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lb_lee(EDIT 7/22/2022: I have edited this entry because I considered debating whether plural culture exists as pointless hairsplitting. I also added new information from the BBS days. Apparently people still need this post, so it remains.)
There is a chestnut of misinformation on tumblr claiming that 'system' is a term made by DID folks, for DID folks, and nobody else is allowed to use it. This is often wrapped up in the idea that multiplicity is owned by people with DID/DDNOS/OSDD, and anyone else claiming it is appropriating. This is utter nonsense. I've written numerous posts on this before, but here is the more thorough breakdown, first focused on the politics of this statement, and then the history of the actual usage.
I. The Politics
The "system is DID-only" argument that tumblr makes seems to be based on a completely different form of social justice theory than disability rights--namely, the idea of cultural appropriation. People making this argument equate 'system' with language created by oppressed people for their specific culture, and other plurals using 'system' as appropriators at best and ableist oppressors at worst. But this is completely false and misleading!
First of all, DID folks probably did not invent the term 'system.' It is more likely that it was created by the mental health powers that be; Freyasspirit kindly gave me this citation from Richard Kluft's "The Phenomenology And Treatment Of Extremely Complex Multiple Personality Disorder" in 1988 where he refers to "a system of alters," and that's the earliest I've been able to find. I've also seen it used later in the therapeutic literature in 1995, in Stephen Braude's "First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind," Krakauer's "Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder: The Power of the Collective Heart" from 2001, and many, many others. Just google "system of alters" and you will find plenty.
Even if I'm incorrect, and the term came from the DID folks themselves, it is clear that mental health personnel quickly picked it up and enforced it upon us from their position of medical authority. Not exactly the empowering narrative of a noble oppressed people coming up with terms for their own self-identification, is it?
But even if you ignore that, the fact is, plurals (or any subgroup therein) are not a homogenous culture. Social media can give the illusion that it is, but there are a LOT of independent plural cultures/subcultures who are completely unaware of each other and have completely different terminology, bugbears, and practices. The closest thing to DID culture I have ever experienced was at a DID conference that had a great number of doctors as honored guests and panelists--and I can say with certainty that the focus was on deference to medical authority, not self-determination. (Also, none of them knew what I was banging on about when I used the word "system;" it wasn't their slang.)
So to equate the terminology of medical personnel to the language used by oppressed cultures is horrifying to me. 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! And yet at the same time, the argument claims other plurals are the appropriators, the ones in power oppressing people with DID, "stealing" their words!
So the whole argument is undermined by the very virtues it professes. It uses a circular logic to claim that plural culture is only made up of people with DID (and/or DDNOS/OSDD, depending on who exactly is spouting this nonsense), that they came up with "system" completely all by themselves, and that their language must be protected from interlopers... but that is completely untrue. Non-DID plurals have been a part of our communities for over twenty years, at least, and I can prove it.
II. History of "System" as a Standalone Noun for Plural Stuff
The earliest use of the stand-alone word "system" for a plural that I've been able to find so far is in the December 1990 edition of the Many Voices newsletter, on page eight: "I'm the part of the system called Terry and Friends." I haven't managed to completely chase down the evolution or use of the term through this newsletter, and probably won't be able to unless/until Sneak gets around to transcribing a bunch of the older issues into easily searchable plain-text, making research easier. I'm not clear whether the people of Many Voices coined it, got it from therapy groups, or whether the term naturally occurred in multiple places because of the much earlier use of "system" to describe any arrangement of related people/parts/things to form an independent greater entity.
Back before the whole moving truck fiasco, Astraea gave me some of their old BBS records in plaint-text. They are not reliable narrators, and since I don't have the consent of the people involved in these old BBS records, I feel uncomfortable relying too heavily on them or sharing too much information. That said, I was able to independently corroborate statements in the September 1992 BBS record of the existence of the Rockielynn System, who joined both alt.sexual.abuse.recovery and alt.support.dissociation in 1994. Other people in the Sept. 1992 BBS record also use the term "system" in the standalone, familiar way it is still used now: "We refer to ourselves as a system... and sometimes the system works, and sometimes it does not." One system's singlet wife says, "I care very much for - and love - everyone in the System."
For all their negative qualities, Astraea have been fairly consistent over the decades over resisting medical terminology. Indeed, the 1992 September BBS record sparks the whole "system" conversation off with Iris of Astraea asking, "What do you call yourSelves? Or, do you? Some find it too labeling even to name themselves in this fashion. We only did it so we would be able to talk about it without saying something dehumanizing like 'alternate personalities'." So I feel pretty confident that
"System" seemingly spreads from the BBS users to the alt.support.dissociation Insider FAQ, also from 1994, created by Discord and Sapphire Gazelles. The FAQ offers the following definition of "multiple system": "someone who has multiple persons/personalities living inside of one body. These are referred to here as alters. (As of the DSM-IV, this condition is called Dissociative Identity Disorder, but most people here will probably not use the official term.)"
So from the very start, the implication is that DID is not the be-all, end-all of plural experience. And the FAQ goes further! When they come to the question "What causes multiplicity?" Discord and Sapphire Gazelles specifically state that while many experience trauma, "there are exceptions to this." These include, "a few multiples exist that do not believe that they were abused but have had dissociative role models, such as a multiple parent." In later edits of the FAQ from 1995, this expanded to also include, "Some people explore identity or alternate identity games, like role playing, acting, pretending, or alternate social structures to the point where they begin to question their original identity. In some cases, these identities can take on aspects, experiences, and problems which are essentially identical to those experienced by multiples who experienced trauma." They also emphasize, "Some multiples are unaware of any initial trauma. Whether such trauma exists and the memories blocked or whether no such trauma exists is usually impossible to determine."
Compare and contrast to the tumblr argument, which does not allow a plural to exist if they don't have trauma. The alt.support.dissociation FAQ allows far more self-governance and flexibility.
This FAQ was reposted and linked over and over up until at least 2012, and the drop in references more reflects falling use of the site, rather than terminology. The last one I can find is from 2013, and specifically uses 'system' to refer to all kinds of plurals, even ones other posters are skeptical of the existence of. (Ironically, tumblr systems with fictives. Note that fictives are still a more-or-less accepted part of the DID phenomenon on that site, so enjoy the subcultural differences there!)
But non-DID plurals took and ran with the 'system' word off of Usenet too. By 2000, the Anachronic Army was using it, dismissing MPD as "An inaccurate label. We are people, and not disordered!" and further stated, "We have dropped the label of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and simply call ourselves 'multiple'." By 2001, Astraea were also using it, and similarly rejecting the medical model of multiplicity, stating that they had never been diagnosed, and asking, "Do you really think the mental health system has the patent on multiplicity?" By 2004, Amorpha had also picked it up.
In 2007, we joined the multiplicity and soulbonding communities of Livejournal, and by that point, 'system' had most definitely generalized into use by all plurals on that site. We used the term in our first comic, MPD for You and Me, which we created that year. We can also find members of the multiplicity community with 'system' in their usernames that we can date back to this period, such as mysidia_system from 2006 (who followed soulbonding comms) and elementalsystem from 2008, who clearly reject the medical model and DID diagnosis as well.
'System' became such a general purpose word, in fact, that it spawned other words based off of it, like 'in-system relationship,' which I've primarily seen discussed by non-DID systems, such as Plures House. (And that article dates from 2012.) And while I saw many, many tedious turf battles during my time on Livejournal, none were ever pitched over the word 'system.' That didn't appear until recent years on tumblr, and still seems highly specific to that site.
Furthermore, I have no reason to believe that 'system' was ever reclaimed to be specifically for DID folks during this time either! Certainly not on a general basis. In 2015, I went to the IGDID Trauma and Dissociation Conference, and nobody knew what I was going on about when I used the term 'system.' The terminology was not used in that subculture.
So 'system' has been general purpose for over 20 years, and it's been used by specifically non-DID systems during that entire time. It never got reclaimed by DID folks, who aren't a monolith to begin with. So for to claim that non-DID multiples are "appropriating" their language, even if you ignore the incorrect usage, is patently false. They've been using it a long time! And they were using it specifically in communities that mixed us all together. They aren't barbarians invading DID Rome; they were here from the beginning, and crafting the language from the beginning, and a great number of them have been huge boons to our community. I consider it deeply rude to try and strip their language from them now, especially for such a ridiculously contrived reason.
--Rogan
There is a chestnut of misinformation on tumblr claiming that 'system' is a term made by DID folks, for DID folks, and nobody else is allowed to use it. This is often wrapped up in the idea that multiplicity is owned by people with DID/DDNOS/OSDD, and anyone else claiming it is appropriating. This is utter nonsense. I've written numerous posts on this before, but here is the more thorough breakdown, first focused on the politics of this statement, and then the history of the actual usage.
I. The Politics
The "system is DID-only" argument that tumblr makes seems to be based on a completely different form of social justice theory than disability rights--namely, the idea of cultural appropriation. People making this argument equate 'system' with language created by oppressed people for their specific culture, and other plurals using 'system' as appropriators at best and ableist oppressors at worst. But this is completely false and misleading!
First of all, DID folks probably did not invent the term 'system.' It is more likely that it was created by the mental health powers that be; Freyasspirit kindly gave me this citation from Richard Kluft's "The Phenomenology And Treatment Of Extremely Complex Multiple Personality Disorder" in 1988 where he refers to "a system of alters," and that's the earliest I've been able to find. I've also seen it used later in the therapeutic literature in 1995, in Stephen Braude's "First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind," Krakauer's "Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder: The Power of the Collective Heart" from 2001, and many, many others. Just google "system of alters" and you will find plenty.
Even if I'm incorrect, and the term came from the DID folks themselves, it is clear that mental health personnel quickly picked it up and enforced it upon us from their position of medical authority. Not exactly the empowering narrative of a noble oppressed people coming up with terms for their own self-identification, is it?
But even if you ignore that, the fact is, plurals (or any subgroup therein) are not a homogenous culture. Social media can give the illusion that it is, but there are a LOT of independent plural cultures/subcultures who are completely unaware of each other and have completely different terminology, bugbears, and practices. The closest thing to DID culture I have ever experienced was at a DID conference that had a great number of doctors as honored guests and panelists--and I can say with certainty that the focus was on deference to medical authority, not self-determination. (Also, none of them knew what I was banging on about when I used the word "system;" it wasn't their slang.)
So to equate the terminology of medical personnel to the language used by oppressed cultures is horrifying to me. 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! And yet at the same time, the argument claims other plurals are the appropriators, the ones in power oppressing people with DID, "stealing" their words!
So the whole argument is undermined by the very virtues it professes. It uses a circular logic to claim that plural culture is only made up of people with DID (and/or DDNOS/OSDD, depending on who exactly is spouting this nonsense), that they came up with "system" completely all by themselves, and that their language must be protected from interlopers... but that is completely untrue. Non-DID plurals have been a part of our communities for over twenty years, at least, and I can prove it.
II. History of "System" as a Standalone Noun for Plural Stuff
The earliest use of the stand-alone word "system" for a plural that I've been able to find so far is in the December 1990 edition of the Many Voices newsletter, on page eight: "I'm the part of the system called Terry and Friends." I haven't managed to completely chase down the evolution or use of the term through this newsletter, and probably won't be able to unless/until Sneak gets around to transcribing a bunch of the older issues into easily searchable plain-text, making research easier. I'm not clear whether the people of Many Voices coined it, got it from therapy groups, or whether the term naturally occurred in multiple places because of the much earlier use of "system" to describe any arrangement of related people/parts/things to form an independent greater entity.
Back before the whole moving truck fiasco, Astraea gave me some of their old BBS records in plaint-text. They are not reliable narrators, and since I don't have the consent of the people involved in these old BBS records, I feel uncomfortable relying too heavily on them or sharing too much information. That said, I was able to independently corroborate statements in the September 1992 BBS record of the existence of the Rockielynn System, who joined both alt.sexual.abuse.recovery and alt.support.dissociation in 1994. Other people in the Sept. 1992 BBS record also use the term "system" in the standalone, familiar way it is still used now: "We refer to ourselves as a system... and sometimes the system works, and sometimes it does not." One system's singlet wife says, "I care very much for - and love - everyone in the System."
For all their negative qualities, Astraea have been fairly consistent over the decades over resisting medical terminology. Indeed, the 1992 September BBS record sparks the whole "system" conversation off with Iris of Astraea asking, "What do you call yourSelves? Or, do you? Some find it too labeling even to name themselves in this fashion. We only did it so we would be able to talk about it without saying something dehumanizing like 'alternate personalities'." So I feel pretty confident that
"System" seemingly spreads from the BBS users to the alt.support.dissociation Insider FAQ, also from 1994, created by Discord and Sapphire Gazelles. The FAQ offers the following definition of "multiple system": "someone who has multiple persons/personalities living inside of one body. These are referred to here as alters. (As of the DSM-IV, this condition is called Dissociative Identity Disorder, but most people here will probably not use the official term.)"
So from the very start, the implication is that DID is not the be-all, end-all of plural experience. And the FAQ goes further! When they come to the question "What causes multiplicity?" Discord and Sapphire Gazelles specifically state that while many experience trauma, "there are exceptions to this." These include, "a few multiples exist that do not believe that they were abused but have had dissociative role models, such as a multiple parent." In later edits of the FAQ from 1995, this expanded to also include, "Some people explore identity or alternate identity games, like role playing, acting, pretending, or alternate social structures to the point where they begin to question their original identity. In some cases, these identities can take on aspects, experiences, and problems which are essentially identical to those experienced by multiples who experienced trauma." They also emphasize, "Some multiples are unaware of any initial trauma. Whether such trauma exists and the memories blocked or whether no such trauma exists is usually impossible to determine."
Compare and contrast to the tumblr argument, which does not allow a plural to exist if they don't have trauma. The alt.support.dissociation FAQ allows far more self-governance and flexibility.
This FAQ was reposted and linked over and over up until at least 2012, and the drop in references more reflects falling use of the site, rather than terminology. The last one I can find is from 2013, and specifically uses 'system' to refer to all kinds of plurals, even ones other posters are skeptical of the existence of. (Ironically, tumblr systems with fictives. Note that fictives are still a more-or-less accepted part of the DID phenomenon on that site, so enjoy the subcultural differences there!)
But non-DID plurals took and ran with the 'system' word off of Usenet too. By 2000, the Anachronic Army was using it, dismissing MPD as "An inaccurate label. We are people, and not disordered!" and further stated, "We have dropped the label of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and simply call ourselves 'multiple'." By 2001, Astraea were also using it, and similarly rejecting the medical model of multiplicity, stating that they had never been diagnosed, and asking, "Do you really think the mental health system has the patent on multiplicity?" By 2004, Amorpha had also picked it up.
In 2007, we joined the multiplicity and soulbonding communities of Livejournal, and by that point, 'system' had most definitely generalized into use by all plurals on that site. We used the term in our first comic, MPD for You and Me, which we created that year. We can also find members of the multiplicity community with 'system' in their usernames that we can date back to this period, such as mysidia_system from 2006 (who followed soulbonding comms) and elementalsystem from 2008, who clearly reject the medical model and DID diagnosis as well.
'System' became such a general purpose word, in fact, that it spawned other words based off of it, like 'in-system relationship,' which I've primarily seen discussed by non-DID systems, such as Plures House. (And that article dates from 2012.) And while I saw many, many tedious turf battles during my time on Livejournal, none were ever pitched over the word 'system.' That didn't appear until recent years on tumblr, and still seems highly specific to that site.
Furthermore, I have no reason to believe that 'system' was ever reclaimed to be specifically for DID folks during this time either! Certainly not on a general basis. In 2015, I went to the IGDID Trauma and Dissociation Conference, and nobody knew what I was going on about when I used the term 'system.' The terminology was not used in that subculture.
So 'system' has been general purpose for over 20 years, and it's been used by specifically non-DID systems during that entire time. It never got reclaimed by DID folks, who aren't a monolith to begin with. So for to claim that non-DID multiples are "appropriating" their language, even if you ignore the incorrect usage, is patently false. They've been using it a long time! And they were using it specifically in communities that mixed us all together. They aren't barbarians invading DID Rome; they were here from the beginning, and crafting the language from the beginning, and a great number of them have been huge boons to our community. I consider it deeply rude to try and strip their language from them now, especially for such a ridiculously contrived reason.
--Rogan
no subject
Date: 2017-09-21 04:49 am (UTC)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
no subject
Date: 2017-09-22 03:31 am (UTC)Rogan: YUP. When I went to the Ivory Garden Trauma and Dissociation Conference, it was a failure business-wise, but a FASCINATING (horrifying) experience personally. Because Colin Ross was the most honored guess, and yeah, the focus was very much on bowing down to the great medical authority. Mori in particular was on the verge of overturning furniture throughout it, and made up a song about Colin Ross done to the tune of 'Glory Glory Psychotherapy' to make it through.
Thank you for wading through Google [...] to find the old ASD FAQs, by the way.
Rogan: Thank Collective Solipsism; they gave me the citation from 1995, and we worked backwards from there! :D
Mori: And yeah, boy was ASD a trip, looking through how you weren't allowed to write out words like 'abuse,' 'rape,' 'police,' or even 'mother' and 'father' without censoring out the vowels.
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.
Mori: Pfft, we have a pulpy sci-fi/romance series from the 80s that uses 'hir' as a gender neutral pronoun! So obviously that was a thing even back before 1985 just in pop culture!