It appears society has fallen victim to the dystopic view, resigned to a future in which the horrid imaginings in the recesses of our minds have become the everyday. Truly, some of the things we have today--miniskirts, death metal, autopsy--would shock the mind of a Victorian era time traveler glimpsing what lay in store for his/her descendants. But now that you and I are literally living this horror, is it so bad? Are our minds and bodies now victims of mercilessly sinful lifestyles with no hope for redemption? This is a purely rhetorical question, of course, but for some, who pine for the times where morals were absolute, class determined by birth and authority figures were unquestionable, this is humankind's dystopia.
Imagine for a moment that your present condition was unbearable. You are living in dystopia, and you know there are better ways! You are quite literally a cyborg in the sci-fi sense, a human being that was born and raised embedded inside a machine that augments you...but you want to experience what it is like in your 'natural' state. You want to disconnect these robotic pieces that make you supposedly 'better' and find out what 'worse' is in order to compare it to your augmented state. Would we not want the ability to shed our shackles and breathe the free air; to choose for ourselves that which was determined for us before we had the voice to speak up?
What if this 'augmentation' was an extra arm? A leg?
It appears, on the outside, to be a piece that everyone should have been born with in the first place. And we are--we are born with two arms and legs, because that's the way it's always been. But if you are an Apotemnophiliac, it doesn't matter that this limb is perfectly matched to you. Your 'natural' state is without this extra, augmented piece. The point I am attempting to make here is that people should have the NEARLY unlimited choice to improve their own quality of life, and if it means that they remove their limbs in order to become 'whole', so be it.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have those who wish to augment further. I say 'further', because we, as humans, possess a state which has already been augmented since before our births by the efforts of those who came before us. Nikolas Rose succinctly stated "...but were we ever just 'human'--were our capacities ever so natural? I doubt it; humans have never been "natural," and at least since the invention of language we have been augmenting our capacities through intellectual, material, and human technologies." Thus, we became cyborgs ever since we adopted the technologies and ideas of those who wanted our waste separated from our living spaces and food sources; who wanted climate control to bear the harshest Minnesota winters; who wanted to live past the ripe old age of 30. After all, in our 'natural' state, we would likely still be gathering berries and hunting buffalo who would have long since probably gone extinct from our efforts.
My biopolitical stance, then, is you are free to make the choice that would make you more whole. If you've gotta have those bigger breasts to feel okay about yourself walking down the street, do it. If you can't bear that second arm another minute longer, you can get it removed. But here's the inevitable catch--no one in society is required to indulge your request; you must either solve the problem yourself (unlikely for limb removal) or find a willing participant. You might have finally found a surgeon willing to get that limb off for the right price, but your insurance company would very likely laugh at the idea of funding the procedure. So you've now got two choices: get obscenely rich and pay for it yourself, or get to work changing society's perception on whether your condition is truly a medical need.
Have hope! Society adopts the outliers, over time, as long as they become more prevalent. Sooner or later, apotemnophilia may cease to be a disorder and simply become a different part of "the order", given enough support. Certain aspects of our culture would be downright freakish to those living 200 years ago, yet this is no Orwellian or Huxleyan--or More-ian-- future. We have taken that sexualized, rock and roll, clinical culture and made it our own. Every one of us is a member of the same society that defined these things as 'acceptable' or 'unacceptable', and because we all have input in it, these definitions are fluid.
We definitely don't live in Utopia, but what we got ain't so bad.
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