A North Carolina woman recently appeared on the television shows “The Doctors” and “Dr. Phil” to explain that she had a psychologist droplet drain cleaner in her eyes out of her desire to be blind.
“It’s your body,” Amber “Jewel” Shuping said. “You should be able to do what you want to do with it.”
Shuping outlined that as a child she was considered legally blind without eyeglasses, and began thinking that she should have been born blind.
“It got to the point where I felt that I shouldn’t be seeing at all,” she said. “I felt imprisoned by my sight.”
“People depend way too much on their eyesight,” Shuping asserted. “People think of blindness as a disability. I think of being empowered and being free when I think of being blind.”
She said that she would lay in the grass and stare at the sun for hours after her mother told her doing so would blind her, but it didn’t work. Years later, Shuping joined a group for people who had the same desire and learned how to pretend to be blind as she walked with a cane.
At age 23, after meeting a psychologist online, she decided that she wanted to have drain cleaner poured in her eyes so that she could become blind for real.
“I put all my time into researching how to go blind,” Shuping said, explaining that she soon traveled to Chicago to have the psychologist carry out the plan. “I was 23 years old and I had waited all of my life for this chance.”
She explained that the moment the drain cleaner left the dropper and hit her eyes, she was in excruciating pain, but yet was glad because she would now be blind.
“The drain cleaner had eaten through my eyelids and my eyes,” Shuping stated. “With all the pain, all I could think was, Yes, this is going to work. I’m going to be blind.”
The two then waited for 30 minutes and then went to the hospital, where they lied by telling medical staff that it was all an accident. Doctors tried to save her eyesight, but she got worse with each passing week and has spent the last seven years living blind.
“Why would a psychologist do that?” Dr. Phil McGraw asked Shuping.
“Doctors won’t do it because they believe its unethical,” she replied.
“Did it occur to you that maybe they were right?” McGraw asked.
Shuping’s condition has been classified as Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). The term “transabled” has also been used to describe persons like Shuping.
An article published by a Canadian newspaper in June outlined that now following transgenderism are reports of a class of people who believe that they are disabled people trapped in a healthy person’s body—and are going so far as to injure and maim themselves so that they can align with their preferred identity.
“As the public begins to embrace people who identify as transgender, the trans people within the disability movement are also seeking their due, or at very least a bit of understanding in a public that cannot fathom why anyone would want to be anything other than healthy and mobile,” Sarah Boesveld with the National Post wrote on June 3.
One of the experts on the matter cited in her article included Clive Baldwin, an associate professor of social work at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, who has interviewed nearly 40 “transabled” persons. Baldwin also appeared on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” in which he further explained the condition, which is also known as Body Alignment Integrity Disorder.
“[I]t’s usually a very specific disability that people want,” he said. “It might be an above left knee amputation, or a right below elbow amputation. Some people want to be paralyzed. They don’t want their legs to work.”
Others have also expressed concern over the concept. Marsha West of Berean Research said that with “trans” persons becoming more vocal in today’s society, right and wrong is further becoming muddled.
“What’s really at issue here is that it’s no longer deemed appropriate to view people as having psychological disorders—and the fact of the matter is that trans-people do have a psychological disorder,” she wrote in a blog post earlier this month. “Because the Left is bent on making the most perverted and bizarre human behaviors ‘normal,’ pretty much anything goes in our moral relativistic society.”
