The biggest irony in all of this is that I remember a number of people on Tumblr in 2012 claiming that the words "multiple" and "system" were INVENTED by non-dissociative systems and that no one with DID had ever used them. They would make dick posts beginning with lines like "Dear 'multiples' of Tumblr: Stop appropriating from people with DID" or "Dear 'systems' of Tumblr: Stop pretending to have DID," putting the words "multiple" and "system" in dick quotes again and again. They really, truly seemed to believe that "people with DID" had always and ever been the only term used, probably because Tumblr doesn't like non-Tumblr sources, especially when they're books. There was at least one person-- I don't know if they actually were a DID group or just white-knighting-- who insisted in 2012 that the word switching was invented by non-DID systems and made a ragepost about "DEAR 'MULTIPLES' OF TUMBLR, STOP USING YOUR BULLSHIT MADE-UP WORDS LIKE 'SWITCHING.' REAL PEOPLE WITH DID DO NOT 'SWITCH,' THEY JUST FIND THEMSELVES SUDDENLY IN A DIFFERENT PLACE IN A DIFFERENT TIME WITH NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED AND APPROPRIATION AND FUCK YOU AND I'M BLAMING YOU FOR THE FACT THAT MY THERAPIST IS AN INCOMPETANT HACK WHO CAN'T TEACH US HOW TO COMMUNICATE AND JUST SITS BACK AND TELLS ME THAT THIS IS ALL 'PART OF HAVING DID.'" (Well, okay, not that last part.)
We made a number of posts to our Tumblr explaining that the terms "multiple" and "system" had, in fact, been used in Well-Known MPD/DID Books and by Well-Known Doctors and in online MPD/DID communities and resource pages created when most of the people posting this stuff were probably in diapers, where people said multiple, plural, and/or system. Actually, the earliest we can find "plural" used as an umbrella term was on the Vickis' MidContinuum page in the 90s, which was very much about abuse and recovery. (Interestingly, use of the term seemed to have convergently evolved in several different places in the late-90s/early-00s era.) We even found at least one instance of Morton Prince, the "Dissociation of a Personality" guy, using the term "systems of tendencies" to refer to "alternate states" (as most other doctors called them at the time). We felt as though we were mostly screaming into the aether, though, given that the posts rarely got more than 20 likes or reblogs, and while we're hardly the kind of people who measure our self-esteem by likes received on social media, the fact that people weren't spreading the information to any great degree suggested to us that the information wasn't going to get to the people who needed it, and we had no idea how to get it spread around, short of adopting the kind of aggressive asshole online persona that most of the people going "REAL PEOPLE WITH DID DON'T CALL THEMSELVES MULTIPLE SYSTEMS!" seemed to possess. And that... wasn't something that would have been compatible with our mental health.
Tumblr in general wasn't compatible with our mental health, in fact, and we quit using it on any kind of regular basis in 2014, when people we'd considered friends were posting the most aggressive, abrasive things they could in the name of "education" and "enlightenment," and we were beginning to wonder if we'd ever really known them the way we thought we did. Other people we knew seemed to be struggling with Tumblr's language policing and we couldn't see any long-term healthy option for them besides getting off of Tumblr, but they seemed to have come to believe it was the only place they could get help as a disabled/trans/etc person if they needed it. (That is, unfortunately, one of the worst things about Tumblr: signalboosting on it can really work, but you have to play the Tumblr social game in order to get signalboosted, and some of the most enthusiastic signalboosters turned out to be abusers in it for the publicity, doing the right thing for the wrong reason.) We were dissociating to the point where we could no longer "see inside" due to the constant flood of posts screaming at people in specific-unspecific ways, and our "persecutor voices" (which don't seem to represent actual people in here, but rather a haywire coping mechanism which believes if we hate ourselves utterly and completely then no one will be able to hurt us) were worse than they'd been in years. We thought we'd made some headway in dealing with them, but Tumblr brought them roaring back, and they slipped it insidiously under our radar by convincing us that feelings of pain and defensiveness were natural and meant we were "learning" and "being enlightened." (We later came to realise that these ideas were actually just variations on some old abuse tapes with a find-and-replace on the words, which was possibly the most disturbing thing. I don't think it's a coincidence at all that so many Tumblr serial rebloggers who are in it to "get enlightened" are abuse victims.)
But we'd stopped trying to engage in Multiple Wars even before that for a variety of reasons, and sometime between our giving up on it and now, something bizarre happened: Tumblr did a complete 180 on the origin of the words it formerly claimed were silly neologisms by non-DID systems, lost its collective memory (again), and began to insist that these same words had been the exclusive property and even the creations of a DID-specific subculture which they... couldn't really tell you that much about the history of; they were just adamant that it existed.
The only rationale I can possibly come up with for the "cultural appropriation" reasoning-- which definitely isn't to say that I agree that it's appropriation-- is the argument that people diagnosed with dissociative disorders are part of the broader community of people with mental health issues and, as such, part of the broader disability community. And it's only a line of reasoning that occurs to me because I've used it before to argue that multiples can be considered oppressed insofar as they fall under the broader mental health stigma umbrella or the broader disability stigma umbrella. But the pervasive and institutional nature of that stigmatisation is directed at people with mental health condiitons in general. (Since another thing Tumblr doesn't seem to get is that the broader culture does not give a damn if you call yourself traumagenic or natural or gateway or DID, no matter how much anyone tries to insist that this is Really An Issue; the only thing the broader culture sees is "Crazy people are scary and dangerous!" They don't care who is in your system, or how you say they got there. They don't care what your subjective worlds look like or if you have any at all. They only care that you were labeled with something that tapped into their Scary Crazies fear. I mean, there are lots of people who believe that DID and schizophrenia are the same thing and ignore any attempts to explain otherwise, so they're not going to give a damn about anyone's furious attempts to explain the "difference between real DID and these natural system fakers.")
And yeah. It would be nice if they could point to some examples of this precious culture which is supposedly being appropriated from or explain its supposed history without substituting moral outrage for concrete details. I mean, I think there's some wiggle room for debate about what constitutes a culture and whether an online community can be considered a culture, but that gets into anthropology and the realm of actual observation and evidence, and a lot of Tumblr-style social justice seems to rely on the premise that moral outrage is always superior to these things. I've heard about some past forums which sounded very nice, like a WWIVnet board in the early 90s called "More Than One In This Body," but the number of people diagnosed with MPD or DID in the early 90s who also had access to the Internet was a very tiny subset of all the people actually diagnosed. At their absolute best, online multiple communities seem to have done a lot of reinventing the wheel over the years, in complete isolation from each other.
So to equate the terminology of medical personnel to the language used by oppressed cultures is horrifying to me. It's not liberating or empowering in the slightest, because it implies that our most holy words, our culture... are words that doctors came up with. It puts doctors in a place of cultural authority, not just medical authority!
This was actually one of the biggest reasons why we once embraced the whole idea of "multiplicity is always natural, it's just that some multiples were traumatised and organised their systems around that," when we first came out-- the way that doctors were virtually deified in some survivor communities and no one dared question their theories, and how much we were horrified by it, especially when some of those doctors had terrible ideas. ("The Osiris Complex" by Colin Ross was actually one of the few books we couldn't finish and nearly chucked at the wall after a chapter in which he persistently misgenders a trans male patient and seems to believe that it's necessary to describe the patient's phalloplasty, in degrading terms, claiming that the patient forced him to look at it. And this was even before his current tinfoil hat ideas.)
The existence of a community, however small, that was focused around questioning doctors was much more what we wanted to see, after we'd spent the past few years considering and re-considering whether we might be multiple and weighing the evidence of the other systems we've met in the past and questioning whether it always had to involve splitting due to trauma, and we loved Dark Personalities' original premise of "If you've been made to feel in other communities that you were wrong just for existing, you are welcome here." Unfortunately, the DP mailing list managed to get worse than lj-multiplicity in terms of people flaming each other constantly with nothing done about it, largely due to the Anachronic Army applying a "complete free speech for everyone" rule similar to Reddit, so moderating was actually not allowed.
...and yeah, the passivity of a lot of multiple communities, even non-DID ones, being unwilling to accept any terminology that wasn't sanctioned by medical professionals bothered us. There was one particular incident where a number of people didn't seem to get the concept of repurposing terminology. Basically, a system called the Bretheren (who don't seem to have an online presence any more) ran an online magazine called "Asylum" for multiples, with the name being an explicit attempt to repurpose mental health terminology and reclaim it as a term of identity and/or pride, which is definitely known in some circles of psych patients or ex-psych patients. But some people were offended by this because "calling it Asylum implies that multiples are insane and belong in asylums! People will get the wrong idea!" and the Bretheren ended up changing the name to Chrysantheme because of it.
(And I've actually seen several zines, sites, etc, for self-identified mad folks with variants on the name "Asylum," so this was hardly unique.)
Thank you for wading through Google (I can't navigate the remains of Deja since Google inherited it, these days) to find the old ASD FAQs, by the way. That was a newsgroup we strongly avoided because by the time we came out, it was dominated by systems totally dependent on their doctors and "Hostzillas"-- our term for people whose attitude towards being multiple was basically "I WANT THOSE HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE ALTERS WHO ARE RUINING MY LIFE BY NOT LETTING ME BE THE ONLY ONE IN CHARGE OF MY BODY TO GO AWAY." Seriously, it seemed like some of them didn't even want to engage their system members in any way at all and just wanted some kind of miracle cure to "make them go away"-- which was bizarre to us, because one of the things we liked about being multiple was introducing people to each other and forming bonds across different generations of our group, and people having in-system friendships and relationships. But the Hostzillas? Nope, just wanted to be drugged up or whatever until "all the alters went away."
It seems that things were different in 1994, though. I think one of the creators of the FAQ (the name Discord sounds familiar, but I don't know if it was them) eventually broke away from both alt.sexual-abuse.recovery and alt.support.dissociation to make a group called alt.abuse.transcendence, which was supposed to be explicitly about breaking free from your past trauma and not letting it become your whole identity. I know someone made the group because they were tired of all the learned helplessness on ASAR and ASD, anyway; I just don't know if it was Discord. But we never hung around multiple Usenet enough to see if it succeeded.
Another interesting thing to note about the ASD FAQ is that it uses "sie" as a gender-neutral pronoun, which is probably something else that should be pointed out to people who think gender-neutral pronouns were invented on Tumblr. (There's actually a very scholarly paper on the history of the various gender-neutral pronouns proposed in English dating back to the seventeenth century that I'm trying to re-find, and it was written before Tumblr. A lot of people accused s.e. smith of inventing "ou" to "be a special snowflake," but it actually dates from the eighteenth century. I'm surprised "thon" wasn't revived because it actually was listed in several dictionaries for a while. Seriously, though, when you search gender-neutral pronouns, "ou" and its history is one of the FIRST things that comes up. But I suppose finding out about it would require research beyond the superficial, and people on Tumblr don't like to read anything off of Tumblr that hasn't been officially sanctioned by Tumblr.
no subject
We made a number of posts to our Tumblr explaining that the terms "multiple" and "system" had, in fact, been used in Well-Known MPD/DID Books and by Well-Known Doctors and in online MPD/DID communities and resource pages created when most of the people posting this stuff were probably in diapers, where people said multiple, plural, and/or system. Actually, the earliest we can find "plural" used as an umbrella term was on the Vickis' MidContinuum page in the 90s, which was very much about abuse and recovery. (Interestingly, use of the term seemed to have convergently evolved in several different places in the late-90s/early-00s era.) We even found at least one instance of Morton Prince, the "Dissociation of a Personality" guy, using the term "systems of tendencies" to refer to "alternate states" (as most other doctors called them at the time). We felt as though we were mostly screaming into the aether, though, given that the posts rarely got more than 20 likes or reblogs, and while we're hardly the kind of people who measure our self-esteem by likes received on social media, the fact that people weren't spreading the information to any great degree suggested to us that the information wasn't going to get to the people who needed it, and we had no idea how to get it spread around, short of adopting the kind of aggressive asshole online persona that most of the people going "REAL PEOPLE WITH DID DON'T CALL THEMSELVES MULTIPLE SYSTEMS!" seemed to possess. And that... wasn't something that would have been compatible with our mental health.
Tumblr in general wasn't compatible with our mental health, in fact, and we quit using it on any kind of regular basis in 2014, when people we'd considered friends were posting the most aggressive, abrasive things they could in the name of "education" and "enlightenment," and we were beginning to wonder if we'd ever really known them the way we thought we did. Other people we knew seemed to be struggling with Tumblr's language policing and we couldn't see any long-term healthy option for them besides getting off of Tumblr, but they seemed to have come to believe it was the only place they could get help as a disabled/trans/etc person if they needed it. (That is, unfortunately, one of the worst things about Tumblr: signalboosting on it can really work, but you have to play the Tumblr social game in order to get signalboosted, and some of the most enthusiastic signalboosters turned out to be abusers in it for the publicity, doing the right thing for the wrong reason.) We were dissociating to the point where we could no longer "see inside" due to the constant flood of posts screaming at people in specific-unspecific ways, and our "persecutor voices" (which don't seem to represent actual people in here, but rather a haywire coping mechanism which believes if we hate ourselves utterly and completely then no one will be able to hurt us) were worse than they'd been in years. We thought we'd made some headway in dealing with them, but Tumblr brought them roaring back, and they slipped it insidiously under our radar by convincing us that feelings of pain and defensiveness were natural and meant we were "learning" and "being enlightened." (We later came to realise that these ideas were actually just variations on some old abuse tapes with a find-and-replace on the words, which was possibly the most disturbing thing. I don't think it's a coincidence at all that so many Tumblr serial rebloggers who are in it to "get enlightened" are abuse victims.)
But we'd stopped trying to engage in Multiple Wars even before that for a variety of reasons, and sometime between our giving up on it and now, something bizarre happened: Tumblr did a complete 180 on the origin of the words it formerly claimed were silly neologisms by non-DID systems, lost its collective memory (again), and began to insist that these same words had been the exclusive property and even the creations of a DID-specific subculture which they... couldn't really tell you that much about the history of; they were just adamant that it existed.
The only rationale I can possibly come up with for the "cultural appropriation" reasoning-- which definitely isn't to say that I agree that it's appropriation-- is the argument that people diagnosed with dissociative disorders are part of the broader community of people with mental health issues and, as such, part of the broader disability community. And it's only a line of reasoning that occurs to me because I've used it before to argue that multiples can be considered oppressed insofar as they fall under the broader mental health stigma umbrella or the broader disability stigma umbrella. But the pervasive and institutional nature of that stigmatisation is directed at people with mental health condiitons in general. (Since another thing Tumblr doesn't seem to get is that the broader culture does not give a damn if you call yourself traumagenic or natural or gateway or DID, no matter how much anyone tries to insist that this is Really An Issue; the only thing the broader culture sees is "Crazy people are scary and dangerous!" They don't care who is in your system, or how you say they got there. They don't care what your subjective worlds look like or if you have any at all. They only care that you were labeled with something that tapped into their Scary Crazies fear. I mean, there are lots of people who believe that DID and schizophrenia are the same thing and ignore any attempts to explain otherwise, so they're not going to give a damn about anyone's furious attempts to explain the "difference between real DID and these natural system fakers.")
And yeah. It would be nice if they could point to some examples of this precious culture which is supposedly being appropriated from or explain its supposed history without substituting moral outrage for concrete details. I mean, I think there's some wiggle room for debate about what constitutes a culture and whether an online community can be considered a culture, but that gets into anthropology and the realm of actual observation and evidence, and a lot of Tumblr-style social justice seems to rely on the premise that moral outrage is always superior to these things. I've heard about some past forums which sounded very nice, like a WWIVnet board in the early 90s called "More Than One In This Body," but the number of people diagnosed with MPD or DID in the early 90s who also had access to the Internet was a very tiny subset of all the people actually diagnosed. At their absolute best, online multiple communities seem to have done a lot of reinventing the wheel over the years, in complete isolation from each other.
So to equate the terminology of medical personnel to the language used by oppressed cultures is horrifying to me. It's not liberating or empowering in the slightest, because it implies that our most holy words, our culture... are words that doctors came up with. It puts doctors in a place of cultural authority, not just medical authority!
This was actually one of the biggest reasons why we once embraced the whole idea of "multiplicity is always natural, it's just that some multiples were traumatised and organised their systems around that," when we first came out-- the way that doctors were virtually deified in some survivor communities and no one dared question their theories, and how much we were horrified by it, especially when some of those doctors had terrible ideas. ("The Osiris Complex" by Colin Ross was actually one of the few books we couldn't finish and nearly chucked at the wall after a chapter in which he persistently misgenders a trans male patient and seems to believe that it's necessary to describe the patient's phalloplasty, in degrading terms, claiming that the patient forced him to look at it. And this was even before his current tinfoil hat ideas.)
The existence of a community, however small, that was focused around questioning doctors was much more what we wanted to see, after we'd spent the past few years considering and re-considering whether we might be multiple and weighing the evidence of the other systems we've met in the past and questioning whether it always had to involve splitting due to trauma, and we loved Dark Personalities' original premise of "If you've been made to feel in other communities that you were wrong just for existing, you are welcome here." Unfortunately, the DP mailing list managed to get worse than lj-multiplicity in terms of people flaming each other constantly with nothing done about it, largely due to the Anachronic Army applying a "complete free speech for everyone" rule similar to Reddit, so moderating was actually not allowed.
...and yeah, the passivity of a lot of multiple communities, even non-DID ones, being unwilling to accept any terminology that wasn't sanctioned by medical professionals bothered us. There was one particular incident where a number of people didn't seem to get the concept of repurposing terminology. Basically, a system called the Bretheren (who don't seem to have an online presence any more) ran an online magazine called "Asylum" for multiples, with the name being an explicit attempt to repurpose mental health terminology and reclaim it as a term of identity and/or pride, which is definitely known in some circles of psych patients or ex-psych patients. But some people were offended by this because "calling it Asylum implies that multiples are insane and belong in asylums! People will get the wrong idea!" and the Bretheren ended up changing the name to Chrysantheme because of it.
(And I've actually seen several zines, sites, etc, for self-identified mad folks with variants on the name "Asylum," so this was hardly unique.)
Thank you for wading through Google (I can't navigate the remains of Deja since Google inherited it, these days) to find the old ASD FAQs, by the way. That was a newsgroup we strongly avoided because by the time we came out, it was dominated by systems totally dependent on their doctors and "Hostzillas"-- our term for people whose attitude towards being multiple was basically "I WANT THOSE HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE ALTERS WHO ARE RUINING MY LIFE BY NOT LETTING ME BE THE ONLY ONE IN CHARGE OF MY BODY TO GO AWAY." Seriously, it seemed like some of them didn't even want to engage their system members in any way at all and just wanted some kind of miracle cure to "make them go away"-- which was bizarre to us, because one of the things we liked about being multiple was introducing people to each other and forming bonds across different generations of our group, and people having in-system friendships and relationships. But the Hostzillas? Nope, just wanted to be drugged up or whatever until "all the alters went away."
It seems that things were different in 1994, though. I think one of the creators of the FAQ (the name Discord sounds familiar, but I don't know if it was them) eventually broke away from both alt.sexual-abuse.recovery and alt.support.dissociation to make a group called alt.abuse.transcendence, which was supposed to be explicitly about breaking free from your past trauma and not letting it become your whole identity. I know someone made the group because they were tired of all the learned helplessness on ASAR and ASD, anyway; I just don't know if it was Discord. But we never hung around multiple Usenet enough to see if it succeeded.
Another interesting thing to note about the ASD FAQ is that it uses "sie" as a gender-neutral pronoun, which is probably something else that should be pointed out to people who think gender-neutral pronouns were invented on Tumblr. (There's actually a very scholarly paper on the history of the various gender-neutral pronouns proposed in English dating back to the seventeenth century that I'm trying to re-find, and it was written before Tumblr. A lot of people accused s.e. smith of inventing "ou" to "be a special snowflake," but it actually dates from the eighteenth century. I'm surprised "thon" wasn't revived because it actually was listed in several dictionaries for a while. Seriously, though, when you search gender-neutral pronouns, "ou" and its history is one of the FIRST things that comes up. But I suppose finding out about it would require research beyond the superficial, and people on Tumblr don't like to read anything off of Tumblr that hasn't been officially sanctioned by Tumblr.
-Amaranth