#monthly article

Plural self advocacy is exactly what it says on the tin: plurals taking control of our own lives and being in charge of how we’re represented. It’s what happens when we speak for ourselves instead of letting singlet academics do it for us. Plural self advocacy has a long history that stretches before the existence of the internet, and it has made a difference. Here are some notable milestones, and what they’ve done for us.

1987ish: Truddi Chase is giving interviews (x, x, x), very openly insisting that her headmates are real people and that integration is not a solution for them.

February 1989: The first issue of Many Voices is published. This newsletter for and by trauma survivors with dissociative disorders is likely one of the first places that plurals could speak about their experiences on their own terms. It would run for over 20 years until 2012, when it was bequeathed to the ISSTD so that the issues could be made publicly available.

1993: Richard P. Kluft’s ‘Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder’ mentions Truddi Chase’s outspokenness against integration, disdainfully. ‘Some perceive the alters as real people’, it says. This paints a clear picture of how multiplicity was perceived at the time.

1995: Astraea’s web is created. This site continues to be one of the biggest plurality resources out there, and Astraea themselves have had a wide reach in plural activism - they’ll come up several more times in this article. They have curated a wide selection of sources on early accounts of plurality, plural involvement with legal issues, and the struggle against psychiatric abuse by all kinds of neurodiverse people, not just plurals.

1998: The Vickis begin to compile experiences of the ‘midcontinuum’, giving us the first terminology to describe median experiences. This is also, as far as we’re aware, the origin of ‘plural’ as an umbrella term.

2001?: darkpersonalities publishes ‘why we are not MPD/DID’, generally regarded as the first known instance of a system explicitly separating themselves from the ‘disorder’ definition. The empowered multiplicity movement grows from this. While many people take a cynical, bitter view towards people who still identify with their diagnosis, it begins to be associated with more sympathetic stances as it develops (x, x, x). Many of us look back disapprovingly on darkpersonalities’ attitude towards triggers and survivorship, but their role was still foundational to the concept of empowered multiplicity.

2002: Tim Bayne writes on the moral defensibility of forced integration, laying out a grounded  philosophical argument for considering non-host plurans autonomous people. It’s unknown what influenced him to write this paper, or whether any plurals were consulted.

2002?: The activist group Pavilion is formed. Their activities include outreach towards mental health professionals and academics, interviewing for radio stations, creating informational pamphlets and compiling resources for plurals and interested singlets.

2003: Matt Ruff, author of Set This House In Order, acknowledges Astraea and a plural friend-of-a-friend for introducing him to natural plurality and the idea that plurals don’t have to integrate, inspiring his book.

2011-2013: The Coalition for DSM-5 Reform writes launches a campaign to urge the DSM taskforce to change much of the proposed writing. This gets a lot of attention from plurals, and as such the DSM-5 revises its definition of DID to include distress/impairment, and for the first time accepts the self-reporting of plurality as valid evidence (x, x). It’s worth noting that this is an incredibly small step - as Astraea’s web says, ‘It was not proposed because therapists are beginning to recognize that non-disordered multiplicity exists; it was proposed in order to accommodate members of cultures and races where being more than one person is contextually normal.’ But it’s a step, nonetheless, that begins to recognize that plurals are the ultimate authorities on our own experiences of ourselves.

May 11, 2015: VICE interviews systems including Astraea and Oure Gaiya for a piece questioning if plurality is always a disorder.

2016: The plurality playbook is published internally at Google. It covers advice for plurals on succeeding in the workplace while dealing with the specific challenges that plurals face, and advice for singlets on respecting and assisting their plural coworkers.

January 18th, 2019: The Double Gears system (well known at the time as streamer and speedrunner protomagicalgirl) disclose their plurality on Hbomberguy’s DK64 stream for Mermaids. The hashtag #pluralgang trends on Twitter as a result, encouraging many people on twitter to come out as plural and many more to realize they’re plural by being introduced to the concept for the first time. #pluralgang has been a consistently active hashtag for the year since its inception and continues to be used to share resources, organize meetups, promote activism and generally remind plurals that they’re not alone.

The plurality playbook is also publicly published around now. In the new foreword, the Lizzes cite the activity surrounding #pluralgang as their motivation for this.

March 2019: The first Plural Positivity World Conference is held. It was created as a counter-conference to the one hosted annually by the ISSTD. The fees for attending the World Congress on Complex Dissociation and Trauma start at $200 for just one day, making attending near-impossible for the lay person. As the Crisses put it, “The ISST-D holding meetings, disseminating information, creating policy, teaching new standards for treatment, discussing new options, or sharing their research findings about us should not be done in a place that by design excludes us.” The Plural Positivity World Conference will run again in 2020.

December 25th, 2019: Power to the Plurals announces The Plural Association, a peer network for plurals which intends to provide phone, email and live chat helplines.

To this day, the overwhelming majority of plural activism has happened outside of the medical model. Improvements in the treatment of plurals have come from us being seen as people, and singlets seeing us as people has come from us viewing ourselves that way - by making spaces for us to understand ourselves and create narratives that aren’t bounded by pathology. Even changes within psychiatry have mostly been motivated by pressure from plurals demanding fairer treatment. It is good, and necessary, for us to speak for ourselves. We have done so much, and still have so much more to do.

This month’s article was written by Joey, one of our community mods and volunteers, and voted on by our Patrons. You can write for us by applying through our volunteering page, and decide what ideas we tackle by pledging $5 or more a month.

It’s a discourse many of us in the community have heard rehashed — is the word “transspecies” an inappropriate comparison of nonhuman struggle to transgender struggle, or is it a deeper reflection of our own experiences? Less often discussed, however, is why transspecies individuals call themselves transspecies instead of or in addition to other, more common terms.

The transgender comparison is often brought up, and sometimes that’s intentional — many transspecies individuals are transgender. When you experience both cross-gender and cross-species identities, the lines can blur between them. Kintypes and other identities may not match the gender one was assigned at birth, or even a human conception of gender at all; if you’re a space alien from a species with 174 principled genders, male and female probably seem pretty foreign to you. My own first introduction to the nonbinary community, long before I transitioned, was through an otherkin individual who had both a female and a male kintype influencing them. In that case, to be transgender is to be transspecies, and vice-versa; there is no meaningful separation of the experiences.

For me, it particularly brings to life the performance art piece Becoming Dragon, which questioned the purpose of and satirized transphobic “Real Life Experience” requirements through a yearlong continuous VR-like life as a dragon in Second Life. Micha Cárdenas is not, to my knowledge, nonhuman-identified, but bringing together the creation of a gendered experience in the physical world and a species experience in the virtual world in this sense is a deeply transspecies act, even done by a person who is not transspecies.

But transspecies brings to mind another word as well: transhuman. In Micha Cárdenas’s I Am Transreal, she reflects on much the same: “Today we can become, in our minds and at a low resolution, any creature we wish. Through nanobiotech and soon through body hacking, perhaps the dream of shapeshifting, of becoming bird, wolf, or dragon, is rapidly approaching.” Though not necessarily centered in a realistic picture of the near future of body modification, this is a dream held by many transspecies people, one that might sometimes be compared to the common desire to transition in the transgender community and might at other times be seen as its own unique experience.

Several prominent transspecies activists, such as Neil Harbisson and Tiamat Medusa, are involved in body modification; the thousands of dollars Tiamat has spent on tattoos, tooth pointing, tongue splitting, implants, and more have been the subject of many a dramatic tabloid piece, while the former’s cybernetic color-sensitive skull implant — designed to supplant his colorblindness — visibly marks him as a cyborg. Though not all transspecies individuals have the money, resources, community support, and desire necessary to make such huge physical changes (or any changes at all), many of them do desire physical changes, often ones not possible with current technology. I have personally pursued cosmetic surgery options to appear more like my true self, and hope to do so more in the future. Other transspecies people make social changes, where possible, to resemble who they want to be — name changes, open nonhuman identification, and so on. These transition aspects call to mind both transgender and transhuman lifestyles.

There are other reasons too — the politicization of humanity and the valuing of a true human experience, and the way in which this experience is denied to many oppressed people, can lead to some of us rejecting it wholesale, abandoning the socially constructed human ideology that’s used as a tool to hurt us. It can work to evoke an identity centered in species dysphoria and a need for tools to escape it. It can be a way of reflecting on the desire to belong culturally to a species that doesn’t exist on Earth or to live among one’s extinct people.

It is, ultimately, one more way for those of us who are nonhuman to express the vastness of what that nonhumanity means. And in a world with hundreds of words meant to capture a uniquely and purely human experience, what’s wrong with one more word to reject that?

This month's post was written by Marron, one of our volunteers, and voted on by our patrons. Cast your vote and read the articles early by pledging $5 on Patreon. Have your article featured by applying as a guest writer!

When we talk about being nonhuman, and especially on being otherkin, we often reflect on our early childhoods, on how, at some level, “we always knew.” I like to tell the story of how, at three, I told my mother I wanted to be a popular cartoon robot when I grew up. But when we tell these personal truths, we often forget another, equally important one: sometimes, we don’t start as nonhumans. We become them. To quote the Silver Elves, two among the many elves who were openly nonhuman during the 70s and who became the roots of the modern otherkin community in particular, “being an elf is always about choice… [T]hese elves think that we are elves principally because we have chosen to be so.” (Magical Realms of Elfin, 3-4)

The idea that we can become nonhuman — in identity, in attitude, and in self — is not new, although it wouldn’t matter if it was: in embracing choice, it’s important to remember that we also must embrace the choice of forging new paths and finding new viewpoints. But unfortunately, for almost as long as individuals have been becoming nonhuman, there have been those in the community who oppose this personal freedom. Many today deeply want to be nonhuman, but are turned away by the assumption that the lack of choice is a monolithic otherkin experience, and that all individuals are either otherkin or wholly human.

The reality, though, is that the nonhuman community not only can but must embrace the role of choice in so many of our lives — be we otherkin, alterlink, or just content in saying what we are without any particular qualifiers. Our shared experience of nonhumanity is what brings us together. When we choose to embrace choice, we choose to embrace a bigger, more vibrant nonhumanity, one with room for both our conventional ideas about nonhumanity and entirely new one.

It is difficult to talk about choice-based communities without talking about the copinglink community. Often disparaged as “tumblrkin,” copinglink refers to those who actively nurture an identity as other for the purpose of coping with the difficulties of their life — often, though not always, traumas associated with ableism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression. It is probably the best-known choice-based identity term, coined in 2015 by tumblr user who-is-page out of frustration with the conflation of voluntary identity and otherkin identity; however, the term has been criticized for an excessive focus on the coping portion of the identity, for being coined by someone who did not engage in chosen identity, and for seeming to view the idea as less serious or important than otherkin identity. This has resulted in the use of other terms, like otherlink and alterlink.

The last of these criticisms — the viewing voluntary identity as a game, while otherkin identity is serious business — is probably familiar to anyone anywhere in the alterhuman community, which has always struggled with creating hierarchies. In truth, the reason or source behind an identity can’t prove how important it is to the person who carries it; there are voluntary identities that underpin people’s whole lives (the aforementioned Silver Elves, with their choice-based perspective, have been living openly as elves since before the term otherkin was coined!) and there are involuntary identities that serve as little more than a footnote. Not all alterhumans are nonhuman, not all nonhumans are otherkin, and whatever we are, we need to stick together — it’s not like those who oppose us sweat those details. We’re all in it together. 

But voluntary identity goes even beyond the alterhuman community. Although not all members of the voidpunk community consider ourselves alterhuman, the same basic concept applies: the choice to reject humanity, or to accept the inhumanity pushed on us. Many in the transhuman community seek a mechanical or digital life, even though they have no context for the machinekin community. Anyone who has been in the Renaissance Fair scene will have met people who buy season passes, who go as the same fae or elfin being every day, who try to embody the essence of that character they become even when they aren’t at the fair, who run in-character Facebook pages. Few of these people know what otherkin are, let alone alterhumanity, but that doesn’t stop them from finding joy in letting go of humanity for a while. It’s not about why they take on their nonhuman roles; it’s about the fact that they do.

And that’s the essence of it: It shouldn’t matter to you why I’m a machine, or why I’m an ooze, or why I’m a gnoll. It shouldn’t matter why anyone is anything. Do we ask humans why they’re human? Do we ask our pets why they’re cats, or dogs, or fish? We accept things for what they are, until they’re marked as other or weird by society. Then we pick apart the exact details, looking to prove our legitimacy — but in trying to be accepted by “normal”, human people do, we often accept their arguments against some of us to prove we’re the “good” ones. We cannot succeed by creating little nexuses of acceptable nonhumanity; we have to make nonhumanity itself acceptable.

What does a world look like where we don’t question each other’s legitimacy — where we let ourselves decide the importance of our own identities not based on the why but on how they feel? What is a world where we can become what we’d like to, regardless of the purpose? Even for those with involuntary identities, there is often a process of embracing one’s nonhumanity and becoming more nonhuman by centering that portion of the self: of bringing things into one’s life that remind them of their true self, of learning to induce shifts, of meditating, etc. And these things are important! There’s an incredible energy in actively choosing to embrace one’s own nonhumanity, whether or not you chose to have it in the first place. When we support those choices — when we support all choices — we create a community where we can be our most authentic selves.

This month’s article was written by Marron, one of our volunteers, and voted on by our Patrons. You can write for us by applying through our volunteering page, and decide what ideas we tackle by pledging $5 or more a month.