Here we go again. [Yarrow]
Jul. 4th, 2012 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amorphaSo apparently, there's stuff making the rounds again on Tumblr about "plurals are just a bunch of privileged rich white teenagers who have NEVER KNOWN REAL OPPRESSION!" *facedesk*
...like another system we know pointed out in a place where it was discussed recently, we missed the part where claiming an identity as plural, as multiple or median or DID or whatever, of any origin, gets you any kind of privilege at all. I mean, FFS-- we're only out to four people we know offline, and all of them we met on the Internet first, and only one of them is someone we see on a regular basis. We haven't even tried coming out to doctors, because when we came out to therapists when we were younger, our experiences with how they responded to us were pretty much universally bad-- one of them basically destroyed our communication system in the name of "helping us heal." (Even though we don't identify as trauma-based, these days, but... back then, we thought we had no right to question a therapist.) We really don't want to get phoned in to a mental institution, especially when we know from talking to other systems that some doctors, if they know you're plural, will give you neuroleptics in an attempt to "make the voices stop" (i.e. your communication), because there's no longer big money in DID diagnoses in most places. And there are several neuroleptics we have a high likelihood of dying from an allergic reaction to. For some reason, autistic people have a much higher likelihood of fatal reactions and of developing movement disorders from taking them, than non-autistic people do.
And we're in a precarious enough situation already with being autistic and not always able to communicate well verbally with doctors. And this is from when we're just having normal verbal communication difficulties and aren't being left incapable of communication because they triggered our PTSD all over the place. (We actually got "fired" by a doctor and his nurse practitioner once, because we freaked out and ended up nonverbal in the examination room, after the nurse completely failed to read anything in our file and triggered the hell out of us. They basically told us to go away and never come back to their office again. And these people were supposed to be really good in dealing with PTSD.)
...I almost think a bunch of us should get together and make some kind of group statement on this or something. Like "no, we're not all a bunch of privileged airheads, some of us deal with discrimination quite regularly at the front, and we are NOT TEENAGERS, OKAY." Not in a feeding-the-trolls sense, but... I've gotten this nasty, unpleasant perception a few times that while some of the people flaming plural systems on Tumblr are just trolls following the snark trail (like people did on Something Awful and Portal of Evil ten years ago, back before Tumblr apparently invented plurality), or people who just want to spew nastiness about any available target, there are also some people doing this who think of themselves as being genuinely invested in The SJ Community and think they're seeing something real that needs to be called out and dogpiled. Even if their perception of it is incredibly distorted by what they want to see and/or are being told is there by other people in the community pulling this shit.
...also for some reason (and this is an indication of how little they actually know about our community, I guess) the people making these "privileged teenagers who've never known oppression" accusations keep repeatedly conflating plurality with Otherkin (and saying the same things about everyone in that community). I actually considered that label for myself years ago but decided I didn't really identify with it, even though I identify as half-human, because it just... I don't know. We met some individual great people, but the community didn't fit for me. Most of the people in it were singlets and we saw several instances of people being dismissive and nasty to plurals. Like "you're clearly mentally ill, you crazies need to get out of our community so the rest of us will look good!" (Because, yeah, a community of people identifying as nonhuman would otherwise find it really easy to get taken seriously if it weren't for freaks like us messing it up for them. Yeah. Not that I think the kin community overall deserves even a fraction of the trolling and flaming it's gotten over the years, just... still. The fact that Tumblr people keep conflating it with plurality when we've seen people treated like shit in it for being plural is just kind of like salt in the wound.)
And the fact that for some self-professed social justice activists treating Discrimination Against The Mentally Ill as one of Their Issues, those supposed principles fly out the window the moment someone even mentions 'classic' DID... I just don't know what the hell to do any more, honestly. The thing about snark site trolling was that no one involved in it could claim any kind of moral high ground, because they were there to troll and/or laugh at the Crazy Stupid People. So all you could really do was just not respond to it and wait for them to find a new target to go after. When it's coming from people claiming to be committed to justice and ending discrimination... I have no idea how to respond to this crap.
oh, ETA (after we did find a way to respond to it somehow, even though it used up most of our energy for the evening): Talking to the person who mentioned it to us clarified that the people who'd started it were not looking for people going "DID doesn't exist!" (I'd gotten the impression that they were) but for people agreeing with them that non-disordered plurals are "appropriating mental illness." (See our other post for why we just wish that idea would DIE ALREADY.)
Also, bizarrely, claims of plurals and Otherkin (which get continually conflated for no reason we can possibly understand) being a bunch of spoiled teenagers who have never known "real oppression" like the kind of oppression that people of color and trans people deal with, are almost entirely coming from people who are white and cis themselves. Well, it's actually not all that bizarre in the SJ community, unfortunately-- people trying to slap down someone else by invoking comparisons to some other community they're not part of at all, and saying essentially "You're not as oppressed as them! Shut up!" Basically grabbing onto the oppression of some group they're not even part of in an attempt to gain moral superiority points.
What's ironic is that the friend& (it was one person but they're part of a system) who first mentioned it to me, has reblogged several of those threads to mention that they are bodily trans and black, and identify as plural-- and no one ever responds to them. Just keeps on reblogging/responding the "Yeah! You go, girl!" crap because they seem to think that ability to write lots of angry litanies of how horrible their life is in a tone of outraged righteousness, equals actual rightness. This says something I'm finding extremely unpleasant about the SJ community on Tumblr, but I'm having trouble putting it into words.
...like another system we know pointed out in a place where it was discussed recently, we missed the part where claiming an identity as plural, as multiple or median or DID or whatever, of any origin, gets you any kind of privilege at all. I mean, FFS-- we're only out to four people we know offline, and all of them we met on the Internet first, and only one of them is someone we see on a regular basis. We haven't even tried coming out to doctors, because when we came out to therapists when we were younger, our experiences with how they responded to us were pretty much universally bad-- one of them basically destroyed our communication system in the name of "helping us heal." (Even though we don't identify as trauma-based, these days, but... back then, we thought we had no right to question a therapist.) We really don't want to get phoned in to a mental institution, especially when we know from talking to other systems that some doctors, if they know you're plural, will give you neuroleptics in an attempt to "make the voices stop" (i.e. your communication), because there's no longer big money in DID diagnoses in most places. And there are several neuroleptics we have a high likelihood of dying from an allergic reaction to. For some reason, autistic people have a much higher likelihood of fatal reactions and of developing movement disorders from taking them, than non-autistic people do.
And we're in a precarious enough situation already with being autistic and not always able to communicate well verbally with doctors. And this is from when we're just having normal verbal communication difficulties and aren't being left incapable of communication because they triggered our PTSD all over the place. (We actually got "fired" by a doctor and his nurse practitioner once, because we freaked out and ended up nonverbal in the examination room, after the nurse completely failed to read anything in our file and triggered the hell out of us. They basically told us to go away and never come back to their office again. And these people were supposed to be really good in dealing with PTSD.)
...I almost think a bunch of us should get together and make some kind of group statement on this or something. Like "no, we're not all a bunch of privileged airheads, some of us deal with discrimination quite regularly at the front, and we are NOT TEENAGERS, OKAY." Not in a feeding-the-trolls sense, but... I've gotten this nasty, unpleasant perception a few times that while some of the people flaming plural systems on Tumblr are just trolls following the snark trail (like people did on Something Awful and Portal of Evil ten years ago, back before Tumblr apparently invented plurality), or people who just want to spew nastiness about any available target, there are also some people doing this who think of themselves as being genuinely invested in The SJ Community and think they're seeing something real that needs to be called out and dogpiled. Even if their perception of it is incredibly distorted by what they want to see and/or are being told is there by other people in the community pulling this shit.
...also for some reason (and this is an indication of how little they actually know about our community, I guess) the people making these "privileged teenagers who've never known oppression" accusations keep repeatedly conflating plurality with Otherkin (and saying the same things about everyone in that community). I actually considered that label for myself years ago but decided I didn't really identify with it, even though I identify as half-human, because it just... I don't know. We met some individual great people, but the community didn't fit for me. Most of the people in it were singlets and we saw several instances of people being dismissive and nasty to plurals. Like "you're clearly mentally ill, you crazies need to get out of our community so the rest of us will look good!" (Because, yeah, a community of people identifying as nonhuman would otherwise find it really easy to get taken seriously if it weren't for freaks like us messing it up for them. Yeah. Not that I think the kin community overall deserves even a fraction of the trolling and flaming it's gotten over the years, just... still. The fact that Tumblr people keep conflating it with plurality when we've seen people treated like shit in it for being plural is just kind of like salt in the wound.)
And the fact that for some self-professed social justice activists treating Discrimination Against The Mentally Ill as one of Their Issues, those supposed principles fly out the window the moment someone even mentions 'classic' DID... I just don't know what the hell to do any more, honestly. The thing about snark site trolling was that no one involved in it could claim any kind of moral high ground, because they were there to troll and/or laugh at the Crazy Stupid People. So all you could really do was just not respond to it and wait for them to find a new target to go after. When it's coming from people claiming to be committed to justice and ending discrimination... I have no idea how to respond to this crap.
oh, ETA (after we did find a way to respond to it somehow, even though it used up most of our energy for the evening): Talking to the person who mentioned it to us clarified that the people who'd started it were not looking for people going "DID doesn't exist!" (I'd gotten the impression that they were) but for people agreeing with them that non-disordered plurals are "appropriating mental illness." (See our other post for why we just wish that idea would DIE ALREADY.)
Also, bizarrely, claims of plurals and Otherkin (which get continually conflated for no reason we can possibly understand) being a bunch of spoiled teenagers who have never known "real oppression" like the kind of oppression that people of color and trans people deal with, are almost entirely coming from people who are white and cis themselves. Well, it's actually not all that bizarre in the SJ community, unfortunately-- people trying to slap down someone else by invoking comparisons to some other community they're not part of at all, and saying essentially "You're not as oppressed as them! Shut up!" Basically grabbing onto the oppression of some group they're not even part of in an attempt to gain moral superiority points.
What's ironic is that the friend& (it was one person but they're part of a system) who first mentioned it to me, has reblogged several of those threads to mention that they are bodily trans and black, and identify as plural-- and no one ever responds to them. Just keeps on reblogging/responding the "Yeah! You go, girl!" crap because they seem to think that ability to write lots of angry litanies of how horrible their life is in a tone of outraged righteousness, equals actual rightness. This says something I'm finding extremely unpleasant about the SJ community on Tumblr, but I'm having trouble putting it into words.