If you're claiming that 'HEADMATES ARE A TUMBLR THING', you're (still) wrong.
People have been talking about multiplicity/plurality outside a medicalised paradigm and DID/MPD treatment that isn’t integration-focussed for over a decade. amorpha-system and iexistwow have discussed this as well. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t systems that benefit from from the strict medical model, including integration, but that the discussion has happened for twenty years at the very least.
Here is a list of links from personal sites and blogs by plural systems who have been active for a long time or don’t fit into the ‘spoilt white tumblr teenager’ stereotype. Some of these are trauma-based systems like the Anns and Phoenix Household, whilst others aren’t or aren’t fully sure of their origins (we don’t know what ours are, for example).
Astraea’s Web has a counter dating back to 1999 and Astraea still update the site a few times a year. On an older version of the site it says they’ve been ‘changing minds since 1995’, which means they’ve been doing plural activism for about twenty years, which seems about right, as I know they were involved in several mailing lists. We ourselves first encountered the site nine years ago in late 2005(?).
The Pavilion activist group was created in the early 2000s. If you look at the ‘projects’ page you’ll see that all these dates are from 2004 or earlier.
Amorpha’s Collective Phenomenon page has an Internet Archive version from 2004, but I’m fairly sure they started the website a few years earlier than that using a different host. Amorpha haven’t updated their website in some time but they’ve been active occasionally here on Tumblr (as amorpha-system).
The Consortium (who post sporadically here as elstru) ran the Disenchanted Forest website, where they rejected the ‘multiplicity is inherently disordered’ idea. They were also the creators of the ‘Multiple Code’. The archive for their site dates back to 2001.
The Anachronic Army founded Dark Personalities, which was both a website and mailing list. As Amorpha have said in the past the most innovative thing about Dark Personalities was the uncensored mailing list - most lists at the time were very therapy-centred and required strict trigger warnings, both for common triggers and personal ones as well. Like many of the other systems listed here, the Army rejected the MPD/DID label, especially the focus on integration and words like ‘alters’, ‘ego states’ and ‘parts’. The Army also hosted an informational website on multiplicity called the Multiplicity Gateway. I don’t agree with some of the Army’s attitudes towards triggers and survivorship but their role was significant in the empowered multiplicity subculture. Dark Personalities was before our time but we did know many people who were in the community longer than we were who told us about it.
Most people, when they talk about DP, refer to the mailing list, but there was also a website with a staggeringly large number of articles. There is, for example, a very good article about the unnecessary divide between ‘survivor’ and ‘natural’ multiples by Hijynx of the Volalupi system that I think is worth reading.
Four and Twenty, the Blackbirds system’s plurality website, was last updated on 30th September 2004 - over ten years ago. Four and Twenty was one of the first sites we encountered when we were reading about different kinds of multiplicity nearly nine years ago.
Positively Plural was created by Doltaghey House (who’ve since changed their system name; I think they go by Nosselinfea now) and the last update was from 2002 - nearly thirteen years ago.
The Courts created No Apologies for Existing, a website that was focussed on affirming the validity of identities and different world-views: the peopletips of 2001 (yes, there was ‘SJ-like’ language back then)!
Even our website, which is fairly new in comparison, was originally created in 2007 (though we’ve changed hosts a few times, but you can still find an Internet Archive capture of an early incarnation of the site).
Ann Garvey& (the Anns) are a DID/trauma-based multiple system who have worked with other empowered multiples (both trauma-based and not) to spread awareness. They’re in their fifties and are not the ‘Tumblr teenager’ stereotype.
Phoenix Household’s website is nearly fifteen years old. Phoenix are a trauma-based system with an extensive otherworld and strong connections to their individual identities. They’d gone through much of the classical therapeutic process, including attempted integrations, but they didn’t view themselves as disordered and found that the best way to deal with their multiplicity was to establish co-operation after re-organising their system.
The Vicki(s) ran the ‘Wonderful World of the Mid-Continuum’ website, about people who fell in between the ‘multiple’ and ‘singlet’ categories.
House of the Moon ran a website about their multiplicity. There are edits from late 1997 here (just over seventeen years ago, imagine that). They were a system who had a DID or MPD diagnosis (1997 was not long after the diagnosis had been changed, so they may have received it before) and didn’t consider the multiplicity itself a disorder.
Darktide were similar (website founded in 1997, updated sporadically in the early 2000s) - they had a traumatic history but viewed themselves as always being plural in some sense and rejected the ‘DID’ label in particular.
The Shire’s website, Those That Walk, has an Internet Archive version dating from 2005. The original site was hosted on Tripod and has archives going back to 2001. The Shire have an MPD diagnosis (they refer to it as ‘MPD’, the ICD-10, the diagnostic guide used in many countries outside the USA, keeps the MPD name rather than DID, and the Shire live in New Zealand) but reject the 'disordered’ label.
If you want to be critical of empowered multiplicity it is your right, but if you’re going to criticise the phenomenon at the very least stop spreading the myth that this is a Tumblr Thing™.
amandla
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