Jack Dawkins, 2026
It’s been over a decade since I’ve talked about the divisions in the plural community. I thought syscourse was bad in 2015, but it’s grown only worse over the past eleven years.
Whilst Tumblr used to be the centre of plural activity online, the community has expanded to TikTok, Discord, and Reddit. (We don’t use TikTok ourselves, but we do use Reddit daily.)
Because of the toxicity of the plural community, we spent years avoiding the online plural community, limiting discussion of our system to a few trusted friends on locked blogs or in person. We didn’t even talk about ourselves in therapy. We’ve recently got back into participating in Reddit plural spaces, but we continue to feel a bit alienated. There’s loads of new jargon—willogenic, system medicalist (sysmed), and so on—that’s hard for us to keep up with. We feel a bit too old sometimes, since we’re nearly in our forties and there are a lot of younger posters who are just starting to work themselves out. There’s one benefit, though, to dipping our feet into Reddit plurality—it’s inspired us to write articles for our site again.
Trauma-origin (traumagenic) systems
Let’s start with trauma-origin systems, since it is they who are the centre of modern plural discourse.
The 2020s have seen the rise of the system medicalist (sysmed), or those who think that trauma and dissociation are required to be a proper system. They are wedded to the medical model (and tend to treat the Theory of Structural Dissociation as though it were received from heaven) and are unwilling to see other views.
Sysmeds are akin to trans medicalists (transmeds or, more pejoratively, truscum) in the transgender community; transmeds believe that one must have dysphoria to be a legitimate trans person.
I understand that there are people who want to seek final fusion for themselves, don’t view their alters or parts as separate people in their own right, and consider their DID to be a deficit and not a neutral phenomenon or even a benefit. They deserve to have treatment that meets their goals and ought not to be harassed by systems who prefer to stay multiple, whether they are trauma-origin or natural.
The problem is that they want to apply this model to all who experience a more-than-oneness, or think that anyone who doesn’t fit the medical model is feigning multiplicity (or expressing “imitative DID,” as they’d put it). They think that nonmedical multiples are somehow taking resources from disordered systems, which is bullshit. Nonmedical multiples are not seeking diagnoses, and they’re certainly not seeking treatment for their plurality.
Moreover, endogenic systems can be disordered and have a traumatic history. Lunastus Collective, an endogenic plural system, have a DID diagnosis, experienced classic symptoms like blackouts and memory loss, and experienced trauma in childhood. They believe that they have always been plural. (Even the much-vaunted Theory of Structural Dissociation says that trauma-origin multiples never develop a singular sense of self, though they describe this in pathological terms. By that argument, even trauma-origin systems are “endogenic” in a way.)
Natural (endogenic) multiples
Sysmeds are even nastier toward natural multiples than they were in 2015, often accusing them of faking plurality or denying their trauma. People have experienced harassment, ostracism, and bullying—both from sysmeds and singletons wishing to white-knight for people with “true DID”—for simply saying that they are endogenic systems. They are often banned from plural Discord servers. “Anti-endo” developers of apps designed to support systems actively violate endogenic systems’ privacy to ban them from using their software. There’s constant “fakeclaiming”—that is, declaring a system fake—of systems who don’t fit into the medical model. Systems’ posts are routinely posted on cringe subreddits, which typically leads to harassment of the systems who have the misfortune of being featured. Often, the anti-endogenic witch-hunt extends not just to endogenic systems, but those who support them. Even mixed-origin systems get tarred with the endogenic brush by the most zealous “anti-endo” crusaders. This is despite the fact that some mixed-origin systems, like us, are partly or primarily traumagenic.
Systems were bullied and harassed on Tumblr when we were posting there, but it’s not nearly as intense as it is today.
Unfortunately, some nondisordered endogenic systems have a tendency of dismissing the disabling experiences that disordered systems experience. This is not helpful and does not help natural multiples’ cause.
Tulpas/willogenic systems
The tulpa subculture is alive and well. Another term for systems-by-choice is “willogenic.” There are apparently distinctions between tulpa and willogenic, but I’ll admit that I’m not sure of the details. In “syscourse,” tulpas and their hosts are typically lumped in with endogenic systems. We’ve never created a tulpa and doubt we ever would.
Where do we stand?
Our position on our origins is rather different to where we stood in 2015. Since then, we’ve been formally recognised as having DID, which we have complex feelings about. We no longer consider ourselves endogenic in the sense that we exist without traumatic influence. With what we’ve gone through, we can’t honestly say that’s the case. But we do think that we never developed a singular sense of self and became increasingly differentiated over the years. Because we’ve never been singular, have been strongly influenced by trauma, and have incorporated creativity throughout our existence, we consider ourselves a mixed-origin system.
We believe that multiplicity is an emergent phenomenon that arises through various methods, whether that’s traumatic dissociation, deliberate creation of headmates or simply naturally existing. We think it’s a neurodivergent experience that can be disabling for some people, just as autism and ADHD are. This was our position in 2007, and it remains our position nineteen years later. We have not taken, and will never take, part in “syscourse,” other than to expose it as the rank counterproductive nonsense that it is.