Also I hope people in here are decent about plurals
I have some friends who describe themselves as plural. I don't know very much about it, but that's okay. I listen to what people say, keep an open mind, and respond with respect. Other people's experiences of the world are different from mine and are equally important. :)
is there a decent explanation of that somewhere? i've only read that "multiple personalities isn't like how it's depicted in media" because of course it isn't, but then i've only ever encountered internet people presenting themselves as systems acting like that troll that was banned recently or like data in tng season 7's masks.
Also, to note, being a system doesn't relieve us of responsibility for our stuff, is our take. We community police ourselves, so to speak and like even if the alter that is extremely sexual is fronting, the rest is somewhat in control to uphold thought. It is not like a car where only one person can drive, i'd guess.
I don't have DID, but a pretty mild form of OSDD, I think. It's like, breaks in memory, extremely varying amounts of gender dysphoria, between like paralysing sadness after seeing my beard shadow and being able to walk around in swimming trunks on a beach. Political opinions swing from social democracy to "the GPCR was the best thing that ever happened." Different likes in food etc, different behaviour, from nice and charming to constant anger. I try to figure myself out, but therapists are and will never ever help, so I am left to do so on my own. I have two alters that I can consistently identify. It even affects my autism, one alter is almost NT and another one pretty autistic. There are probably some more, but bc of Opsec, no details. I am also extremely suggestible, which I can use for autosuggestive stuff, incidentially giving me decent discipline, but complicating any discussion of that topic (bc people are like "you just convinced yourself you have got it")
I am not happy that it didnt work, so I will try again: To outsiders, it seems like my personality completely shifts, but I experience no significant breaks in memory or self-perception, as a rule
I have some experience with two people who had DIS/multiple personalities and with the (non-)acceptance of psychiatrists and psychologists. One person might get a borderline disorder instead of DIS. At least Frank Putnam's MPD book has large stretches that are not good or factual or good science (and do sometimes lack patient centering) Edit: Read Huldra's comment about him, they highlight important consequences of his ideas.
I have a couple of theories of, but mostly it doesn't matter so much. What matters is how we want to interact with bodies that we recognize. We do ascribe to them a sense of continuity and permanence which obviously is wrong and yet not seldom useful. We do ascribe to them certain patterns of acceptable or estimated behavior, too. A clearly neurodivergent friend I have gets cut much more slack if he isn't finding the right tone of cultural civility, which is the right thing to do. Other people would get more scold for failing social cues.
What matters in interacting with DIS is that you yourself are still allowed boundaries and it isn't a failure not to get not communicated things. Though it is nice to talk to people as they want to be talked to, even if that varies.
CW:(Ableist murder) https://greyfaction.org/resources/proponents/putnam-frank/ (Also further warning that other text on this site may be critical of DID as a whole, but its still a valuable resource for documenting what some notable figures in the field believe and support.)
Frank Putnam also seems to support "facilitated communication"(various methods where an "assistant" supposedly helps someone communicate when they otherwise couldn't, and interprets those communications) and satanic abuse conspiracy shit, specifically in a case when both of these combined led to the murder of an autistic child.
You expect that people and their feelings and how you refer to them and how they act is more or less constant. That the Julia you talked to 5 minutes ago is roughly the same as the one you talk to now. That this is true for years, too. It is not true in general, but especially not if DIS people act very different (and not in the way of mania) from one moment to the next.
sure it is, at least for acquaintances. we grow and change over time of course, but outside of trauma or radicalization that most people don't go through you're not going to observe those changes without being very close to someone. Trump is the same piece of shit he's always been for 50 years. my parents' neighbors are the same people with the same politics and general demeanor they had going back to my childhood (well, the ones who aren't dead or moved away).
various coworkers, classmates, sports teammates etc never exhibited radical change outside of normative ranges of mood, and my friend who has bpd or whatever kinda just has a wider range. when i've had occasion to bump into people again they're presenting the same way as they always did, give or take two trans people.
i reckon it's precisely the lack of this continuity that makes whatever dis/multiple whatever people seems scary or disturbing to neurotypicals.
you're not going to observe those changes without being very close to someone.
That part doesn't feel right for both plenty neurodivergent and especially people with DIS or alike.
Though I agree that even plenty of neurodivergent are actually having a continuity which makes people feel in control (even if their mood swings are wide).
i meant you're not going to observe NTs changing over time when it's not drastic unless they're close relations. the shifts that present from folks we medicalize as personality disorders are of course expressed more plainly.
Was that person a full on troll? Damn, they said some stuff that helped things click for me with less common gender identities. I'm worried I was duped into believing some harmful bullshit now.
Even if it was a troll, their work is not theirs. You can of course draw a couple of things from it. A bit of multiple / DIS discourse definitely was expressed by it.
Oh, maybe I'm thinking of someone else then, I don't remember that. Was this the "swarmkin" one, or someone else? I think there was someone that kept changing their story every other post, which I'm guessing is the troll.
i think i saw it claimed to be swarmkin at some point but i was pretty checked out after it said it couldn't watch some episode of star trek voyager because it had a... i think the term was "brainmate" based on the character 7 of 9 that was contradicted by the on-screen depiction of jeri ryan's character having a (my terminology) 90s-ass normative gender identity because she was on a 90s tv show.
So my general attitude is more of a "live and let live" with people who claim to be more on the...I think it is "faegender" side of things? And just not worry too much or try to demand they explain themselves or conform to my standards or anything. I'm hoping that's a decent way to treat people and I'm not being too welcoming to wreckers and trolls who want to make fun of the "woke SJWs" or whatever.
yeah idk i don't really understand what people get out of having a specific inscrutable gender label instead of just saying "nonbinary" and not elaborating, or saying something cheeky but intelligible to other people like "my gender can't be expressed in human language". i think putting on the label constitutes an attempt at communicating meaning because that's the entire point of language so i don't think it's demanding to be like "ok and what does that mean?".
i'm sure such people have reasons for how they're choosing to describe themselves and i'd like to understand that, at least, even if it's not possible to understand someone else's gender (and i don't really understand the supposedly well established genders either)
Yeah, I suppose if someone does have an unusual gender identity they would expect other people to not understand and ask questions. I don't really understand non-binary gender too well, but as a cis-gendered person, it's basically just because I've never thought about it. It's not something I've ever had to question or examine within myself. I think that is why so many cis people refuse to try to understand people different from them. They've never thought about that stuff, therefore no one else has. Or something, I don't know. I just want to be nice to people.
NB can be a lot of things. I identify that way because I don't feel male or female, at least not fully. Like if there is a gender spectrum from male to female, I sit around the middle but more towards the male side. But it varies a bit.
The xenogender stuff, I admit I don't really get it either. But if someone is sincere about it, I try and trust that it makes sense to them, and it's not my place to judge its validity. As you say, I think the main thing is to be kind to others and let them try and make sense of who they are in their own way, even if it seems incomprehensible or even ridiculous from the outside
yeah idk i don't really understand what people get out of having a specific inscrutable gender label instead of just saying "nonbinary" and not elaborating, or saying something cheeky but intelligible to other people like "my gender can't be expressed in human language".
The entire point of xenogender labels is that to the people using these, it is a way to make their gender identity legible to them and being able to conceptualize it. It's the very opposite of inscrutable. Even when we view gender as a spectrum between the poles man and woman, there's people who do not find themselves anywhere on that, they are outside of the charted territory of what Western society views as scrutable gender expressions. So they need an approximation of how they feel about and understand the gendered part of their personality, a shorthand for their concept of the self, their body image and their gender performance. Nonbinary is in large parts a catch-all term, and it is one that says what people are not. Saying "i'm not this" does not answer the question "what am i?". I like large, open-ended labels a lot, but i get the need that many people have for microlabels to articulate their experience.
And i'll be honest here, i've met more than one nonbinary person irl where it would have made perfect sense for that elflike being to say "my pronouns are fae / faer". I wouldn't have doubted that one second. I've lurked in communities of people who can best conceptualize themselves as androids or energy beings and none of that seemed anything stranger than the self-image i have on a good dose of LSD - when my mind is able to produce such a state with a few microgramms of ergotamines, i do not find it hard to grasp that some people feel that way all the time even when stone cold sober. Especially when they're nonbinary and present in ways that make people call them a "thing" or an "it" to begin with. A lot of NB folks have had experiences of what they call "being creatured", having their humanity and even their personhood doubted and denied to them. Is it such a stretch that some of them arive at a point where they wonder if they even need to view themselves as a person when just acting naturally means others cannot see them that way anymore?
As a trans person, i understand both that our gender identity can be hard to grasp for outsiders and that we have a right to self-identification, and i also know the transmedicalist history (and in many parts still ongoing present-day status quo) of excluding non-binary people from community support and from access to gender-affirming care. So i'm not going around doubting other people's gender identity or saying their pronouns do not make any sense, and it's honestly kinda sad to see how quickly xenogender people are doubted even in a space like this. DroneRights probably was more than a bit of a troll in that it came off as willfully antagonistic, but i don't think it was trolling us about that it could best understand itself as a de-personalized borg drone.
i meant inscrutable to the rest of us. my experience around people finding solace or self-understanding or whatever in labels comes from "oh that was x all along" and is bundled up in other people before them having some experience of non-normativity and communicating about it. I guess somebody has to be first, but a new label doesn't have any of that context and i'm not sure how or if it carries any information. That doesn't invalidate someone's gender but it means they're not communicating any of the things that you or I do when we say woman or agender or somebody else says nonbinary.
I feel like you don't need a robust understanding of the specifics of "neither" or "something else" to add agender and nonbinary as umbrella to the canonical western reckoning of gender, but trying to establish a new specific one is a different project from what we've done before. It's not doubt it's you've said something that i take at your word has meaning to you but doesn't tell me anything, like explaining colors to someone who has never seen them, except there's no well established physics to draw on. There are surely genders that I don't know what they are but i literally can't think anything about them because i have no referent underlying the words.
as for the psych heavy stuff I was originally asking after a credible explanation and it seems to not be available, and i don't know about all that. Our brains can do all kinds of weird and wonderful things but the way people recall experiences and report them isn't methodologically rigorous so i don't know how i'm supposed to tell the difference between stuff like sleep paralysis hallucinations and things I apparently can't read about anywhere.
I think the common term for "both outside binary gender identities, outside of a gradient between these and outside of just not having a gender" is xenogender. But yeah, just respecting people's pronouns and not prodding them to justify their existence is the appropriate thing to do. See my post below for some more detailed thoughts on the matter, even though it's just a trans woman trying to make sense of this and not a firsthand account.
Thanks for that! It's always good to try and get more perspectives on things, even if it isn't a firsthand account of what it is like, it's still good to empathize with another person, even if we don't fully understand what their inner life is like.