Promise of Cure

This section returns to the contradictions built into cure and its promise that medical technology can align people’s bodies with what they desire. The author explores these contradictions by expanding on his story of chest reconstruction surgery, laying his desire for a flat chest alongside transabled people’s active choosing of disability. He declares his lifelong struggle to love his disabled self exactly as it is irreconcilable with his use of medical technology to reshape his gendered body. This theme of contradiction is continued through an examination of how gender transition is and is not connected to cure and of the differences and similarities between gender transition and weight loss surgery. The book ends with the image of a thirty-acre pocket of restored tallgrass prairie made up of millions of interdependent beings and the possibility that all these contradictions could be as complexly woven and yet as simple as the prairie.