A man in Norway is sparking outrage on social media after he was sympathetically interviewed about his decision to begin identifying as a disabled woman.
On October 28,
Good Morning Norway (
God Morgen Norge, GMN) aired an interview with Jørund Viktoria Alme, 53, an able-bodied male who now identifies as a disabled woman. In the interview, Alme stated that he had always wished he had been born a woman who was paralyzed from the waist down.
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Despite having no physical handicaps, Alme currently utilizes a wheelchair “almost all the time.”
In addition to gender dysphoria, Alme claims to have a Body Integrity Disorder (BID), citing a “dissonance” between how he perceives himself and how his body functions. “I have struggled with this every day my whole life,” Alme told
Vi, a Norwegian outlet, earlier this year.
“It is a cognitive dissonance: in the same way that I experience being a woman in a man’s body, I experience that I should have been paralyzed from the waist down. This is not a desire to be a burden on society. It is about the wheelchair being an aid for me to function in everyday life, both privately and at work,” Alme stated.
Criticism of Alme’s “identity” has been so substantial that Norway’s
TV 2 news program featured the perspectives of four disabled women in the days after his interview was broadcast on
GMN.
Emma Sofie Grimstad, 18, was one of several women who hit back at Alme’s disabled “identity.” Earlier this year Grimstad spent two months in a wheelchair after she contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome, an acute inflammatory disease which attacks the nerves and can cause paralysis.
Grimstad criticized Alme, referring to him as a “person with functional legs who chooses to sit in a wheelchair,” and pointed out that “there are many who don’t have that choice.”
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Immediately following the women’s critical remarks,
TV 2 provided a definition of Body Integrity Disorder (BID). The brief statement sympathetically portrayed Alme as having a “deep feeling that certain body parts or functions feel foreign or do not belong.”
Following this, Alme responded to criticism leveled against him.
“I have struggled with my own shame and prejudices for 50 years before I was so bothered by BID that I finally had to open up about it,” Alme told
TV 2. Alme went on to say that he aims to facilitate “diversity and inclusion.”
TV 2‘s statement on BID, sometimes also called
Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), also referenced a condition called
apotmenophilia, which is
defined in medical research as “a syndrome in which a person is preoccupied with the desire to amputate a healthy limb.” The term was coined by sexologist John Money in 1977, after he spoke with men who wanted to become amputees because they found the idea sexually arousing.
Money is largely credited as having coined the most commonly understood concept of “gender identity.”
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In September, Alme
confessed to iNyheter that his identity as a disabled woman was sexually motivated. When the question of whether or not he was acting on the impulse to live out a sexual fetish was broached, Alme replied, “I don’t know, maybe so.”
“I often hunted for beautiful shoes that I bought for Agnes. Once I found a pair of shoes for her. Then I discovered that they had a pair of shoes in a large size. So I bought them too. There was a lot of excitement in buying a pair of shoes with high heels,” Alme told
Vi.
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Since airing the interview with Alme,
Good Morning Norway has received numerous outraged replies posted under the article on their Facebook page.
One woman, the mother of a child with a disability, remarked that she had to undergo a difficult application process in order to receive financial assistance when purchasing a wheelchair. Another commenter called Alme’s “identity” a “mockery,” while another suggested that he had a sexual fetish for the disabled.
Good Morning Norway stated in their post that they would be actively deleting “offensive” replies. One individual claimed to have seen 900 comments to the article the day prior, and expressed shock that at the time of his reply, only 47 comments were available.
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