests when registering here, 107 people have selected it as one of their areas of personal interest. (Others may do so by changing their options under “Forum Actions” at the top of the page, then selecting “Edit Profile” in the drop-down menu.) I mention this because I did a member search to find how many of us there are here. (I do have a motive.)

In September I will be making a presentation at the WPATH conference in Atlanta regarding BIID, on a panel with others (including our Jesus) who are presenting on Male-to-Eunuch as a valid gender identity. As a result, I am gathering information for my talk. One thing that is important to do in something like this is to present the experience of others with direct and powerful quotations. It can’t all be my personal experience.

Generally, most people who experience BIID have all or a combination of the following symptoms:

A. An intense and persistent desire to become physically disabled in a significant way. According to one recent book on the subject, castration (32%) is the most frequent desire, followed by removal of a lower limb (25%).

B. Persistent discomfort, or intense feelings of inappropriateness concerning current non-disabled body configuration.

C. The desire to become physically disabled results in harmful consequences, as manifested by either (or both) of the following:

(1) the preoccupation with the desire (including time spent pretending to be disabled) significantly interferes with productivity, with leisure activities, or with social functioning.

(2) attempts to actually become disabled have resulted in the person putting his or her health or life in significant jeopardy.

D) Repeated episodes of depression and sometimes suicidal thoughts or attempts; who knows how many completed.

E) Rehearsal activity (pretending or “play”) during which they imitate the impaired state in private and in public. Here, the use of banding of the testicles is common. Sometimes, there have been plans of self-injury to achieve impairment.

If you experience BIID in your life, what is your experience? When did you first experience the sense of a limb or appendage being out of place or wrong (i.e., testicles felt alien, didn’t belong), how old were you? Circumstances? (for example, many people remember farm castrations, and felt interested afterward). Do you experience any sexual arousal from thinking about losing the alien body part? If you have achieved your proper state (i.e., have been castrated, had a penectomy, etc.) what is your related sexual desire, if any, now, or is there any? If castrated, what are your thoughts about maintaining testosterone levels?

I’ve just scratched the surface of the many questions that can be asked, and should be asked so there can be greater understanding and acceptance of anyone who experiences BIID. Please do not be limited by what little I have asked

Do tell me your story, your thoughts, your feelings. You can do so by Private Message (click on my name at the upper left of this post and then on Private Message on the drop-down menu), by posting here on this thread, or by email to eakristoff @ hotmail.com (please put BIID in the subject line).

The goal of my presentation is to convince more medical and counseling practitioners, many of whom will be in the audience, that BIID requires treatment that may include amputation of the “offending part” by a proper surgeon. I promise anonymity, but your stories may help those with BIID to get the medical help they desire.

I very much appreciate hearing from those I already have, and look forward to hearing your story, as well. Thanks.

Kristoff

FYI

Amputation on request

By Alex Mensaert

Did you know that there are people who want to have a disability? Most of them want an amputation. They are called wannabes. During the last years they had so many different names; Apotemnophile, BDD, BIID... Did you know that there are people attracted to disability & amputees. They are called devotees. Alex, the writer of this book explains more about his investigations and meetings with wannabes and admirers of amputees. Some people think that Alex is also a wannabe. Is he? -And what does he think about them?. Alex met a lot of devotees, mostly female admirers and tell his stories about relations he had with them. Some Chinese man even pay a woman to become an amputee. What is a wannabe, what is a need-to-be, why do some people are pretenders? You all will find it out in this book, written by Alex who is a triple amputee

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/a ... t/16296403

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I paid for and downloaded Mensaert's book, and read it (took about 20 minutes).

For all I yet understand, it may be accurate to allow that my life came with a form of BIID about as intense as ever happens. Yet, for this to make any sort of intelligible sense, it might be useful to allow that the human brain is an aspect of the human body, and that a person's sense of identity may somehow transcend what may commonly be deemed the purely physical. Perhaps, however, there is more to the physical world than human mental models of physical reality yet include.

BIID is, methinks, a person's manifest encounter with a disability, the treatment (surgeries?) for which, if done wisely, corrects the disability. In the model of BIID that makes useful sense to me, surgeries in response to BIID do not result in disability, and surgeries are not sought with the actual intent of disability; rather, the surgeries correct the actual disability when such surgeries are appropriately done.

My disability was a biological proclivity for cancer, such as that from which my dad and brother died. Surgeries that removed my colon, a duodenal polyp, many rectal stump polyps, testicles, and (after 20 years) testicular implants, were all done with the intent of minimizing my being disabled by being dead from terminal cancer or worse. I never sought to be disabled, but to minimize disability from a total-life functional stance.

During the three or so years (mid 1986 to mid 1989) when I was mostly a psychiatric inpatient in consequence of iatrogenic conditions based on diagnostic blunders, I lived with a diverse assortment of normal (to me) people which supposedly normal people might mistakenly deem abnormal. Among my normal inpatient peers were some who had done various forms of what I guess would usefully be recognized as BIID remediation attempts (wrist-slashing, for instance?). What if a person's BIID is merely being alive? What can actually correct such a disorder?

I hold the view that my sought and achieved amputations (colon, polyps, testicles, testicular implants, haircuts, trimmed fingernails and toe nails, a few plantar warts, and whatever else) have all been appropriate ways of my staying usefully alive as a perhaps-useful member of human society.

Were I to work at making sense of what disability really is, and is about, I would find that the basis of the notion of disability is the mistaken belief that anything ever happens, as it happens, other than as is necessary and sufficient.

biid is a new term, but reading the list of symptoms i can see where i fit as having had biid

you have my permission to use the experences that i wrote in my progress thread or contact me with more spacific

questions any thing to ferther our cause

I hope you took notes last night on the phone.

I'm surprised that there hasn't been a much greater response here. Kristoff is preparing a presentation to the one group that would best be able to help those with BIID to obtain the professional help that they need – both counselors and surgeons. Personal stories are a powerful tool to gain the acceptance that's needed.

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I have been working away at a much more detailed account of my life encounters with what might indeed usefully be named BIID. One issue that has made writing hard for me is my sense that BIID is not necessarily an alternative to MtF, FtM, MtE, and perhaps FtE (total hysterectomy is what sort of gender change?).

To me, differential diagnosis without complementary integral diagnosis leads toward tragic errors of diagnostic classification in sometimes unpredictable-in-advance ways.

Perhaps I can somewhat illustrate what I intend to mean...

From around the time I began talking, and, if my memory is accurate, well before then, my brain/mind has informed me that my life has been as though I got "the wrong body." Alas, a purely female body, as best I can read my brain/mind, would somewhat less wrong, though still wrong. About the time it became vividly clear to me that it was as though I got the wrong body, I came to the understanding that the right body for my life was the wrong body for my brain/mind. There is more to my life than my brain/mind.

Once I had run the system dynamics model of my plausible cancer risk with respect to testicles and colon, using Bayesian a-priori probability estimating, there was not likely any power on planet earth that was going to make me keep what I figured would kill my brain and everything else of my body, and I set out to save everything I could find a way to save.

Yes, I would agree that high cancer risk based on family history might be deemed a more appropriate cause for surgical removal of body parts, and no, I totally disagree with any such deeming. A person who has no realizable ability to live a satisfactory life is, it seems to me, dead while still alive. Only some form of prejudicial stigma would allow me to deem my reasons for body part removal surgeries to be wiser, better, or more appropriate than the reasons anyone else might have.

That said, if surgery is done as a way of acting out a displacement (the result of trauma?), then a person may end up regretting having had surgery because the surgery would only deal with the symptoms, and not the actual cause, of the distress basis for surgery. Knowing this, as a psychological principle, I made sure that my choices for surgery were not displacement based. And I have no regrets about the orchiectomy, the colectomy, or any other surgery I have had, because they were carefully considered and I had made as sure as I could that the surgeries would actually correct a real body problem and not merely palliate symptoms or fantasies.

I strongly suggest not comparing my life with the lives of others, as the way in which I am autistic (not being able to think in words or pictures) may give me pragmatic access to ways of thinking not readily available to many other folks.

For now, I regard transgenderism as a proper subset of BIID, because I favor integral diagnosis over differential diagnosis when more than one condition being diagnosed is present.