Hello, we've decided to conduct a study on different the different kinds of plural experiences. Part of our data collection is a series of surveys that we're currently creating. Does anypony have suggestions for things that they think would be important to include?
The reason we're asking this question is because listening to folks is one of the best ways to learn about them; therefore a crucial aspect of conducting a study with the purpose of education, awareness, and the breaking down of misinformation.
I and other blogs have mentioned this concept multiple times, or at least used the term, but I don't think any of us have ever actually sat down and talked about or given a definition for it, so I'm going to do that today. What does "plural-adjacent" mean? Where does it come from?
"Plural-adjacent" is a term meant to encompass all experiences that are, well, adjacent to plurality. Experiences that may not neatly fall under plurality, or be personally identified as such, but still mirror, echo, are similar to, or are reminiscent of plurality in some way. Plural-adjacent may also be described as when you aren't plural yourself, but hold some strong connection to plural experiences or the plural community through your own lived experience(s). Some examples of plural-adjacent experiences are voice hearing, some forms of deity work, and imaginary friends. Of course, this isn't an exhaustive list; there are lots more examples (and experiences) that can be considered plural-adjacent out there in the world, and whether one considers themself/ves to be plural-adjacent is up to them.
[PT: "Plural-adjacent" is a term meant to encompass all experiences that are, well, adjacent to plurality. / end PT]
To understand plural-adjacency, it may help to think of it less as looking for experiences that are strictly like the definition of "more than one self-aware self in a single body" or even just "more than one", and more like experiences that are similar to what plurality is like, includes, or involves. Taking from a personal example – the reason our occasional delusion of being a doll is plural-adjacent isn't because this particular delusion is like our systemhood; it's plural-adjacent because the experience of temporarily being or becoming someone/something else is very reminiscent of switching in plurality, especially since it often occurs in times of high stress. Another example would be how things like talking to spirits, having imaginary friends, or being POSIC are similar to internal communication and the specific experience of being able to communicate with entities that others do not know are there/cannot sense.
Our system was the one to coin plural-adjacent, although we've never made an official post about it before. I believe the first time we mentioned it online was in an anonymous ask to @sophieinwonderland,* who has also taken to using the term. Since then, the term "system-adjacent" has also appeared in discussions where it would be applicable. We use this term as a system specific synonym to plural-adjacent. There's also, as you may have noticed, the term plural-adjacency, which is just the same concept as a noun. Occasionally, we use "adjacents" as shorthand to refer to those who are plural-adjacent.
The term "plural-adjacent" itself was inspired by our studies into Judaism and Jewish academia; in Jewish communities, the term "Jewish adjacent" is used to describe those who may not be Jewish themselves, but still hold some connection to the community or Judaism as whole, such as through marriage to a Jewish person. While plural-adjacent is not used in the exact same way, we still try to use it with respect to its origins.
To us, plural-adjacency means that although you may not share our exact identity, you are still free to consider yourself part of the community, and you are welcome to contribute to the conversation where you feel you may have something worth adding. To hold a community of both plurals and plural-adjacents means we celebrate both our similarities and differences; that we help and support each other; that we are united to forge our own paths even when the world tries to silence or stamp us out. At the time of writing this, there have been a number of recent posts about pluralphobia (the discrimination of people for being plural, whether assumed or actual). It's our hope that all plural and plural-adjacent folk can work together to combat pluralphobia, educate others, and at the end of the day, live happy lives as who we are without fear. We are stronger together, and our lives become that much richer when we embrace the variety and diversity of both plural and plural-adjacent experiences. It is a sharing of experiences, stories, lives, community, and common goals.
Of course, I'm not requiring anyone become a hardcore activist to use the term, or anything. I'm merely expressing a hope I have for all of us.
I suppose you can think of this post as the official coining post for plural-adjacent. I hope this helped explain the term and its origins!
* We've done our best to find the ask in question, since it was answered, but despite our best efforts, we can't seem to find it. We'd also like to add the disclaimer that it's completely possible others came up with this term on their own in other situations; however, we were unaware of any others using the term at the time of our first public usage and unofficial coining. Due to not remembering the exact time this ask was submitted or answered, we cannot be sure which usages were as a result of our idea spreading, and which were original. However, we can say for certain it's been a few years since our term was first put out there, since we starting more openly using the term starting in at least September of 2021, as you can see it in our pinned post on our @pluralprompts blog, which has remained largely unedited since it was first written.
Person A has a very unique power: they can break the fourth wall. Yeah, that's right, they can tell you're there! But it's not like anyone else is aware of the audience watching their world, so Person A doesn't bring it up to anyone, and blows off any questions about why they sometimes "talk to themself" and "act like someone else is there".
Until one day, something occurs to them: isn't this set-up rather like a system? Sure, it's not like you're sharing the same brain, but when you, the audience, can already tell what they're thinking in the privacy of their own head, you might as well be, right? They don't have any names for the members of their audience, not like how (other?) systems have names for their members, but...
Eh, they'll keep it as a thought in their back pocket. Not like anyone else would notice the similarities between systems and their fourth wall breaking habits, right?
... Yeah, they felt the universe jinxing them as soon as they thought those words.
Barely even thinking about it, Person A leaned into the buzz in the back of their mind, the link connecting them to so many others. They could never explain it well to anyone else – not that anyone had ever asked – but the buzz was easy to sink into, like a soft couch after a long day. It was the feeling of coming home to your loved ones who'd been waiting for you. It was an ocean of memories and emotions and knowledge shared for the sake of being shared; because anyone who was connected like this was an ally at least and family with just a little work. It was a shame the movies never properly showed off what a bond like this was like, only ever twisting it to give to their villains.
However, Person A had a job to do right then that they didn't think the rest of their hivemind could help with, and they were getting rather lost in their head with all this hivemind appreciation. So, with great reluctance, they pulled themself back to their individual body and focused on the world around them once more.
We just read this article on emotional wellbeing in queer men
and boy do we feel like we just got half way thru a therapy session
warnings: long, existential crisis-y, discusses normative queermisia & poor mental wellbeing. bolding in quotes is mine, hopefully the formatting and text isn't fucked bc this thing keeps jumping around on our phone.
One of the most striking studies I found described the spike in anxiety and depression among gay men in 2004 and 2005, the years when 14 states passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. Gay men in those states showed a 37 percent increase in mood disorders, a 42 percent increase in alcoholism and a 248 percent increase in generalized anxiety disorder.
The most chilling thing about those numbers is that the legal rights of gay people living in those states didn’t materially change. We couldn’t get married in Michigan before the amendment passed, and we couldn’t get married in Michigan after it passed. The laws were symbolic. They were the majority’s way of informing gay people that we weren’t wanted. What’s worse, the rates of anxiety and depression didn’t just jump in the states that passed constitutional amendments. They increased (though less dramatically) among gay people across the entire country. The campaign to make us suffer worked.
and then you look at that positive psychology claim about the ratio of neeing 3 positivity to counteract 1 negativity, and i live in a country that had been colonised by England, America is a massive power in the anglosphere, and both countries are being horrific to queer citizens. i already knew that most people in my life who love me do not want us to be trans, would rather that we were not, that there are even other trans folk don't like us to be androgynous and nongendered, and that most of what i get around my transness and gendering us correctly from the people around us is grudging, whinging tolerance of you know im going to make mistakes and this is really hard for me to change, 'cause apparently we need to be reminded often, we need to have it drilled into us constantly that our happiness is a burden
no wonder we dont know how to feel valued outside of having helped people
no wonder we feel we are wanted not for who we are but for what we can do that's useful
we keep being shown that our happiness is a burden to them
That’s why, two years ago, his 18-year-old nephew James showed up trembling at his doorstep. He sat Halkitis and his husband down on the couch and announced he was gay. ...
James grew up in Queens, a beloved member of a big, affectionate, liberal family. He went to a public school with openly gay kids. “And still,” Halkitis says, “there was this emotional turmoil. ...
Over the years, James had convinced himself that he would never come out. He didn’t want the attention, or to have to field questions he couldn’t answer. His sexuality didn’t make sense to him—how could he possibly explain it to other people? ... "... So I thought those were my two options: this fairy-tale life I could never have, or this gay life where there was no romance.”
i don't even have two options as an agender. yeah, it means my options aren't limited and anything or everything is possible, but that's just another way to say i have no number of options.
James remembers the exact moment he decided to go into the closet. He must have been 10 or 11, dragged on a vacation to Long Island by his parents. “I looked around at our whole family, and the kids running around, and I thought, ‘I’m never going to have this,’ and I started to cry.”
I realize, the second he says it, that he is describing the same revelation I had at his age, the same grief. James’ was in 2007. Mine was in 1992. Halkitis says his was in 1977.
i dont recall having that realisation with such certainty, but there's been chronic knowing i dont know if i can have this. i don't know if it's possible and the sheer uncertainty of it is overwhelming. not having any sort of role models or social roles, all i can see is i dont belong anywhere. there is no place for me. the only way i can possibly find a place is if i can convince them i can be useful enough, helpful enough, likeable enough to be worth keeping around. which is a pretty damn hard thing to believe we could be when we struggle so much with socialising and getting through day to day activities.
"Gay and bisexual men talk about the gay community as a significant source of stress in their lives,” Pachankis says. The fundamental reason for this, he says, is that “in-group discrimination” does more harm to your psyche than getting rejected by members of the majority.
and then i get this regular low dose of erasures and explicit exorsexism from binary trans folk online, plus indirect shittiness from this constant stream of "it's totally cool to be masc or fem as a nonbinary person" (yes!) and "not all nonbinary people are white waify androgynous" (yes true!) and "you don't owe anyone androgyny" (also true) but this constant stream of support for binary presentations and absolutely no support for people who present androgynous or explicitly genderfucked really just shows the underlying attitude of "no, do not be androgynous, you can joke about it but you shouldn't really want to be like that, don't you dare have the audacity to present as anything other than masc or fem if you aren't specifically artistically performing it and looking really visually palatable" but with a veneer of kind encouragement and a whole load of plausible deniability, and is it any wonder i feel less comfy finding trans groups now we're mid-transition and visibly genderfucked than we were pre-transition?
For gay people, the effect is magnified by the fact that our minority status is hidden. Not only do we have to do all this extra work and answer all these internal questions when we’re 12, but we also have to do it without being able to talk to our friends or parents about it.
John Pachankis, a stress researcher at Yale, says the real damage gets done in the five or so years between realizing your sexuality and starting to tell other people. Even relatively small stressors in this period have an outsized effect—not because they’re directly traumatic, but because we start to expect them.
yep, there we go. and these parts particularly hit right now in context of our closeted plurality, and the way folks on tumblr are so damn cruel about the topic mastodon my beloved
