I want to be very clear up front:
We Crew are pro-endo. We believe endogenic systems are real. (Of course we do. WE'RE endogenic.) We believe origins of plurality and multiplicity are diverse, complex, and not something anyone else gets to dictate for you.
At the same time, we're keenly aware of harmful patterns and trends in pro-endo communities. And I think itās important to talk honestly and frankly about why some people, including people I care about and consider friends, label themselves anti-endo as a reaction to those patterns. Not as an opposition to the idea that endogenics exist, but as what tends to happen in communities surrounding them. (And these things aren't exclusive to those communities either, just saying.)
1. How CDDs Are Minimized or Reframed
A recurring problem in many pro-endo spaces is the way CDDs are talked about. PwCDDs are often portrayed as inherently less healthy or less enlightened, stuck in dysfunction compared to non-CDD systems, needing guidance from non-CDD systems to be āhappierā or āmore functionalā. Even when this is framed as compassion, it often comes across as infantalizing, dismissive, and condescending. CDD systems donāt need rescuing, and certainly not by people with no lived experience with those disorders.
2. Hostility Toward Accurate Information
Another major issue is how accurate, evidence-based information about CDDs is frequently treated as harmful simply for existing. People who talk about diagnostic criteria, trauma mechanisms, dissociative amnesia, or the realities of living with a CDD are often accused of gatekeeping, invalidation, or āmedicalizing pluralityā, even when theyāre just speaking about their own lived experiences.
This creates an environment where PwCDDs are pressured to stay quiet if the truth doesnāt fit the dominant narrative.
3. Pushing People Away From Professional Help
This is one of the issues I find most concerning.
People expressing distress, dysfunction, or loss of control ā things that can indicate a CDD or another psychiatric condition ā are often discouraged from seeking professional support. Commonly people will say this like:
āTherapists will just try to integrate you/force full fusion.ā āDiagnosis will harm you/prevent you from being able to drive/do normal life things like raise kids or get jobs.ā (And we Crew have hurt people with those two things ourselves.)
Supporting plurality should never mean discouraging people from getting help when theyāre struggling to function or stay safe.
4. Support for Harmful Beliefs
Some beliefs and practices are normalized in pro-endo spaces without enough nuance or caution. These include: Host centrism, which can be neutral or useful in some systems but harmful when enforced as a moral or ideological standard. Encouraging systems to ignore fragments or less-elaborated systemmates with the goal of making them disappear. Treating inner experiences as disposable if they donāt align with a preferred framework.
What works for one system is not a universal rule. Acting as if it is universal causes harm.
5. Validation Without Safeguards
While not every pro-endo space engages in this, there is a problem with validating radqueer or transID identities and offering blanket affirmation of beliefs that may indicate psychosis or severe destabilization.
Support does not require affirming every belief as literally true.
Sometimes care means grounding, boundaries, and encouraging safety.
You can be pro-endo and still acknowledge these problems. We Crew are.
And you can be anti-endo due to these problems and still respect endogenics, as many of our friends are.
Critiquing a community is not the same as blindly hating everyone in that community, and believing otherwise only drives people further apart.
@mesa-sys and @rambleyz this is what I was talking about in the comments of that other post. See what I mean by it being too long for comments? š
