Failure to regulate doctors: surgeon amputates two healthy fingers from man with body integrity dysphoria

[Calllalllama]

This article ties in with something that I have been thinking for a while that the gender surgeries were allowed to flourish because we have started prioritising the mind over the body.
Perhaps it's an attitude in society that everyone should 'be who you want to be.'

It may have been plastic surgery that lowered the boundary between health and bodily autonomy and after that regulations were lowered ending up with very experimental surgeries such as breast amputations, phalloplasty to mimic the other sex and now 'nullo' surgeries which bare no resemblance to anything natural.

Canada's MAiD programme for assisted dying is moving in the direction of travel towards being given to younger people with mental health problems and also in Canada this case of body integrity disorder is the natural successor to trans surgeries- fixing and 'internal state of mind' by removing healthy body parts.

Surgeons will experiment up to the point they are allowed to, and this prioritisation of how you feel inside instead of your bodily integrity is worrying.

https://queerdoc.com/nullectomy-nullification/

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/15/canadian-doctor-amputates-healthy-fingers-of-man-with-body-integrity-dysphoria/

The boundaries around "it's my body I can do what I want with it" do seem to have stretched a lot recently. Especially were it involves other people, either directly or indirectly.
The Canadian who wants both a penis and a vagina being a recent standout example.
I understand, even if I styrongly disagree with it, the concept of trying to change sex. But what's being argued for in having you cake and eating it, is and end result that does not naturally occur. To have it performed and paid for by other people as a 'right' seems ludicrous to me.
Every so often I read a story about how someone travelled abroad for cheap cosmetic surgery, and it went wrong with unpleasant results. The stories are fairly regular, they keep happening. People are not being put off by the stories.
The mindset of "don't like it change it" seems very deeply embedded in today's culture.
I'm mostly ok with people doing what they want to their bodies where it doesn't affect other people, but I do think a few cases mental care and support would be a much better course of action that removing healthy body parts. Where it starts affecting others around I am far less accomodating.
Where does this end? If it's your 'right' to have a penis and a vagina, then why can't you have two penises or two vaginas? Why stick to the groin area, slap them down wherever you fancy. I think the genie is out of the bottle, but it's not a particularly kind or caring genie, it's the sort of genie that loves to turn wishes into curses.

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."

Presumably you are talking about a man in the Canada case? I think a lot more doctors telling the truth would help.

He will never have a vagina. He could have an additional (blind ended) orifice created that would need to be maintained so that his body didn’t try and heal it shut.

I'm not sure that assisted dying as a response to extreme mental suffering is related to surgery to address conditions such as body dysphoria.

The former is an acceptance of the reality that, like many physical illnesses, not all mental health conditions are responsive to treatment, and that in very extreme situations where there is no prospect of improvement, the degree of suffering that the individual is experiencing is incompatible with any kind of tolerable existence.

The second is almost the opposite of acceptance, based on the belief that physical surgery can be an approptiate, effective and desirable fix for mental health conditions.

There's nothing new about this. In the 1990s there was a surgeon in Scotland who amputated the healthy limbs of several patients.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/625680.stm

One of his patients explains how much better he feels after his surgery.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/632856.stm

More here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/

Archive version:
https://archive.is/OsvZ6

I'm guessing that the doctor's argument is that (as has happened in cases where people have been convinced that their leg (for example) doesn't really belong to them) people with this kind of body dysphoria will attempt to damage their own bodies in a way that will require surgical attention to bring about the outcome they desire, and that this is intrinsically more dangerous than going along with their desires.

The logical destination there is a society that learns all it has to do is threaten to "do something" to get whatever they want. And I'm not sure that's a happy place.

Where does this end? If it's your 'right' to have a penis and a vagina, then why can't you have two penises or two vaginas? Why stick to the groin area, slap them down wherever you fancy.

Slightly off topic, but I read a science fiction short story years ago where this was the premise, although they must have been able to make functional genitalia, at least for sexual purposes. People were having vaginas and penises created all over themselves. I can't remember the details of what problems occurred but it ended up with one of the plastic surgery companies advertising a service that would remove all of your 'additions' and the advert showed two grotesque bodies which were unzipped somehow and a normal man and a woman stepped out and walked off into the sunset together.
🙄

How are these 'medically sanctioned' body modifications any different from 'extreme body mods'?

Why aren't tongue splitting, elf-ears, horn implants, eyeball tattoos, done by cosmetic surgeons at patients' requests?

If belief-affirming surgeries, such amputating organs because of dysphorias, or creating facsimiles of organs that are not genetically appropriate, are carried out by HCPs in the name of medicine, would Dennis Avner aka Stalking Cat now have his transformation carried out by doctors and surgeons.

Why not?

That poor poor man. Not a big surprise to find out he died by suicide. How do you live like that on a day to day basis? There’s a good reason why people are told ‘no’ for some requests.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/stalking-cat-dennis-avner-found-dead-in-apparent-suicide-after-years-of-body-modification-to-look-like-a-feline-8316569.html

I feel that assisted dying if offered to anyone who wants to commit suicide due to mental health problems will mostly affect women.
Men commit suicide a lot more than women because they are 'better' at using lethal force. Women try to commit suicide and often are often less successful.
The worry is that you offer a service and then it becomes fashionable or desirable the way trans has and Body Integrity disorder or assisted dying will be pushed for by activists as progressive.

So restraining surgeons with pesky things like ethics would fall into that then.

The sad thing about the fingers guy is that our brain's perception of the body is malleable. I read a fascinating book called "Livewired" by David Eagleman which was all about how our brains respond to sensory input and adapt to the loss of inputs, how our brain's model of the body can adapt to e.g. limb loss, or enhancement (not just biomechanic artificial limbs and other sense but also how our brain flexibly adapts to different models of inputs and outputs, e.g. learning to drive, adapting to drive on the opposite side of the road in foreign countries, flipping between the two, learning to cycle, rollerskate etc. )

I'd be really surprised if there wasn't a way of reintegrating the healthy fingers back into this guy's body map so they felt like part of him again.

But even leaving that aside, how could they be sure that he wouldn't have woken up from surgery horrified with the reality and irreversibility of what they had done. Or how could they be sure that the pattern of intrusive OCD thoughts about his fingers that had been whirring round his head wouldn't just transfer to another body part? It seems so reckless. 7 months of alternative treatment doesn't feel very long considering how people can recover after years of mental illness with good therapy.

I used to be supportive of assisted dying a la what Terry Pratchett and others called for. I thought of how it is seen as a necessary kindness with pets etc and seemed cruel to deny that to people.

But Canada's MAID has really challenged that for me, especially combined with the medical transitioning on the gender stuff. It seems rather too convenient when combined with the medical experiments they are doing with gender transition. Mess up people's healthy bodies and no worries if they regret ending up as a lifelong medical patient, they can always take advantage of MAID 😔

I'm also really aware having had depression before that things can seem like they'll never get better but then they do. Or people who suffer disabilities initially can't imagine enjoying life again with their new limitations but then do.

In general being online and relatively in control of how others perceive us (curated feeds, filtered images, avatars etc) I think results in more living in our heads instead of in our whole bodies and having reduced tolerance/familiarity for the messier bits of our physical lives.

There's a line or two in Sir Ken Robinson's TED talks about educating kids like they are floating heads/brains rather than whole bodies.

This is quite unpleasant to even contemplate, but it's incredibly relevant to this thread as a form of very extreme permanent body modification for what seems to me the most asinine of reasons. Please read text description before deciding to click - pictures warning.

"A furry froze his hands in liquid nitrogen and had to have them amputated so he could look more like a dog for his boyfriend…Who then left him weeks later."

https://twitter.com/GodfreyElfwick/status/1780310471356105095