Yavari Romanov and Jack Dawkins, 2026
Disclaimer: Note that this isn’t an anti-endogenic rant. Although we’re a mixed-origin system, we believe that endogenic systems are just as valid as we are. We hate plural-community pissing contests and have since we got involved.
When we got involved with the plural community twenty years ago, we got inducted into the healthy/empowered multiplicity subculture, not realising how much trauma played a role in the formation of our system. We thought we were endogenic—though that term wasn’t used back then—for years, till Jamie started suspecting otherwise and the rest of us eventually followed her lead.
Our entrée into the plural world was through websites like Astraea’s Web, the Anachronic Army’s Dark Personalities, The Layman’s Guide to Multiplicity, the Blackbirds’ Four and Twenty, and the Two Courts. All these aimed to decouple endogenic multiplicity from DID. They were the precursor to the modern “endogenic” systems, though they called themselves “natural” multiples or plurals. It is true that there are systems that exist without undergoing trauma. But the way they did it sometimes denigrated traumagenic systems who needed therapeutic support to navigate life. They held themselves up as being functional, sane, and independent, rather than those other systems who needed significant services and supports to help them manage life.
Most of those sites are long gone (except for Astraea’s Web), but the ideas incubated there still exist even thirty years later. It’s just that they’ve migrated to Reddit, TikTok, and Tumblr instead.
Even now, there are systems who make a big deal out of being more functional or stable than all the rest. They’re marginalising those of us who are not only plural, but struggle with other mental health issues, because we’re too “dysfunctional” and “unstable.”
It’s ableist, disempowering, shitty behaviour that doesn’t help our community. It’s based on capitalist constructions of what productivity and respectability look like.
Let’s take a trip back in time to understand the foundations of respectability politics in the plural community.
Astraea’s Web
One of the biggest influences on our realising we were plural was Astraea, the owner& of the long-running Astraea’s Web. This was both through reading their website and talking to them almost daily for nearly two years. Astraea’s Web was founded in 1995, meaning that they’ve been influencing the conversation on multiplicity for over thirty years. Astraea’s Web isn’t linked to nearly as much as it used to be, but their history in the community can’t be overstated.
Astraea have done a lot of valuable work in setting the foundation for endogenic systems to be recognised as who they are. The problem is that they throw DID and OSDD (Other Specified Dissociative Disorder, a diagnosis for people who meet some DID criteria, but not all) systems under the bus while doing so.
For example, Anthony Temple of Astraea said,
There is no “MPD” except in the minds of doctors who cannot understand that multiplicity is as natural to us as being a singlet is to them. Calling multiples “disordered” simply for having many selves is like calling Native Americans “disordered” for having a culture and language different from those of non-Indians. It is just as prejudicial. It is a denial of our existence.
. . .
I feel the only answer is to demystify multiplicity by getting it out of the doctor’s office.
Yes, nondisordered and endogenic plurality exist, but it’s unfair to dismiss the experiences of traumagenic or DID systems who struggle and need support. We’re not crazy about some of the medical model, and we’ve criticised it a lot here. But it fits some people, and taking DID and OSDD out of the DSM would mean that a lot of people would be stranded without support.
(Admittedly, some of Astraea’s articles are out of date; they were written in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They were written in the era of the DSM-IV, which considered all multiplicity to be DID and DDNOS (Dissociative Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified). The DSM-5 and its text revision, on the other hand, say that DID can be diagnosed only when it actually causes distress to the system seeking therapy.)
Astraea’s critiques of the medical industry don’t stop here. They’re also broadly anti-psychiatry. Although there are a lot of problems with psychiatry as it is, that doesn’t mean that we need to get rid of the whole damn thing. We have Bipolar I (the flavour of bipolar disorder that features full-blown mania) and absolutely need medication to stay stable. If not, then we spin out of control and say and do things that would never happen otherwise. Anti-psychiatry doesn’t really have a satisfying answer to our condition.
Dark Personalities
Dark Personalities was before our time. It was both a website and a mailing list for multiples who felt they didn’t fit into the classic DID survivor mould. The site had shut down by the time we started getting involved with the community in 2006. But we knew a lot of older systems who were involved in with DP, and it was clear that its influence reverberated across the community.
The Anachronic Army and the other systems posting on Dark Personalities were harsh critics of the online survivor culture at the time. They were actively against trigger warnings and “splats” (asterisks replacing letters, like r*pe and ab*se) and wanted to post content that was uncensored. There are both benefits and drawbacks to this approach. Sometimes people need a space where they can talk about what they’ve gone through without censoring themselves. But there really are survivors who’ve gone through a lot who want a safer space that allows them to process their trauma without being constantly reminded of it.
Dark Personalities was innovative in a lot of ways. It allowed multiples to express themselves freely and question aspects of the medical model that didn’t suit them, even if the systems were survivors of trauma. But it also encouraged the attitude that “functional” multiples were better than systems who struggled.
In Essence
Many systems used the In Essence declaration, apparently created by the Courts system, to show that they were functional.
There’s some good stuff in In Essence, like a statement that the system is responsible for the actions of any one member, so you can’t blame harmful actions on your “evil demon alter” without consequences.
The problem with In Essence is that it says stuff like…
We agree that our ongoing intent is to function at or beyond the level of any other average individual in the society around us, being aware of our own needs and requirements and taking our own action to fulfill them without requiring external government.
This is ableist hogwash. A lot of disabled folks can’t “function at or beyond the level of any average individual in the society around us.” Some of us can’t work. Some of us can work, but need a lot of support to do so, or they have to choose between working and household tasks. For example, we’re able to work full time (or more than full time, as the case may be), but most of our executive functioning goes towards working. We have a hard time keeping our living space in order. Cooking is another thing we struggle to do. We know how to cook, but we don’t always have the energy to do it. When we weren’t working, it was somewhat easier (though still hard) for us to keep our spaces tidy and cook all the time.
It’s not in keeping with the principles of disability justice at all. One of those principles is interdependence, or the idea that we all rely on other people to navigate the world. What In Essence is focusing on is a kind of imaginary independence absent of external support.
Even we signed an In Essence declaration when we first discovered our system, though we were dealing with unstable housing, unemployment, and the realisation that we’d been badly abused growing up. But we saw other systems—ones we saw as role models—doing it, so we thought we had to do it as well.
Sound familiar? Aspie Supremacists and Healthy Multiples
Frankly, some aspects of the healthy multiplicity subculture remind us of another community we belong to: autistic folks. Certain autistic people act as though they’re better than others because they can pass for non-autistic, work or communicate with speech. A common term for these people is “Aspie supremacists,” after the old Asperger Syndrome diagnosis. They emphasise that they’re high-functioning and not like Those Autistic People with intellectual disabilities, or Those Autistic People who are non-speaking, or Those Autistic People who can’t work because of their disabilities. And like Aspie supremacists, some healthy multiples are quick to distinguish themselves from Those Dysfunctional Systems with too many problems.
This doesn’t help anyone. Many people outside the plural and DID communities view us all as dysfunctional and disordered, whether or not that’s how we view ourselves. Under the social model of disability, both endogenic and traumagenic systems live in a world that’s not built for them. We all have to mask ourselves. We can’t talk openly about who we are because we’ll be mocked, not taken seriously or thought to be a threat. Ableism isn’t going to help advance acceptance of any kind of system, whether they’re traumagenic or endogenic or a combination of the two.
We may not have In Essence declarations any more. Astraea and the Anachronic Army aren’t leading the conversation on nondisordered and endogenic multiplicity any more. But the ableism and respectability politics remain a problem with which our community contends. It’s time to flip the script again—all systems deserve support, whether or not they meet criteria for DID.