Aimee Mullins: It's not fair having 12 pairs of legs Aimee Mullins: Não é justo ter 12 pares de pernas Эйми Маллинз: Несправедливо иметь 12 пар ног 艾梅-穆林斯：拥有 12 双腿并不公平

I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids, ages six to eight, at a children's museum, and I brought with me a bag full of legs, similar to the kinds of things you see up here, and had them laid out on a table for the kids. And, from my experience, you know, kids are naturally curious about what they don't know, or don't understand, or is foreign to them. They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way, and maybe censors that natural curiosity, or you know, reins in the question-asking in the hopes of them being polite little kids. Eles só aprendem a ter medo dessas diferenças quando um adulto os influencia a se comportar dessa maneira, e talvez censure essa curiosidade natural, ou você sabe, restringe as perguntas, na esperança de serem crianças educadas. So I just pictured a first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids, saying, "Now, whatever you do, don't stare at her legs." But, of course, that's the point. That's why I was there, I wanted to invite them to look and explore. So I made a deal with the adults that the kids could come in without any adults for two minutes on their own. The doors open, the kids descend on this table of legs, and they are poking and prodding, and they're wiggling toes, and they're trying to put their full weight on the sprinting leg to see what happens with that. As portas se abrem, as crianças descem sobre esta mesa de pernas e estão cutucando e cutucando, e estão mexendo os dedos dos pés, e estão tentando colocar todo o seu peso na perna correndo para ver o que acontece com isso. And I said, "Kids, really quickly -- I woke up this morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house -- nothing too big, two or three stories -- but, if you could think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build me?" E eu disse: "Crianças, bem rápido - eu acordei hoje de manhã, decidi que queria saltar sobre uma casa - nada grande demais, dois ou três andares - mas, se você pudesse pensar em algum animal , qualquer super-herói, qualquer personagem de desenho animado, qualquer coisa que você possa imaginar agora, que tipo de pernas você me construiria? " And immediately a voice shouted, "Kangaroo!" "No, no, no! Should be a frog!" "No. It should be Go Go Gadget!" "No, no, no! It should be the Incredibles." And other things that I don't -- aren't familiar with. And then, one eight-year-old said, "Hey, why wouldn't you want to fly too?" E então, uma criança de oito anos disse: "Ei, por que você não quer voar também?" And the whole room, including me, was like, "Yeah." E a sala inteira, inclusive eu, era como "Sim". (Laughter) And just like that, I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as "disabled" to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn't have yet. Somebody that might even be super-abled. Interesting.

So some of you actually saw me at TED, 11 years ago. Então, alguns de vocês realmente me viram no TED, 11 anos atrás. And there's been a lot of talk about how life-changing this conference is for both speakers and attendees, and I am no exception. TED literally was the launch pad to the next decade of my life's exploration. O TED foi literalmente a plataforma de lançamento para a próxima década da exploração da minha vida. At the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics. I had woven carbon fiber sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, which you may have seen on stage yesterday. Eu tinha tecido pernas de corrida de fibra de carbono modeladas após a perna de uma chita, que você pode ter visto no palco ontem. And also these very life-like, intrinsically painted silicone legs.

So at the time, it was my opportunity to put a call out to innovators outside the traditional medical prosthetic community to come bring their talent to the science and to the art of building legs. Então, na época, foi minha oportunidade de chamar inovadores fora da comunidade protética médica tradicional para trazer seu talento à ciência e à arte de construir pernas. So that we can stop compartmentalizing form, function and aesthetic, and assigning them different values. Well, lucky for me, a lot of people answered that call. Bem, para minha sorte, muitas pessoas responderam a essa ligação. And the journey started, funny enough, with a TED conference attendee -- Chee Pearlman, who hopefully is in the audience somewhere today. She was the editor then of a magazine called ID, and she gave me a cover story. Ela era a editora de uma revista chamada ID e me deu uma matéria de capa.

This started an incredible journey. Curious encounters were happening to me at the time; I'd been accepting numerous invitations to speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world. Encontros curiosos estavam acontecendo comigo na época; Eu estava aceitando vários convites para falar sobre o design das pernas de chita em todo o mundo. And people would come up to me after the conference, after my talk, men and women. And the conversation would go something like this, "You know Aimee, you're very attractive. You don't look disabled." Você não parece desativado. " (Laughter) I thought, "Well, that's amazing, because I don't feel disabled." And it really opened my eyes to this conversation that could be explored, about beauty. What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? E, curiosamente, do ponto de vista da identidade, o que significa ter uma deficiência? I mean, people -- Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. Quero dizer, pessoal - Pamela Anderson tem mais próteses no corpo do que eu. Nobody calls her disabled. (Laughter)

So this magazine, through the hands of graphic designer Peter Saville, went to fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and photographer Nick Knight, who were also interested in exploring that conversation. So, three months after TED I found myself on a plane to London, doing my first fashion shoot, which resulted in this cover -- "Fashion-able"? Three months after that, I did my first runway show for Alexander McQueen on a pair of hand-carved wooden legs made from solid ash. Três meses depois, fiz meu primeiro desfile para Alexander McQueen em um par de pernas de madeira esculpidas à mão, feitas de cinzas sólidas. Nobody knew -- everyone thought they were wooden boots. Actually, I have them on stage with me: grapevines, magnolias -- truly stunning. Poetry matters. A poesia importa. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art. A poesia é o que eleva o objeto banal e negligenciado a um domínio da arte. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand. Pode transformar o que pode ter deixado as pessoas com medo em algo que as convida a olhar, parecer um pouco mais e talvez até entender.

I learned this firsthand with my next adventure. Aprendi isso em primeira mão com minha próxima aventura. The artist Matthew Barney, in his film opus called the "The Cremaster Cycle." O artista Matthew Barney, em seu filme chamado "O Ciclo Cremaster". This is where it really hit home for me -- that my legs could be wearable sculpture. And even at this point, I started to move away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only aesthetic ideal. So we made what people lovingly referred to as glass legs even though they're actually optically clear polyurethane, a.k.a. bowling ball material. Heavy! Then we made these legs that are cast in soil with a potato root system growing in them, and beetroots out the top, and a very lovely brass toe. Então nós fizemos essas pernas que são lançadas no solo com um sistema radicular de batata crescendo nelas, e beterrabas por cima e um dedo do pé de latão muito adorável. That's a good close-up of that one. Esse é um bom close disso. Then another character was a half-woman, half-cheetah -- a little homage to my life as an athlete. 14 hours of prosthetic make-up to get into a creature that had articulated paws, claws and a tail that whipped around, like a gecko. (Laughter) And then another pair of legs we collaborated on were these -- look like jellyfish legs, also polyurethane. (Risos) E então outro par de pernas em que colaboramos foram estas - parecem pernas de água-viva, também de poliuretano. And the only purpose that these legs can serve, outside the context of the film, is to provoke the senses and ignite the imagination. So whimsy matters. Assuntos tão caprichosos.

Today, I have over a dozen pair of prosthetic legs that various people have made for me, and with them I have different negotiations of the terrain under my feet, and I can change my height -- I have a variable of five different heights. (Laughter) Today, I'm 6'1". And I had these legs made a little over a year ago at Dorset Orthopedic in England and when I brought them home to Manhattan, my first night out on the town, I went to a very fancy party. E eu fiz essas pernas há pouco mais de um ano na Dorset Orthopedic na Inglaterra e quando as trouxe para Manhattan, minha primeira noite na cidade, fui a uma festa muito chique. And a girl was there who has known me for years at my normal 5'8". E havia uma garota que me conhecia há anos no meu normal de 5'8 ". Her mouth dropped open when she saw me, and she went, "But you're so tall!" Sua boca se abriu quando ela me viu, e ela disse: "Mas você é tão alto!" And I said, "I know. Isn't it fun?" I mean, it's a little bit like wearing stilts on stilts, but I have an entirely new relationship to door jams that I never expected I would ever have. And I was having fun with it. And she looked at me, and she said, "But, Aimee, that's not fair." E ela olhou para mim e disse: "Mas, Aimee, isso não é justo". (Laughter) (Applause) And the incredible thing was she really meant it. (Risos) (Aplausos) E o mais incrível é que ela realmente quis dizer isso. It's not fair that you can change your height, as you want it. Não é justo que você possa mudar sua altura, como quiser. And that's when I knew -- that's when I knew that the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade. E foi quando eu soube - foi quando soube que a conversa com a sociedade mudou profundamente nesta última década. It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. Não se trata mais de superar a deficiência. It's a conversation about augmentation. É uma conversa sobre aumento. It's a conversation about potential. A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. Um membro protético não representa mais a necessidade de substituir a perda. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space. Pode ser um símbolo de que o usuário tem o poder de criar o que quer que ele queira criar naquele espaço. So people that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment. Assim, as pessoas que a sociedade considerava incapacitadas agora podem se tornar os arquitetos de suas próprias identidades e, de fato, continuar a mudar essas identidades, projetando seus corpos a partir de um local de fortalecimento. And what is exciting to me so much right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology -- robotics, bionics -- with the age-old poetry, we are moving closer to understanding our collective humanity. E o que mais me emociona agora é que, combinando tecnologia de ponta - robótica, biônica - com a poesia milenar, estamos nos aproximando da compreensão de nossa humanidade coletiva. I think that if we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have. Penso que, se queremos descobrir todo o potencial da nossa humanidade, precisamos celebrar os pontos fortes do coração e as gloriosas deficiências que todos temos. I think of Shakespeare's Shylock: "If you prick us, do we not bleed, and if you tickle us, do we not laugh?" Penso no Shylock de Shakespeare: "Se você nos pica, não sangramos e se nos agrada, não rimos?" It is our humanity, and all the potential within it, that makes us beautiful. É a nossa humanidade, e todo o potencial dentro dela, que nos torna bonitos. Thank you. (Applause)