Critter Time!

"You can't be plural without trauma" There is no such thing as a non-traumatized person. We live in a society built to torment and traumatize people, starting with the fact that you have to spend the first [x] amount of years in your life being legally owned by another human being. So what you really have to be saying to have this statement make any sort of (even twisted) sense is "you can't be plural if you're not traumatized enough." How do you decide who is? If you don't decide, who does?

Does the person themself decide? If they do, how can you be sure that they'll recognize their experiences as traumatic? And how are you going to treat them if they don't? For the longest time I hadn't recognized what I went through as being traumatic. I thought it was just a fact of life, an unfair fact but a fact nonetheless. Would you have told me that I can't be plural if I had expressed that to you back then?

Does a diagnosis decide? What about the people who've been abused at the hands of the psych industry? What about the marginalized groups who are known to have their struggles undermined and dismissed by the psych industry? What about the people who've never been able to access those resources? What about the kids who are classified as too young to receive a medical diagnosis? Should they be gatekept from plurality because they didn't get the right piece of paper?

Where is the line drawn between people who are traumatized enough to be plural, and the people who aren't? Is there qualifications for how badly you have to be abused before you're allowed to describe yourself as plural?

Even if you did come up with an answer to all of these questions, how do you plan to enforce this boundary? Are you going to go around asking every plural person you meet to describe their traumatic experiences to you so you can make sure they're on the right side of the line you drew? Or are you just going to leave it be because you don't actually care? At that point, why even try to draw the line other than to be cruel to other people?

Because that's the point.

like one argument i could see these ableist assholes using against your post is that just because someone is traumatized doesn't mean that their system originated from trauma. it doesn't even fucking matter!! there's no tangible difference between a "traumagenic" system and an "endogenic" system!! even if this was a valid argument this is so clearly not what they mean when they're arguing about endo systems. their entire argument is "you have to have trauma to be a system," and they only fall back on that excuse when somebody points out how awful that statement is when you look into it beyond a surface level. it's backtracking because they're totally aware they look like shitty people to anyone with even a half-baked understanding of how fucked the world is.

and of course, anti-endo rhetoric primarily targets the most vulnerable plural people who are much more likely to have their traumas dismissed (as you mentioned) and view themselves as non-traumatized/non-traumagenic. namely racialized, tma, and imperiph systems. and instead of understanding the things that these systems have been put through, anti-endos choose the path of harassing them. or if they don't upfront harass them, they'll still be shutting out the most vulnerable plural people from so many plural spaces (and they have the audacity to play the moral high ground like "well i don't actually harass or fakeclaim them i just make it far more difficult for them to find safe spaces"). this is why you'll see some of the largest online plural communities being so heavily dominated by white tme westerners (even for tumblr standards :/)

you need to stop being anti-endo and start being anti-psych (for realsies not just for show. because some of you think you're anti-psych DESPITE doing medical gatekeeping and it's fucking sickening.)