Syscourse Blog of The Pigeon System

unless you would like to hear the reasoning for the anti-endo argument in a very aggressive manner

you have been warned

I'm begging you people to stop seeing absolutes where there aren't any. Fat liberation is largely about dismantling the absolutes.

When we say "fat people can be perfectly healthy", some of you hear "all fat people are perfectly healthy" when the point is simply that weight and health aren't synonymous. It's more complex.

When we say that health looks different for everyone some of you hear "health is completely meaningless" when the point is actually just that it's more complex than either/or. YES, intentional weight loss can be the right path for someone! Look, I Have Said it! The problem is, there's a widespread myth saying it's the right path for everyone. That's not the case.

When we say health status does not indicate your intrinsic worth and should be irrelevant to how you're treated, some of you apparently hear "there's no reason to care about your own health", which is just bananas. Learn better reading comprehension.

Fat liberation is a political movement based on no absolute claims about health. Literally the point is that fat people deserve social equality regardless of health status. "Health is complex and individual" is a full on fact, but ultimately it's also beside the point.

you claim you're a tulpa. whatever. i'm not trying to argue the validity of that. i just want to point out that what you are saying you experience is so emphatically different from a CDD, and yet you still speak on CDDs/the possibility of an endogenic CDD experience. why is that?

forgive me if i'm wrong in what labels you claim. i skimmed your recent feed & your pinned post & didn't do a deep dive—if you are claiming DID, feel free to ignore this ask. however: all i see is you, sophie, saying that you are a tulpa. and then speaking about dissociative disorders. does that not seem a little iffy to you?

you may be plural, sure. i'm not arguing that you believe you are experiencing plurality. but why are you—someone who isn't claiming to have DID or any other CDD—discussing disordered systemhood with the level of toxicity that you're using?

idk i'm just confused. what authority do you have to tell pwDID that they need to accept anything—when you are not a pwDID or a doctor?

Because if I don't, then who will?

Actually, that question has a pretty clear answer. That being people who are less informed.

I am not an expert. I do not claim to be or present myself as such. All I am is somebody who has an interest in plurality of all sorts, a blog, a pretty good handling on how to use a search engine to find the information I'm looking for, and the free time to read academic papers and share them with others.

I don't have a dissociative disorder. I can't tell you what it's like to experience one firsthand. At the same time, I have at least taught myself enough to see that a lot of what the CDD community passes around as scientific facts are closer to urban legends. Especially among fakeclaimers and those perpetuating pluralphobia.

If I learn something in my research that can help people with dissociative disorders, then I think that I have a responsibility to share it. Regardless of whether I have that disorder or not.

Take for example the popular myth that internal communication requires years of therapy and minors won't know if they have alters.

In my research, I found an article comparing voice hearing in schizophrenia versus dissociative identity disorder, and what that study showed was that a majority of DID systems experience voice hearing before the age of 18. They might not have recognized it as DID at the time. But the symptoms were present since childhood.

That same article also talked about how other hallucinatory experiences were actually more common in dissociative identity disorder than in schizophrenia.

Studies like these aren't common knowledge. But by spreading the results around, I was able to help dispel myths about dissociative identity disorder with an actual source. Myths that have been used to fakeclaim and hurt systems.

What if I hadn't posted that? What if I knew that the study existed but chose to remain silent about it because I don't have a dissociative disorder myself and decided that I shouldn't speak on it?

Would that have been preferable?

I don't think so.

If somebody is fakeclaimed and they have read that study, they can know that the fakeclaimers are wrong. That the fakeclaimers are spreading misinformation and lies. If I said nothing, then maybe they would believe the fakeclaimers, and when they encountered those lies, it would send them into a derealization spiral, causing them to question their own system.

That's something that would have been preventable had I chosen to speak out about what I knew.

Maybe I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. But the actual psychologists and psychiatrists don't really have the time to be spreading correct information to the public because they are actually doing the research and helping patients directly.

And in the absence of actual psychologists and psychiatrists who could the spread correct and accurate information, we have armchair experts who have never read a single study in their life.

Or, in the case of dissociative-misinfo... Have read exactly one study in their life, which they use to fakeclaim systems and spread the myth of this vast number of people who are faking dissociative identity disorder. While also making just the most ridiculous claims, like saying that people with OSDD are not systems.

And in the absence of truth, more people will believe the lies and spread them.

Finally, you mentioned endogenic CDDs.

To me, this is as much about encouraging a culture of questioning as it is about the CDDs specifically.

Most doctors will never say it's impossible to have a CDD without having trauma. They will say that a CDD is heavily associated with trauma. They will say that it is virtually always caused by trauma. They will use a lot of words while acknowledging that they can't know for certain if this is caused by trauma 100% of the time. Because they can't know that. Because actual scientists are aware that there are limitations on what they can study and what they can prove.

Upwards of 90% of DID cases are associated with trauma.

That's a lot. That's more than most other disorders. And it is definitely possible that the remaining percentage are just cases where people have forgotten their trauma. That's absolutely a valid position.

At least... Until you start treating that as objective fact.

Sometimes in life, there just isn't going to be an answer where you know for certain. There is just no way to confirm for a fact that the cases of DID where trauma isn't reported is actually because the trauma is forgotten as opposed to not being there at all.

Science isn't religion. It's not dogma. And those that treat it as such are dangerous. Those who will hear a statement about how dissociative identity disorder is currently understood as a post-traumatic response and interpret that as saying that it is 100% scientifically impossible for somebody to have a dissociative disorder without trauma are of deep concern to me.

Not just because of how they view the science on dissociative disorders, but how they view science in general. If there's one thing that I think that people need to take away from this blog, it's that science is ever-changing. Our understanding of the world around us is going to be different in a decade than it is today.

When my host was a child, Pluto was a planet and velociraptors didn't have feathers.

You have to be open to the fact that nothing about our understanding of science is set in stone. This is a hill that I will gladly die on.

And I think it's equally important to think critically about how much of what we believe has actually been tested. Because some things scientists believe haven't been.

I mentioned the association between DID and trauma, but let me also mention that there are no similar studies with Partial DID. It's too new of a diagnosis. There have also been no studies into the trauma association of OSDD-1 without amnesia to see if the trauma association would be just as high as DID.

Without that critical research, it's possible that the association is primarily related to DID's amnesia symptom, and CDDs without amnesia wouldn't be as heavily associated with trauma.

It's currently an assumption that OSDD-1 without amnesia would be just as associated with trauma, but that assumption hasn't been tested.

And I think it's important to drive home that people need to be really careful about trusting assumptions like this when the studies haven't actually been conducted.

I was reading that damn "Why the Theory of Structural Dissociation is Ableist" article written by Stronghold and released by the plural association (bluntly, I find it to be a very poorly written article - not in its strongly worded opinions, but because it spreads blatant misinformation regarding the success of final fusion based on a study the author did not understand, and I also find the piece to be incredibly ableist against systems who use parts language and seek final fusion).

Specifically, I want to talk about this paragraph from the article today, as I find it illustrates a lot of the problems that I have encountered in the plural community with regards to parts language:

Although I do not think personalities is the right term for us, nor is the word parts. It is derogatory, dehumanizing & it is taking away from our autonomy, roles and authenticity as individuals. And so I often wonder whether the alter integration they desire, equals just not being Plural anymore in the minds of the writers of Structural dissociation. If it does, it makes sense to diminish us to parts. And it also makes sense to claim “no one has to go away”, if they never believed we are separated in the first place. After all, it is the ‘experience of separation’, not actual separation, as they say, we did not split off. So was using the term ‘parts’ in 1987 progressive, or a step to further diminish, gaslight and silence us?

While I find questioning the intentions of the authors valuable and think it is important to explore whether any given medical intervention is truly aimed at individual wellbeing or whether its goal is normality and conforming to ableist ideas of what health looks like, I find it completely unnecessary to shit on parts language in order to do that.

This idea that I or any other system which uses parts language is "diminished" to parts carries the implication that parts are something less-than, undesirable, or have less value than systems which are not parts. This narrative is surprisingly anti-system for an organization which claims to be "empowering those with Dissociative Identity Disorder, OSDD and all other forms, labels and experiences of Plurality."

I am not diminished to parts; my parts are me, and I am a person. I cannot be diminished by my own personhood.

Additionally, the idea that parts language is "derogatory, dehumanizing, and takes away from our autonomy, roles, and authenticity as individuals" may imply that systems which use parts language are self-harming, that they are being derogatory and dehumanizing towards themselves, and stripping themselves of their own autonomy and individuality. This is an extremely negative and biased view of not only parts language but also those who use parts language as well. I use parts language for myself out of self-love, not hate.

Further, if we are to acknowledge plurality as a spectrum, then even if parts language really did mean system members were less individual from each other, how is that a bad thing? Median systems have long existed and have described their experiences as "different versions of me" or "different modes"; why is this fine, but saying you have parts as a system is not? Why is there such a focus on individuality and personhood to the point that it excludes those systems who do not experience their systemhood in that way? In what way is that inclusive?

Parts language should not be forced onto anyone, as it is important in general not to force a view of self onto someone that does not align with how they identify; yet, it feels as though people completely forget that rule when sentiments such as "your system members are 100% different people" or "calling your system members parts is derogatory and you are dehumanizing them" are pushed onto people as some sort of objective truth. That is just not how my system works; It would be just as wrong to say my system is not parts as it would be to say to a system who is not parts that they're actually parts.

We DID this shit- for DECADES. It was fucking awful. Companies paid people in “scrip” which was only good for use at the Company Store. So effectively, the company got your money coming and going, and they didn’t pay you at all. And the longer it went on, the less likely you were to have savings that could have helped you move away or get a different job.

I’ve already seen one ad trying very sneakily to promote the idea of “AmazonBucks”, including giving them to workers as rewards, or instead of things like healthcare, sick days, and PTO.

Here’s your reminder that scrip is fucking illegal, that company towns are always a shit idea that should stay dead and buried, and that if unions didn’t work? Every big company out there wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to destroy them.

And then they'd own you: You'd buy your bread at the company store at their price, you'd pay them rent, be fined for being late, for dropping your work, for missing quota... If you were super unlucky you'd have to use the company coin, which couldn't be spent anywhere else. Very EA. You'd get a half day off on Sunday to got to church but you'd work 7 days a week. Your kids would get a few hours school, because some interfering politician had made a law saying children had to have an education, then they'd be expected to show for work.

They'd have to crawl under the looms, while they were in operation and scavenge thread and chaff. Meaning the foreman would occasionally haul you off the machine you were working on and tell you your kid just got scalped because the machine caught her hair and ate the top of her head. So sad, back to work, PS you're being fined a penny for not being at your station.

The soot would get everywhere: We were still power washing it off inb teh 90s. Stuff that didn't get it is still stained black. The dust from the fabric would give you Black Lung, and you'd retire at 50, having been deaf for 30 years, hacking up chunks of lung, and be dead by 55. Then the company would charge your family to bury you. And yes: they'd throw them out of the tiny house that shared a toilet with 20 other families.

Oh yes: The shop floor was so loud it'd deafen the workers, and they'd all be lip reading and using ad-hoc local sign language to talk. You know that running joke about OSHA being written in blood? Yeah. It was.

So here's the interesting part. You know who dug us out of this corporate hell?

Quakers.

They took offense at all of this and started showing up, running Co-Op shops. They did the same as the Corporations: Everyting you had to buy, or wanted, was at the Co-Op. Houses (One of the biggest mortgage lenders was a Co-operative bank until Capitalism happened to it), food, clothes, funerals, furniture and banking. You put your wages in to the Co-Op and they'd let you buy everything on lay-away.

And that helped break the Mill's monopoly.

And they also made... chocolate.

The Quakers came to the conclusion that Chocolate was morally correct: It cheered you up, was nourishing, and had no real drawbacks (Hey! Look, white people thinking - They never looked too hard into where cocao was coming from or what the conditions were like. If you're feeling too happy and cheerful go look up the Belgian Congo some time.)

Anyway, you still find these weird little Yorkshire towns with these huge Mill factory buildings, sitting right next to a chocolate factory: Rowntrees (Bought by Nestlé), Mackintoshs, and Cadburys were all Quaker owned co-operative factories with on-site showers, and profit sharing.

Then Capitalism noticed and ate them, yum yum.

Anyway, point being is that there's a working model for how to wreck a Corporation Town: You clone thier operation with a non-profit or Co-Op. They provide the same products and services that Corporations provide, but they put the money back into the pockets of the people, they circulate money instead of accumulating it.

I'm salty about this topic because I live here. I've worked in the Industrial Museum, met the survivors of the Mills (Old age takes no prisoners) and watched the literal colour of my home change from soot black to creamy brown stone, lived in the Mill terraces, watched Nestlé wipe out an entire company and squat in it's corpse while slowly degrading the products to pump up the profits at the consumer's expense and of course run slavery plantations.

[ID: A screenshot from the ICD-11.

Orange text: "Boundary with Normality (Threshold):"

Black text, preceded by a bullet point: "The presence of two or more distinct personality states does not always indicate the presence of a mental disorder. In certain circumstances (e.g., as experienced by ‘mediums’ or other culturally accepted spiritual practitioners) the presence of multiple personality states is not experienced as aversive and is not associated with impairment in functioning. A diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder should not be assigned in these cases." /end ID]

The example given is spiritual systems, but again that's just an example. The main point is that

The presence of two or more distinct personality states does not always indicate the presence of a mental disorder.

So if people could stop harassing non-disordered plurals for having an experience of existence that is recognised in the ICD-11, that would be great!

Plurality is not always a mental illness (this is specifically the page for dissociative identity disorder btw), so please just let plurals exist, as they do, without harassing them for not meeting the diagnostic criteria for DID, or not identifying as having DID.

1) Nowhere in that post did we say we're non-disordered. You just assumed we were because we stood up for non disordered systems.

2) Non disordered systems are not intruding on spaces for people with dissociative disorders. They are existing within plural spaces, which are not linked to mental illness but are instead part of the general community.

Also, endogenic doesn't mean nondisordered or even lacking trauma. It just means trauma wasn't what caused your system to form. Just like if you achieve functional multiplicity and heal from your trauma you can be a traumagenic nondisordered system. And again like us, mixed origin systems exist.

CDDs *can* identify as plural, but plurality encompasses more than just CDDs, so if you want to post about issues specific to people with CDDs it is far more useful to say 'people with CDDs' rather than plurals.

small heads up idfk, maybe i'm just ill rn

And.

And an End0 made a comment on that post like saying that end0 did and trauma did aren’t the same thing because endo did doesn’t have any negatives. Like. That they didn’t have dissociation. Or panic attacks about not knowing who they are. Or literally any negative you can think of.

They were saying. That end0s. Don’t experience did symptoms.

Wouldn’t that make it.

An entirely different thing.

That you shouldn’t be using did/osdd terms with.

2. Did they say DID/OSDD, or did they say plurality? Those are different things (however DID and OSDD will often cause the person with the condition to be plural. Some pwOSDDID do not identify as plural and many plurals do not meet the diagnostic criteria for either disorder

3. Lots of Endo systems experience distress about being blurry. This person you spoke to is erasing the experiences of many Endo systems.

Is there more than just you in your brain?

Cobgrats your plural

"But what if they're hallucinations" who cares. What do you have to lose vs stand to gain with conceptualizing an internal hallucination as their own person. Also hallucinations usually don't have definable traits like names they gave themselves and personalities and appearances btw

The only kind of gatekeeper we should be okay with is a system gatekeeper.

Ya know, like the headmate.

[ID: A screenshot from the ICD-11.

Orange text: "Boundary with Normality (Threshold):"

Black text, preceded by a bullet point: "The presence of two or more distinct personality states does not always indicate the presence of a mental disorder. In certain circumstances (e.g., as experienced by ‘mediums’ or other culturally accepted spiritual practitioners) the presence of multiple personality states is not experienced as aversive and is not associated with impairment in functioning. A diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder should not be assigned in these cases." /end ID]

The example given is spiritual systems, but again that's just an example. The main point is that

The presence of two or more distinct personality states does not always indicate the presence of a mental disorder.

So if people could stop harassing non-disordered plurals for having an experience of existence that is recognised in the ICD-11, that would be great!

Plurality is not always a mental illness (this is specifically the page for dissociative identity disorder btw), so please just let plurals exist, as they do, without harassing them for not meeting the diagnostic criteria for DID, or not identifying as having DID.

1) Nowhere in that post did we say we're non-disordered. You just assumed we were because we stood up for non disordered systems.

2) Non disordered systems are not intruding on spaces for people with dissociative disorders. They are existing within plural spaces, which are not linked to mental illness but are instead part of the general community.

its fine if you do, but there can be differences

Anti-endos come across as being very against spiritual freedom in general. They don't consider spirituality outside of religion valid. They also don't consider new religions valid.