Trauma in Multi Identity: Essay: 3000: "Agony! Far more PAINFUL than yours!" --" Agony ," Into the Woods: This essay won the Patreon poll this month and was requested by a good few folks. The footnotes in this essay are explanation of terminology and history; you readers who know it already can skip them.Despite being generally looked down on by singlet culture, plurals have nonetheless created an internal pecking order so as to feel superior to each other. Different places have different hierarchies, with different groups at different points on the ladder, but the pecking order itself seems to be universal, and mostly incomprehensible and ridiculous to outside observers. It’s like the geek hierarchy, only even more pointless.For as long as I’ve been on the plural Internet, there have been divisions between plurals who associate their plurality with trauma and/or medicalization, and those who don’t. (Footnote 1). But in 2014, the divisions started becoming more intense, more heated, with a tone of moral outrage I hadn’t seen before. I started seeing the sentiment that trauma-based multiples were the only multiples allowed to call themselves multiple or plural—indeed, they were the only plurals allowed to exist. These folks called themselves “traumagenic,” while everyone else was lumped into the category “endogenic,” which is a false binary, one the term “endogenic” was created specifically to avoid (Footnote 2).In this false binary, which as far as I can tell did not exist until 2014, traumagenics are an oppressed disabled group, and endogenics are their oppressors, stealing their words, their culture, their way of being. Under this philosophy, there can be no overarching plural community, because the two camps are morally opposed.And that’s bullshit.I have written before about the twenty-plus years of non-trauma multis existing in plural communities online (2017), so I won’t revisit that. Since writing that post, I have since found even earlier record of multiples who claimed to have no trauma in their backgrounds, being considered multiple and being mentioned in multi newsletters (Many Voices Press, 1992 June). So for about as long as I have records of traumatized multi community, non-trauma multis have been a part of it! (And that’s still ignoring centuries of record of religious or cultural plurality, before the modern medical association of trauma.)Plural pissing contests are nothing new. But I feel that “the genic wars” is unusually nasty, because it is the first of the plural pissing contests that I’ve seen which reframes identity as moral imperative. Instead of non-trauma multis being stupid, silly, or lying, they become culturally appropriating, ableist oppressors. Which is perverse, because many of the claims traumagenics make about endogenics are, in fact, deeply ableist themselves! And unlike the other pissing contests I’ve seen come and go, this one is starting to show in my offline life, not just online.So let’s talk about why people are so gosh darn mad that a plural might say, “I wasn’t made by trauma,” to the point that they compare it to slave-holding (Entropy System, 2018) and yet aren’t considered the lunatic fringe.At this time, folks usually start expecting to me to state my plural demographic. Am I traumagenic, or am I endogenic? Where do I fall in the battle?And that’s part of the problem. We plurals are expected to cough up what might be considered intimate information on command, to anyone who asks. Even though asking, “are you traumagenic?” is actually a host of questions:• What kind of trauma have you undergone?• Can you remember it clearly enough to be sure about it?• Do you have access to regular, competent healthcare that agrees with you?• Have you been diagnosed? With what? When? By who?• Are you willing to tell me exactly what it is, so I can judge whether it “counts?”• Is it part of your identity?• Are you willing to answer these possibly invasive questions from random strangers?I have known plurals who have refused to answer the question. They get tarred as endogenic (and thus ableist), regardless of their actual experiences.It’s probably obvious that I don’t approve of being picked at like this. Disabled people are often expected to have no boundaries or privacy when it comes to our health, as though our condition is public property. We should have a right to say, “that is none of your business,” and that someone might claim that doing so is ableist (Footnote 3), and oppressing the person badgering us, is a mind-twisting pretzel of nonsense. It’s not ableist; it’s basic privacy, which all people should have!Besides, I joined the community before these categories existed. Asking me if I’m traumagenic is like asking Caveman Og if he’s Catholic or Protestant. It betrays a certain ignorance of history, not to mention a stark political motivation. I have announced some of my trauma history publicly, but I think the “traumagenic” label is fundamentally flawed, and I don’t use it for myself for many reasons. Let’s go into them!In the previous section, I mentioned how some traumagenic multiples paint basic privacy as ableism. This is a problem I’ve seen a lot—taking ableist arguments (“disabled people have no right to privacy”) and dressing them in the clothes of the opposite (“by not publicly stating trauma, you must have no trauma, and thus be trying to sneak into my clubhouse and steal my culture, and you are oppressing me”). It is a convoluted little piece of anti-logic, hard to explain and refute. But let’s try.First, let’s take a step back and talk about what ableism and disability activism are. The basic principles of disability activism are: disabled people should have the same rights as anyone else to engage in public life, have our needs taken care of, and pursue our happiness. We should be able to trust that those taking care of us won’t abuse or murder us, and if we are murdered, we should be able to trust that this would be treated as a crime, and not a mercy. We should have our skills, languages, and abilities recognized, and be treated as the authorities of our own experience.Even these basics seem like too much to a lot of people—some people might be honestly shocked or horrified that I, a crazy person, might say, “I am the authority on my condition, not my doctor.” But I am. My healthcare team each has their own specialties—they know things about medication that I don’t, for instance, or certain forms of therapy that may have helped people like me in the past. But when it comes to my personal experience, nobody can replace me. A doctor can not, must not, replace self-knowledge. When folks act as though I should defer to a doctor in all my dealings with the world, I consider that a deeply ableist argument. It is saying that I don’t even have the right to name my own experience; I must look to a doctor to hand it down to me.This isn’t just unfair to me; it’s also unfair to the doctor. Doctors are human beings like the rest of us. They can be wrong. They can be ignorant. They can be malicious. Treating them like gods is at best setting them up for an inevitable fall; at worst, it allows heinous overreaches of power and cruelty.Plenty of people put doctors on pedestals, but medicalized multiples in particular have a culture of overly deferring to their healthcare team: never making a move without asking the doc’s opinion, treating therapists as their parent replacements, relying on their shrinks for things they should really learn to do themselves, such as taking care of their internal children. When I went to IGDID (a trauma and dissociation conference) in 2015, I saw therapists taking their dissociative patients to the con and talking about them in panels, never making it clear whether said patients consented. I met multiples who had been in care for decades, never improving, never seeming to learn any skills, but still absolutely enamored of their brilliant therapist (who they apparently couldn’t function without). These weren’t children either; these were people old enough to be my parents or grandparents!Traumagenic multiples have the same problem with this culture as any other medicalized multi subgroup. But they are the first I’ve seen who claim that not mindlessly deferring to medical authority is ableist. The argument seems to go, “doctors have said that multiplicity can only be caused by trauma, and the doctors must be right. So if a multiple claims not to have been formed by trauma, they must be lying and are ‘appropriating’ multiplicity, which is ableist.” Even though that very argument undercuts everything disability activism stands for—namely, that disabled people get to be the experts on their own experience! And even though plurals have noticed the way doctors sweep non-trauma-based multiples under the rug as irrelevant statistical outliers (Collective Solipsism, 2015). (And the whole “appropriating” argument will get its own section.)Another part of the argument, though I don’t think it’s consciously thought out, is that traumagenic multiples are “more disabled” and thus “more oppressed,” and thus less ableist. But none of this is true. I know plurals who are disabled for many reasons—it has little to do with whether they see themselves as traumagenic or not. I have never seen a highly ableist singlet go, “oh wait, you’re endogenic? That’s fine, you’re one of the good ones.” And level of disability has nothing to do with how big an ableist jerk someone can be; I’ve known disabled traumagenic plurals who were total ableist dirtbags.The fact is, oppression can’t be solved through avoidance. Surrounding yourself with women won’t free you from misogyny, avoiding all white people won’t provide an escape from racism, and being only around traumagenic plurals won’t solve ableism. The only way to actually overcome these problems is through active engagement, awareness, and change. And I have seen no indication that traumagenic multiples, actually want to do those things, despite all their blathering about ableism.So what is all that talk about ableism for?Before traumagenic came into use, multiples sometimes referred to themselves as “trauma-based.” The term was a general adjective used in mixed multi company, just used to describe yourself like “blond” or “left-handed.” There weren’t groups for it; medicalized multi groups instead tended to identify themselves with specific diagnoses (MPD, DID), or maybe “trauma and dissociation.”But traumagenic is not treated as descriptor, as far as I’ve seen. It’s an identity, and as far as I can tell, it’s mostly based around medicalization, trauma, and suffering. I’ve already talked about the medicalization part, but I think suffering is a very dangerous hook to hang an identity on! Because then I have to ask…• How much do I have to suffer to belong?• What if I ever stop suffering?• What’s the hierarchy of suffering? (Because oh, there’ll be one.)These are ugly questions that I’m somehow expected to ignore, as though I haven’t spent years watching traumatized plurals gouge at each other’s wounds to make sure they’re serious enough to count.And since traumagenic is falsely equated with “disabled” and “oppressed,” it begs the question, what happens if we stop being disabled or oppressed? What happens if we achieve all our most utopian dreams? That should be cause for jubilation, not existential crisis!At least the survivor communities, for all their problems, are ostensibly about hoping for healing and recovery someday: folks might be traumatized now, but one day maybe they won’t be. The traumagenic identity, though, reframes the focus from “this is where I am for the moment,” to “this created me.” That is a static, unchanging identity. A creation can not be undone.It’s one thing to show a respect for our origins, to accept their role in our lives. But I don’t want to have my identity forever framed as a horrific conception story. And I certainly don’t want my community and sense of self to hinge on my suffering, because that means I am incentivized to suffer. If the whole point of disability activism is to make disabled lives better, I sure as hell ain’t picking an identity that encourages the reverse!Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe I’m taking it all way too seriously. But I’ve been in many different kinds of plural communities, online and off, for over a decade. I’ve read a lot of plural books and old archives of plural websites, newsletters, and mailing lists. And every trauma-based community I’ve been in, or researched, has had the problem of equating suffering as identity, even if they didn’t codify it like traumagenics have. I also know enough about myself to know that I can very easily slide down the path of mistaking my suffering for something noble, as though it’s money saved in some karmic bank account. It is too tempting, and leads to terrible things in myself—passivity, a perverse masochistic pride in said passivity, and surrounding myself with people who feel and act the same way. It also leads to a constant anxiety over whether my trauma is “bad enough,” a fixation on the gruesome details, rather than putting them in context, learning from them, and dealing with them.I want my identity and community to be founded on more than pain or oppression. I want to build on the good things my plurality brings me—my friends, my partners, my inner family, my art. Those, I hope, will prove to be a more solid, long-lived foundation than suffering.As you may have noticed, a core part of the genic pissing contest is the accusation that endogenic plurals are “appropriating” multiplicity. But what does that even mean? “Cultural appropriation” is a term coming from critical race theory; it’s based on oppressed cultures having their most sacred symbols ripped away and used by their oppressors as kitsch, sports mascots, and justification of their extermination. But a diagnosis, obviously, is not a culture. A culture is organically created by the people in it; a diagnosis is enforced upon patients by those with medical authority over them. At best case, a diagnosis describes a disease, and when’s the last time you saw anyone “appropriating” syphilis? It’s nonsense.So if traumagenic folks are claiming that to be plural is to be traumagenic, and that we have a culture that is being appropriated… well, what is it, then? What are our powwows, our languages, our foods, our cherished rites and rituals?Culture is more than oppression. To say otherwise is downright offensive to any culture that exists. Jews have holidays, holy texts, bar mitzvahs, millennia of history. Deaf folks have schools and languages. Queer folks have Pride, coming out, a history of queer-owned businesses, and publishers. Hell, even furries have a history of community-owned cons, websites, and a thriving art economy! So what do plurals have?When I think of my own plural touchstone experiences, and ones others have related to me, I think of things like becoming selves-aware, coming out, talking to other plurals online and off, creating a household with other plurals specifically for the purpose, even when it turned out poorly. And this isn’t including internal, in-system events—commemorating deaths, births/creations, marriages, or memory work touchstones. The vast majority of those experiences have nothing to do with being traumagenic or endogenic.There are some medical experiences I and a lot of my plural friends have shared. But they aren’t (and shouldn’t be) the sum total of plural experience! And frankly, I’d rather focus my experience of plural culture (if it exists) on community with other plurals, not medical interactions with my healthcare team.In my old 2017 history of non-trauma multis in the community, I wrote that plurals aren’t a culture, but I find myself rethinking that lately. Reading through the Many Voices newsletter, I was struck by the sense of plural community I saw there. Merchandise by and for multis, households created by and for multis, support groups by and for multis, a sense of community and unified purpose. Is that culture? I’m not sure, but if it isn’t, I think it could be, especially if we keep building our communities and culture together, instead of waiting around and acting like doctors can just hand them to us. They can’t. We have to do the work ourselves.Because we are in this together. At the end of the day, 4chan doesn’t care what plural camp we’re in. Neither do doctors, or the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, or random folks on the street. To them, we’re all just crazy, and all our back-biting and in-fighting won’t do jack when things get bad.Footnote 1: “Plural” is an umbrella term covering a large spectrum of people who experience multiplicity and multiplish phenomenae. It is equally applicable to a people like ourself, a person with imaginary friends, someone whose religion includes trance possession by their spirit guide, and someone who is only sometimes multiple and reverts to singlethood at other times. Many people may not USE that term, but it’s out there!Footnote 2: Explaining the full twisted history of the social pressures that spawned “endogenic” is beyond the scope of this essay; for more details, see the Lunastus Collective, 2014; and Lee, 2019.Footnote 3: “Ableism” is institutionalized oppression of disabled people.Collective Solipsism [solipsistful]. (2015). We started reading The Osiris Complex [tumblr post]. Retrieved from https://solipsistful.tumblr.com/post/127108361130Entropy System [theentropywe]. (2018). do you support endogenic systems? [tumblr post]. Retrieved 2019/03/14 from https://theentropywe.tumblr.com/post/173859245866/do-you-support-endogenic-systemsLee, LB. (2017). A Brief History of the Use of “System” in Non-DID Space [blog post]. Retrieved from https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/881645.htmlLee, LB. (2019). The Creation of the Term “Endogenic” [blog post]. Retrieved from https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1006431.htmlLore Sj berg. (2002). The Geek Hierarchy [chart]. Retrieved from http://toogeekyforyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/geek-hierarchy.bmpthe Lunastus Collective [not-your-fucking-pet]. (2014). Long ramble on terminology creation [tumblr post]. Retrieved from https://not-your-fucking-pet.tumblr.com/post/94222698873/long-ramble-on-terminology-creationMany Voices Press. (1992 June). Many Voices: Words Of Hope For People With MPD or a Dissociative Disorder, Vol. IV, No. 3 [newsletter]. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1992_06.pdf