Able-bodied Norwegian man identifies as disabled woman

A Norwegian man with no physical disabilities has decided to self-identify as a disabled woman.

Jørund Alme told Good Morning Norway (GMN) that he always wished he had been born a woman who was paralysed from the waist down. He uses a wheelchair “almost all the time” even though his legs are completely healthy.

The 53-year-old senior credit analyst from Oslo has received positive media coverage since first identifying as ‘trans-abled’ in 2020, but his recent television appearance raised substantial criticism.

Insult

Alme, who claims to experience Body Integrity Identity Disorder said: “I hope that no one takes it badly that I use the wheelchair as an aid, because it helps me.”

Earlier this year, he told another Norwegian news outlet: “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 paralysed from the waist down.”

Days after his appearance on GMN, the show’s broadcaster TV2 featured the perspectives of four disabled women during a news program.

Noomi Alexandersen, who suffers from cerebral palsy, said Alme’s “identity” felt like an insult to the disabled community.

Mockery

On Twitter one user wrote: “This is so insulting. I’m a wheelchair user. I went through excruciating pain with spinal & neurological damage. It’s not a joke & this to me is mocking me & others who’ve suffered awfully.”

In 2015, a married Canadian man left his wife and seven children to live as if he was a ‘six-year-old girl’.

That same year, Rachel Dolezal, a white American woman, drew criticism for self-identifying as a black woman. She argued that race should also be considered changeable, saying race is “less biological than gender”.

Gender self-ID

The Scottish Government’s Bill to allow people as young as 16 to choose their own legal sex has now passed stage two in Holyrood, with a committee of MSPs rejecting the vast majority of proposed amendments.

The proposed legislation makes it much easier to change legal sex by removing the need for medical evidence and reducing the two-year waiting period to three months. It extends ‘sex swaps’ to 16-year-olds as long as they wait an extra three months.

MSP John Mason, one of the SNP politicians who voted against the Bill, told Holyrood that “biological sex cannot be changed” and he feared the legislation sends “out the message that the distinctions between male and female are not really relevant”.