Armchair sociology and deep thinks

she/her, 50+ ace transfem. I'm learning art and brain-stuff

[culturenaught]

I'm an over 50 transbian who is here to not talk about world or national politics (I have other networks for that.) You'll find a mix of multi-fandom commentary, me learning a new artform (intaglio printmaking), worldbuilding for fiction, and figuring out plurality.

I largely stay out of term-orthodoxy wars, I've served my time over the last two-plus decades in the gender and queer space. Self definitions are important, respecting other people's definitions are important, and if the term isn't codified by a standards body it'll probably change year-over-year anyway.

Plural stuff

I only have one fronter, and I'm monoconscious. My switches are non-possessive when I have them (extremely rare) and blending most of the rest of the time. All this means you won't see identity tags here. The introduced facets:

The Watcher: Analysis, getting the hard thing done, and mental modeling of social situations. Probably she/her. Fang: The fighter, fan of well done fight-choreography, and the one who will step in if I need to scrap. Gender unknown, but probably he/him. The Little: Who is probably 10-12 and very much doesn't like being perceived, even by me.

While I do have a trauma that spawned the first two, that trauma didn't repeat. Which means I never walked the dissociation road. There are also extremely few people around here who have my decades, so I'm trying to share what getting old with a head like this is like.

[culturenaught]

Yelling about history

I mentioned earlier that I was reading Manisha Sinha's The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic and that there may be further yelling. Guess what.

I just finished the chapter on the Freedman's Bureau, an agency formed in the wake of the US Civil War to help the recently enslaved become citizens. The Bureau was established under Lincoln, but he was murdered within two months so it was under Andrew Johnson for the next four years. Johnson, a complete racist of the Trumpian nature, tried hard to kill it. But the US Congress (unlike now) got in the way with veto overrides and even a couple of constitutional amendments.

As Sinha points out, the Freedman's Bureau was the United States very first attempt at a social safety net.

[The Bureau] was foundational to the Second American Republic, as well as two ideas that outlived it: that the government is responsible for the welfare of its neediest citizens and that, in particular, it owes a debt to the formerly enslaved.

And also,

The Bureau's work in the South resulted in the expansion of two distinct political traditions in the United States: a modern liberal tradition identified with African Americans and progressives that looks to the federal government to correct local injustices and inequalities and provide for all citizens, and a conservative, predominantly southern, tradition that critiques all government intervention in the economy and society as illegitimate.

There is knowing abstractly that the current faultlines in the American political sphere are a century and a half old, and there is reading the receipts. This book is providing receipts.

To modern eyes, the work the Bureau was doing is downright socialist. So many schools. Public hospitals. Public contract mediation. Land reform. Recording of grievances. Adjudication of crimes. The Bureau served all poverty stricken folk in the South, but most of that population was black for pretty obvious reasons. All this socialism flew in the face of the aristocratic tradition of the old planter society and created generational trauma that reverberates today.

[culturenaught]

Evolution of understanding

It's a whole thing that observing a system (generic) changes the system. You hope that change is small, but sometimes observing the system can cause massive IT outages because someone was observing a little too frequently and things added up to boom.

Anyway. Once you realize you're a we, y'all are in for a period of change. Here's another of mine.

I'm now pretty sure I have a discrete gender dysphoria holder. This is discrete from the Watcher (see intro post, I'll need to rewrite that). I don't exactly know when she showed up, but she was there when I was 14 at least. She also is a facet who showed up outside of my origin event, which spawned Fang and The Watcher. Somewhere along the way, a piece of me realized the gender incongruence we were facing and emotionally dissociated it into a new facet so I wouldn't get in trouble.

"So I wouldn't get into trouble" was 100% the motive of my plurality as a kid. Become wallpaper. You can't be wallpaper if you're in trouble. QED. Shift those attention getting emotions elsewhere.

Fast forward 30+ years.

It turns out I've been arguing with her the entire time I've realized I had an unconventional gender, sometimes even kinda directly. I didn't add it up to plurality because what was going on in my head was vibes not words. You know how head conversations can get. There was about 8 years in there where we experimented with bras, regularly, to prove to myself (her) that my body simply won't tolerate the things even to look right. She eventually conceded that pain really does overwhelm any good-vibes we get, but it took a long time. In part because she doesn't embody much.

A few weeks ago I was out shopping to fill some wardrobe gaps and decided to talk directly to her (if she was there). She talked back. This ended up being a better shopping experience than I've had in a while since we could more directly address the issues we had with each given piece. We both came away from that happy. So nice, will be doing that again in the future.

Now we're in a negotiating place for some long standing issues, which is ultimately healthy. This also means I'm talking to myself to a far higher degree than I've done in a long time. We're hitting some real differences on the topic of surgery that might need a third party to help mediate.

I am aware that negative symptoms often increase when you start working on your shit, this is normal and part of the process. I get that. I'm keeping that firmly in mind along with the progress this represents.

[sysmedsaresexist]

"System" from an appropriation perspective

LB Lee once said,

There is a chestnut of misinformation on tumblr claiming that 'system' is a term made by DID folks, for DID folks, and nobody else is allowed to use it. This is often wrapped up in the idea that multiplicity is owned by people with DID/DDNOS/OSDD, and anyone else claiming it is appropriating.

The "system is DID-only" argument that tumblr makes seems to be based on a completely different form of social justice theory than disability rights--namely, the idea of cultural appropriation. People making this argument equate 'system' with language created by oppressed people for their specific culture, and other plurals using 'system' as appropriators at best and ableist oppressors at worst.

I hate LB Lee, but let's break this down, because I think there's two good discussion points here.

There is a chestnut of misinformation on tumblr claiming that 'system' is a term made by DID folks, for DID folks

Wrong, we're saying it's clinical first, and you're ignoring the sources provided to you, but that's another story for another day.

and nobody else is allowed to use it.

True, we're very protective over the word system, and that it should be a more medical-leaning term, vs something like "plurality" for others. Like alter vs headmate.

This is often wrapped up in the idea that multiplicity is owned by people with DID/DDNOS/OSDD, and anyone else claiming it is appropriating.

This is true, and that's an interesting thought. Well done, LB Lee 👏

Appropriation is an interesting term to throw in here with any seriousness behind it, as it's often reserved for other conversations. But the concept...

We should examine this, most anti endos now admit plurality is real, but something different to CDDs. Most pro endos are unaware of the history of certain terms and why they might be so important, or why some people are so protective over a word with such a broad, general meaning.

The "system is DID-only" argument that tumblr makes seems to be based on a completely different form of social justice theory than disability rights--namely, the idea of cultural appropriation.

That's actually an interesting thought that should be explored more in depth. There might actually be a kernel of truth to this. I don't know that I agree it's "cultural," but it sure is something.

People making this argument equate 'system' with language created by oppressed people for their specific culture, and other plurals using 'system' as appropriators at best and ableist oppressors at worst.

Hm.

Again, not created by us, but we do want to acknowledge the general medical history associated with the term. Because it does exist, long before Richard "IFS" Schwartz was even a thought in his parents' heads.

This feels real and tangible, and most importantly, SOLVABLE.

It's a concept most anyone can grasp and actually work through. It's a kind of theory we're all familiar with.

Thoughts?

[culturenaught]

Thoughts...

This'll be a bit out of order, but I think it supports the argument.

> The "system is DID-only" argument that tumblr makes seems to be based on a completely different form of social justice theory than disability rights--namely, the idea of cultural appropriation.

and

I don't know that I agree it's "cultural," but it sure is something.

The key problem here is the definition of cultural, since the usual context of cultural appropriation is various indigenous or minority cultural practices getting mined for content by the dominant capitalist western culture, divorcing practice from meaning in the name of vibes. Applying the cultural appropriation concept to a tumblr-centric community seems off, but it is an absolute meme that Tumblr users consider themselves the weird kids of the social media world. This is a sub-culture, and we are mined for content by the larger social media cultures.

Using cultural appropriation in this way implies that a subculture is objecting to another probably larger culture using terms with clear definitions in ways that they should not be used. Or applying the terms in ways that don't meet the subcultural definition. Those words are being appropriated the way woke was.

Where things get messy is that the terms were created by the medical establishment, and later adopted and canonicalized as valid identity terms by this subculture. This leads to the cultural terms, the subculture being the Tumblr-based CDD community, having definitions by something with a standards body behind it and ratified socially. This allows the appeal to standards defense of term-usage which is usually not possible with most Tumblr-based identity debates — or is seen as overly reductive, because most appeal to standards is citing something like pluralpedia as the canonical source of terms, most terms of which have a community definition defined by active usage rather than standards-body ratification. Because there is a standards body, the cries of appropriation!! feel especially profound for terms like system and alter, and less so for a term like polymind.

Don't get me wrong, the term debate has not just been on Tumblr. But LB Lee specifically cited Tumblr, which is why I wrote the above that way.

[culturenaught]

Yelling about history

Thus far the National Government has been inspired by slavery. It has seemed to exist for Slavery only. All is now changed."

— Charles Francis Adams, Sr. April 12, 1861

The US economy in the 1770s and 1780s was that of a key part of the British Empire of Sugar. We supplied the plantation islands in the Caribbean, and our own slave-based plantation economy drove further profits. Our successful independence kept the profits of our industry and agriculture here. Slavery was at the core of our economy from the very beginning. As abolition grew in the North, the replacement was industrialization and wage-theft by different means.

Fast forward 90 years to the election of Lincoln of the then-new Republican party (founded 1854, the last successful third party introduction in the US) who was elected on a platform of not extending the peculiar institution to our new territories dispossessed from our indigenous population. Yes indeed Mr. Adams, all was then changed with those shots on Fort Sumter the same day.

I'm reading Manisha Sinha's The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, so you may get more history yelling for a while.

[culturenaught]

Food trauma

I was reading:

Reblog by @leebrontide

💬 13  🔁 837  ❤️ 1578 · it is wild to me that you're letting your 4 year old have pizza that late at night. my instinct is to be like what i

and that got me into a story telling mood. Witness the parental food-sins of the late 70s and early 80s (so far as I've been able to tell, none of this relates to my plurality-trauma). All of my friends who had kids tried very hard to not do this.

Food was always a regulated thing growing up.

Some of this was because Mom and Dad both had issues with Mom's weight, and they wanted us kids to not be like that. My sister caught more of that trauma than I did since she was fem-presenting at that age and I wasn't. But I still got some. That meant a few things.

Food happened at designated times. After about age 6, random snacks stopped being allowed.

Dinner was a sit-down meal, with table manners, and full setting. Once you had dessert, you were done with food until breakfast. Lunch could be full casual, but dinner was formal. Every day.

At one point I was 2nd percentile for height, but 50th percentile for weight, which meant my food got policed a lot.

"You eat what you're given," as mentioned in the linked reblog, was absolutely a thing imposed on me. I wasn't defiant enough to go hungry rather than not eat something I definitely didn't want to eat. That would be getting in trouble and I avoided that as much as possible.

They started with "clean your plate," but eventually relented to "you have to try everything on the plate," which was better but not by much.

By my mid teens the food wars had stagnated into set lines. It was accepted that there were things I simply would not eat. And one thing I simply had to as a condition of respecting the rest.

With the wisdom of hindsight and watching a bunch of friends try to get calories into variously neurodiverse kinder I now know what I should have done back then, but didn't have the moxie to attempt. Set a boundary, enforce it, and accept the consequences. That might have gotten me to adulthood with the capability of tolerating green-leafies.

Instead what I got is an utter rejection-revulsion of the green smell and cellulosic crunch of lettuce and related plants. If its green, I won't touch it. That was trained into me by accident, but it is absolutely there, and absolutely why salad is not a food I can eat or someone eating it too vigorously near me will drive me away.

This is what coercive methods of food training do to people, and why my entire generation of queer youth had anxiety over passing that on to their kids.

[starstruck-sillies]

I have to admit, the fact that we're starting to suddenly see people saying that CDDs aren't always traumagenic or just generally questioning the trauma basis of them is kind of concerning to us.

That literally goes against everything science knows about these disorders. That's like saying you can be born with PTSD or can become autistic later in life. That's not how it works.

The fantasy model for dissociation has been debunked several times over. ToSD is the most widely accepted theory for CDDs because that's the one that's been the most consistently provable, other theories fell apart in study. The reason that many sources don't say this with absolute certainty is to account for denial, which is one of the most common symptoms. Sure it's impossible to prove anything absolute with psychology, but we do still have to go with what the science says here, and it says pretty clearly that there haven't been known cases of a CDD occurring without childhood trauma. You can't be born with a CDD, you can't develop one in adulthood, you can't have this happen without repeated childhood trauma.

Can we please not do this. We've known they're traumagenic disorders for so long. We've already gone over that you can have some symptoms of CDDs to different degrees outside of CDDs and without trauma while not having a full CDD. I thought we were all on the same baseline here, why are we doing this? Where did this wave of misinformation come from?

-Georgia

[culturenaught]

A key concept that I'm finding I need to be able to describe to people is the difference between disordered and plural. Plurality is not the disorder (we had that talk when we renamed it away from MPD) the disorder involves the memory issues and partitions, the unprocessed trauma affecting your limbic system in every day life, the kinda scary shifting affect in response to triggers, etc.

I'm not disordered, but I am plural. I do have trauma origins, but in my case the emotional amnesia actually kept me from getting further traumatized so I never 'graduated' to memory partitions. This made it real tricky to engage with the community here, because I had to learn a ton of nuance before I felt engagement wouldn't be violating DNIs or other community norms. I'm the odd threshold case that proves once again that nature is analog, and the human tendency to draw boxes has to be aware that some folk won't fit in the boxes.

[culturenaught]

Last day of class, editioning and color

When our teacher said, "You should edition that," to this plate last week, that's not a hint you let slide. So I cranked out eight of them yesterday in Process Blue. I had some papers left, so I ran the plate in other colors just to see how each of them felt. Really interesting! Here's a CMYK set. You might need to pop that image in a new tab to get a good feel.

The blue is most people's favorite of these. The pink/magenta gives strong summer, or post-apocalypse vibes. The yellow was very washed out, because it's simply hard to tell if you've wiped enough yellow ink off of copper. The things you learn. Also, very summer. Or maybe nuclear flash, who knows. I didn't wipe the edges of the black and wow that added to the vibe. The number two most popular was the black.

I also ran a purple because I had one paper left hiding in the sink with all the other papers (end of term, so it was a busy shop).

Vibe-wise, it kinda sits near the Process Blue.

So neat.

[spamtown-usa]

honestly the idea that plurality is Weird and Aberrant is. just so odd to me. If brain can make one guy why not it make other guys? it’s a big beautiful hunk of meat. why wouldnt it sometimes make other guys. it actually makes many guys pretty often too, DID alone has an incidence rate of 1%. 1 in 100! that’s a lot actually! most banger posts of mine get more than 100 notes! And DID isn’t even the only MEDICAL way to be plural!

the only reason it wouldnt make other guys is cuz it only has one body to put them all in. but these kinds of limitations are immaterial to the meat chunk. I also only have two hands, but i constantly feel like I need more than that. I also am in a human body but the meat chunk says i’m actually a bald eagle. I have no reason to believe that I am a shapeshifter of cosmic origin, but meat chunk says it’s true anyways. Meat chunk does not give a FUCK what you think is reasonable it WILL shove thousands of guys into one body cuz thats Just the kind of thing it does. yknow? idk. i do not expect the electric meat to follow the sociocultural rules placed upon it

[transcyberism]

the fact that the human brain can make a guy at all in the first place seems to be aberrant and largely unique in the animal kingdom. animals don't do that. they don't have identities. they don't think about what kind of animal they are or whether they're like other animals or what it means that they're not. they don't have that kind of self-awareness. making twelve guys (or twelve hundred guys, whatever) is not that much weirder than making one guy.

[culturenaught]

Mwahaha.

What we've learned around how identity forms in early childhood says a lot about how identity concepts exist in animal models. The fact humans usually converge into a unitary identity, typically between ages 4 and 9, might possibly be unique to us. DID the trauma disorder happens because things happen in the before-convergence window to interrupt the convergence process, leaving some of us with a few guys (or a lot of guys) yammering in the background who each have their own memories (the D in DID stands for dissociative).

But if you grade convergence on a 0 to 5 scale, with 5 being strictly unitary in the mind, and 0 being rapid switching between many guys who are weakly aware of each other, DID is probably 0 and 1 on that scale. A couple of other dissociative disorders occupy 2 and maybe 3, leaving the rest of 3 and 4 out there without entries in the DSM while not strictly speaking being unitary.

That's where I go.

Most parents I've talked to describe switches in their infants. An absolute marvel one second, rage-beast the next. This is a normal part of development, but also the natural plurality that most of us converge out of. Some of us, like me, had things happen that interrupted this early convergence but not severe enough to make discrete guys with their own memories. Instead I get what I call facets, discrete emotional states I sometimes switch into when circumstances are right but don't otherwise have dissociated memories. The adult version of the sweet/rage-beast duality described by various parents, only in my case it's the well socialized face and my non-verbal, all focus combat specialist (or a few others who are in here).

As for animal models, current theories hold that they likely show emotional plurality similar to the way very young humans do. We had to evolve into where we are somehow. From personal experience, this does come with a sense of self but the context I'm thinking in matters quite a lot to the emotions I'm feeling at the time.

[culturenaught]

Going better this time

Reformulated my ground to use a few drops of acrylic matte medium and it's made a pretty nice difference. Using only glazing medium left a pretty shiny layer, which didn't hold transfer-paper chalk at all. But the matte medium addition holds chalk quite well, so I don't need a light adhesive layer to hold the marks.

And it's a lot cleaner to work with! This is so much nicer.

Not yet sure how to handle the background river that I attempted a lift-ground with last time. Will probably free-hand it when doing the 'distant ground' aquatint.

[culturenaught]

And printed (lower one)...

To quote the teacher, "This is editionable." I'm so happy. Each plate teaches you something, this one taught me how not to be afraid of aquatint! I didn't go as dark with the brick this time because I wasn't fond of the lack of contrast in the first version, but may have gone too far here? It still works. As always, my brushwork effing sucks but I make do.

One of the plaster cracks on the right side is actually a gouge from plate beveling I couldn't fully remove, so I worked it into the design.

[culturenaught]

Going better this time

Reformulated my ground to use a few drops of acrylic matte medium and it's made a pretty nice difference. Using only glazing medium left a pretty shiny layer, which didn't hold transfer-paper chalk at all. But the matte medium addition holds chalk quite well, so I don't need a light adhesive layer to hold the marks.

And it's a lot cleaner to work with! This is so much nicer.

Not yet sure how to handle the background river that I attempted a lift-ground with last time. Will probably free-hand it when doing the 'distant ground' aquatint.

[culturenaught]

Went big, ended weird

This was my most ambitious aquatint yet. The bottom is the original pencil, the top is the proof-print after the final aquatint etching. Very different feelings.

The reactions to this piece are interesting. The art students in with me in the print shop were enthusiastic about it, digging the shifting shadows and unresolved tensions. The engineers and literalists purse their brows and say it's interesting if confusing.

Technically there is a lot wrong with it:

The sign needs to be the same tone-level as the distant ground, if not the sky. As is, the thing is almost unreadable unless you're right up there in good light.

The windows and frames need to be different tone levels, more contrasting.

The sugar lift I tried completely disappeared

I didn't get all the etching ground off, which is the bright spot in with the bricks.

The stop-out was badly applied in a few places, most terribly in the open sky in the background and along the right edge.

I think I might do another plate of this one, but with a more detailed aquatint plan. The one I wrote up forgot about the patch of ground and bike-trail by the railing, the inner frame along the right, and contrasting out the windows on the far building. The unshadowed brick could use some tone as well; as it is it looks extremely harshly lit, which is a vibe I'm not sure I want to keep.

That said, this plate had tone for the following etch durations:

0: Clouds, stars

30s: Light sky

1 minute: Unshadowed brick

2 minute: Distant ground, near ground and trail, lighter inside frame tone

3 minutes: Shaded windows

5 minutes: Shaded brick

20 minutes: Dark sky.

Which worked!

[alteredpanel]

hey. those go somewhere

[culturenaught]

Getting called out.

Emotional dissociation is probably my most prominent negative symptom. Handy in a crisis, less handy when I actually want to feel whatever emotion has been yoinked. Sometimes I can feel it happening and can't do jack about it. I think it's the Watcher doing it, but I'm not 100%. I'm pretty sure I have a Gender Dysphoria Holder in here somewhere; given all the changes I've done in the last 20ish years I hope they're not getting boulder-crushed like this much at all anymore.

[culturenaught]

A pretty stage

Scribing this plate is going mostly well. I do like the look of copper glinting through the ground.

I'm tempted to stipple all the bricks, but all the donk donk donk noises will get me murdered. When I get to the shop this weekend I plan to do some aquatint.

[median-culture-is]

Median-leaning-singlet culture is worrying you will be shunned by other plural folks for not being "plural enough".

.

[culturenaught]

And the corollary, shunned by the system folks even if you can point to the trauma that led to the current circumstances in your head.

[culturenaught]

Etching progress, ever onward

I've actually gotten better at this. Here's my first ever print, it had a lot of issues.

I mean, any first try is going to be problematic in some way. This one wasn't in the tank long enough, was over-wiped, has scars from edge-beveling that I never bothered to remove, has file-bite on the bevels that caught ink, trapped ink on the back squooshed out and made the blobs on the bottom right, and suffers from a general lack of contrast. I also re-learned that I can't draw a straight line without help. I learned a ton from this one, which was pressed in mid-October 2025.

Also, woodgrain is really fun.

Yesterday's final print is much fancier.

This is a two-color print, which meant two plates. It has literally taken me 11 pressings to dial in alignment technique (5 tries), and coloring. Earlier versions had me spot-cleaning with a Q-tip the green plate in the spots where the black plate was, which made a nice set of contrast. I forgot to do that with this particular proof. Also, I'm totally working with perspective and shadow here! This is a solstice view, since the solar alignment is clearly not along the evident N/S/E/W axis. From a distance, the shade-line on the inside edge of the surrounding ditch works much better than up close!

Everything up until this last set of proofs was done with the shop's oil-based ethching and litho-inks. However, the shop's vents were busted yesterday so I attempted water-based Akua for the first time due to those not needing mineral spirits for cleaning. It worked extremely well, but I'll need to see if that opinion holds true for aquatint. Something tells me I'll be likely to over-wipe if I have aquatint on a plate.

One more month, then summer break. Our instructor is doing a papermaking class I might do. She says she does all of her home printing on self-made papers. Considering the gram-weights of the papers we use for intaglio, I'm curious to see how that works.

[culturenaught]

Age regression? Maybe I grew up too fast

About a day ago @semiplural shared an ezine about age-regression. https://www.tumblr.com/semiplural/812744204534022144/sometimes-i-am-small-an-18-zine

There was a line on one of the pages, describing the why behind age regression:

littlespace [noun]: letting go and falling back into childlike wonder, joy, terror, the intensity of living before you learned you had to suppress yourself, skills and feelings and thoughts slipping back into simpler ways.

And I stared. I had to poll the team to see if they were feeling/remembering what I was remembering, and pretty much yeah. None of us can remember a time when we didn't suppress things. I (the events that caused my plurality were later on in childhood, I was singlet as much as any given 4yo can be) learned that suppression was safety extremely early. Not all feelings were for public consumption. Feelings caused people around me to react, and sometimes I didn't want that reaction more than I wanted to act out.

4yo me didn't yet know I was different than other kids, I wasn't The Short One yet. But the tendency to survive standing out came early, sure enough.

Oof.