Losing Sight of Ourselves

Imagine a compulsion so insidious that it causes us to perceive the conditions of life as tyranny. An obsession urging us to see beyond our eyes, to stretch our field of vision outside the contours marked by the shape of our face, to take a knife to ourselves, as though vision were trapped in the oppressive capsule of the eye, ready to be liberated.

Several years ago, a North Carolinian woman called Amber Shuping flew to Chicago to meet with a psychologist who designed a procedure for her to undergo at home. This would consist of applying drain cleaner to her eyes.

I didn’t even look in the mirror to say goodbye to myself. I didn’t care. I wanted to be blind. It was a screaming, violent pain. The drain cleaner had eaten through my eyelids and my eyes. All I could think was yes, this is going to work.

Ms. Shuping suffered from Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), and the psychologist who aided in her blinding is not fundamentally different from the chemical castrating, hormone therapy administering, genital altering surgical industry that has grown up to service the transgender fixation.

Spanish political philosopher Miguel Angel Quintana Paz satirizes the views of the medical establishment, referring to the procedures that Spanish law, and those of other countries, recommends vis gender:

I am not saying that the first three-year-old child who expresses a desire to be blind should necessarily be made blind. But perhaps they could, little by little, be given medication that would cause them to lose their sight. At the age of 12, for example, if the parents refuse to allow their child to become blind, perhaps we could consider depriving them of their parental rights. Let a judge decide which children become blind and which do not. Above all, let the rule of law prevail. Finally, let us imagine that there are trans-blind people who wish to be treated as blind, but refuse to undergo any blinding operation. They see like you or I … but they feel blind. And they demand that we address them as such … they expect their ophthalmologist to treat them as if they could not see at all. Would this claim be legitimate? Should we impose fines on those who make a mistake and say offensive things to a trans-blind person, such as “look where you’re going” or “Hasta la vista!”? 

One cannot speak universal truths except by way of a particular language, and there is no such thing as a universal language whose words and grammar are somehow beyond culture.

A spiritually wholesome, care-taking ethos understands transcendent, universal truths as cascading down into particular, linguistic expression, just as it understands the beatific vision as somehow continuous with ordinary senses, or human freedom as manifesting in our delimited, physical features. 

Our freedom is not contradicted by determinate conditions like gender binaries; the stratospheric is not contradicted by the atmospheric; transcendence is not opposed to imminence. 

The opposite view can present in two forms: it will either deny transcendence such that the whims of a human will captured by strong mental fixations (like the powerful desire to surgically alter our bodies) becomes our supreme criterion, or it will believe in a sinister transcendence, a violent divine at odds with the harmony of our senses, structures like gender, and so on.

The bloody rites of human sacrifice return, worming themselves into people’s minds, demanding amputation and mutilation in the name of self-transcendence.