A partial history of plural self-advocacy

this was originally published on the Alt+H blog on february 15th, 2020. i rehosted it here on june 15th, 2024.

Plural self advocacy is exactly what it says on the tin: plurals taking control of our own lives and being in charge of how we’re represented. It’s what happens when we speak for ourselves instead of letting singlet academics do it for us. Plural self advocacy has a long history that stretches before the existence of the internet, and it has made a difference. Here are some notable milestones, and what they’ve done for us.

1987ish: Truddi Chase is giving interviews (x, x, x), very openly insisting that her headmates are real people and that integration is not a solution for them.

February 1989: The first issue of Many Voices is published. This newsletter for and by trauma survivors with dissociative disorders is likely one of the first places that plurals could speak about their experiences on their own terms. It would run for over 20 years until 2012, when it was bequeathed to the ISSTD so that the issues could be made publicly available.

1993: Richard P. Kluft’s Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder mentions Truddi Chase’s outspokenness against integration, disdainfully. “Some perceive the alters as real people,” it says. This paints a clear picture of how multiplicity was perceived at the time.

1995: Astraea’s web is created. This site continues to be one of the biggest plurality resources out there, and Astraea themselves have had a wide reach in plural activism — they’ll come up several more times in this article. They have curated a wide selection of sources on early accounts of plurality, plural involvement with legal issues, and the struggle against psychiatric abuse by all kinds of neurodiverse people, not just plurals.

1998: The Vickis begin to compile experiences of the ‘midcontinuum’, giving us the first terminology to describe median experiences. This is also, as far as we’re aware, the origin of ‘plural’ as an umbrella term.

2001?: darkpersonalities publishes “why we are not MPD/DID”, generally regarded as the first known instance of a system explicitly separating themselves from the ‘disorder’ definition. The empowered multiplicity movement grows from this. While many people take a cynical, bitter view towards people who still identify with their diagnosis, it begins to be associated with more sympathetic stances as it develops (x, x). Many of us look back disapprovingly on darkpersonalities’ attitude towards triggers and survivorship, but their role was still foundational to the concept of empowered multiplicity.

2002: Tim Bayne writes on the moral defensibility of forced integration, laying out a grounded philosophical argument for considering non-host plurans autonomous people. It’s unknown what influenced him to write this paper, or whether any plurals were consulted.

2002?: The activist group Pavilion is formed. Their activities include outreach towards mental health professionals and academics, interviewing for radio stations, creating informational pamphlets and compiling resources for plurals and interested singlets.

2003: Matt Ruff, author of Set This House In Order, acknowledges Astraea and a plural friend-of-a-friend for introducing him to natural plurality and the idea that plurals don’t have to integrate, inspiring his book.

2011-2013: The Coalition for DSM-5 Reform writes launches a campaign to urge the DSM taskforce to change much of the proposed writing. This gets a lot of attention from plurals, and as such the DSM-5 revises its definition of DID to include distress/impairment, and for the first time accepts the self-reporting of plurality as valid evidence (x, x). It’s worth noting that this is an incredibly small step — as Astraea’s web says, “It was not proposed because therapists are beginning to recognize that non-disordered multiplicity exists; it was proposed in order to accommodate members of cultures and races where being more than one person is contextually normal.” But it’s a step, nonetheless, that begins to recognize that plurals are the ultimate authorities on our own experiences of ourselves.

May 11, 2015: VICE interviews systems including Astraea and Oure Gaiya for a piece questioning if plurality is always a disorder.

2016: The plurality playbook is published internally at Google. It covers advice for plurals on succeeding in the workplace while dealing with the specific challenges that plurals face, and advice for singlets on respecting and assisting their plural coworkers.

January 18th, 2019: The Double Gears system (well known at the time as streamer and speedrunner protomagicalgirl) disclose their plurality on Hbomberguy’s DK64 stream for Mermaids. The hashtag #pluralgang trends on Twitter as a result, encouraging many people on twitter to come out as plural and many more to realize they’re plural by being introduced to the concept for the first time. #pluralgang has been a consistently active hashtag for the year since its inception and continues to be used to share resources, organize meetups, promote activism and generally remind plurals that they’re not alone.

The plurality playbook is also publicly published around now. In the new foreword, the Lizzes cite the activity surrounding #pluralgang as their motivation for this.

March 2019: The first Plural Positivity World Conference is held. It was created as a counter-conference to the one hosted annually by the ISSTD. The fees for attending the World Congress on Complex Dissociation and Trauma start at $200 for just one day, making attending near-impossible for the lay person. As the Crisses put it, “The ISST-D holding meetings, disseminating information, creating policy, teaching new standards for treatment, discussing new options, or sharing their research findings about us should not be done in a place that by design excludes us.” June 20204 edit: The Plural Positivity World Conference has run every year since and its panels can be viewed on its youtube channel.

December 25th, 2019: Power to the Plurals announces The Plural Association, a peer network for plurals which intends to provide phone, email and live chat helplines.

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To this day, the overwhelming majority of plural activism has happened outside of the medical model. Improvements in the treatment of plurals have come from us being seen as people, and singlets seeing us as people has come from us viewing ourselves that way - by making spaces for us to understand ourselves and create narratives that aren’t bounded by pathology. Even changes within psychiatry have mostly been motivated by pressure from plurals demanding fairer treatment. It is good, and necessary, for us to speak for ourselves. We have done so much, and still have so much more to do.