Gender & Multiplicity: A Primer on the Intersection of Transness & DID
Hi i’m Ian. so, it’s trans day of visibility. Or at least, it was. It’s kind of a strange sort of concept to us. Because of, well, y'know, the DID*
*that stands for dissociative identity disorder our identity began to divide at a young age. Now we’re a system of over eighty alters. for us, that means our genders are all over the map.
Even between two alters with the same gender…Hisham identifies as cis internally, Karma identifies as trans internally…the perception of the self may differ.
And it only gets more complicated.
Comic: tomboy *not a girl or a boy but a secret third thing.
Alannah: utrinque dyke. don’t fight her on her label.
Ian: faggot (or genderqueer guy… but fag is faster)
Baby Bird Saso: nonbinary bird. don’t even ask
[oldest] Saso: agender. There are four Saso’s. Even between duplicates, genders can still vary.
Alexx: girl. We have few alters with straight-forward genders.
Each of us has a nuanced sense of self.
Did issues aren’t talked about very often. Trans issues aren’t either, but that is changing. And the intersection between them is talked about pretty much never. But as a gender diverse DID system, the intersection of the two affects us every day.
Transition decisions are hard when different parts of you want opposite things. Even things like haircuts and shaving can cause internal conflict. Compromise is crucial. How about we all present as ourselves? That sounds great. Or things go bad.
Where did all this facial hair come from? Forcing transition on alters that don’t want it can cause chaos internally. And make otherwise cooperative alters become hostile to the system. Their reactions can vary from depression or dysphoria to something more drastic. I have a friend who won’t start HRT because he fears his transition would be sabotaged by distressed alters in his system. Who shaved our face? In systems with poor communication, these problems become even worse. We’re lucky to have decent communication and cooperative alters in our system.
But we run into issues all the time anyway. Gender diversity makes DID impossible to hide. Some guy: “Weren’t you a guy yesterday? Your name was different too.” The transition choices we make also impact the safety of the girls in the system. No matter how we proceed, there is no passing as cis for all of us. Of course, trying to agree on a collective name and gender identity is a nightmare as well. How do you decide on one label for over eighty people?
Here’s the passage with the all‑caps sections turned into regular sentence‑case (while keeping the original line breaks and punctuation):
Genderfluid - X
I’m sure the experience is similar, but only one of us actually has a fluid gender.
Genderqueer – checkmark?
Kind of? Our collective gender is definitely queer, but the word doesn’t fit all of us.
Pangender – checkmark?
We identified this way before learning we have DID. It made sense then, thinking we were a singlet, but now it feels lacking in clarity.
Transgender – checkmark?
It’s not incorrect to call us trans, but not all of us identify that way. Nonbinary – checkmark? Again, not wrong, just… not wholly correct, either.
I don’t need to keep going, you get it, yeah? Nothing fits perfect. These days we just say “transmasc” and let people guess.
It just gets exhausting, you know?
I could go on, but it’s stuff like this that makes days like Trans Day of Visibility strange for us.
Unless we quash some part of ourselves, the combination of DID and transness makes us hypervisible. Every day.
Personally, we wind up coming out about both to everyone. Because it’s safer to explain.
Despite this, however, the situation we are in is still…at the end of the day… An invisible one.
But it doesn’t have to be! People with DID and gender‑diverse systems don’t have to hide away forever. We can’t stay relegated to horror‑movie plots and being denied transition because of our systems. We have a right to be seen, acknowledged, and protected.
So this year’s Trans Day of Visibility, I made a decision – I decided to speak up and start the conversation.
It’s time to give trans systems some visibility.
赤
4R4
Tumblr: Akabirdie
Twitter: akabirdie_art
Instagram: redacfourofour
Thanks for reading! This is only the beginning. There’s so much to say on the topic. My experience is not universal – a covert system may have a different experience than I have as an overt one. OSDD‑1 systems, while not explicitly mentioned, share many experiences but may differ on the communication end of the topic. They have as much of a stake in this as DID systems do. I hope this comic helps to open people’s eyes about a demographic that’s typically forgotten about in conversations about transgender issues. End transcript.
