There's a paradox in a lot of plural spaces. System kids are welcome, but only if they're Literal Children who stay in child-only soft boxes where they can be ignored. If a kid wants to have an adult conversation, then they're spoken over, pushed away, or otherwise discounted more often than not- and if they're accepted, then it's often at the cost of expecting them to have absolutely no childlike qualities to "prove" that they're mature enough to stay around. We even see this pattern within systems sometimes.
What are systems without adult members supposed to do if the only place system kids can talk is in the Super Soft Safe Box? What about system kids who want to talk about theoretical physics or drugs or sex or a thousand other taboos? What about kids who function as adults? And what about system kids who are kids but don't want to live their lives in the Super Soft Safe Box like the world expects them to?
Acceptance of system kids as being wildly different from each other in mindset and ability is improving, but we still have a long way to go in treating system kids with a shred of respect and decency in wider plural spaces.
Not to mention... why is there so much intense focus on mental age as some universal concept in the first place? It feels like a lot of the plural community takes the concept of mental age as a given without considering where that idea comes from, how it affects how they treat others, and how it interacts with systemic discrimination and ableism. It can sometimes be a useful construct if approached critically, but I see so little critical thought about it.
If you want some reading on the topic, one of the articles cited is worth at least a skim- it's a fairly good surface overview of eugenics and its tie to IQ/mental age, immigration, racism, ableism, etc.
ID below the cut with the full quotes- sorry to alt texters, I fit as much as I could in there but the text limit is real.
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There's a subtle sort of discrimination to how a lot of plural spaces treat system kids/littles. Especially those in adult bodies, or with a particularly large gap from their body's age.
"Littles must always be supervised in online spaces or else they'll bother adults and be preyed upon." "There must be an adult in your system if you're bodily an adult- they should handle life while the kids go away to never be seen by adults again. Littles should only talk to other littles. Anything else is unsafe and sometimes pedophilic. Right?" "Littles shouldn't be in charge. They're supposed to be cared for by everyone else and kept out of sight." "You're welcome here! You just have to only ever talk in the Baby Zone that no adults ever visit to talk to you. Yeah, it's empty and no one will answer. But you want to talk, right?" "Sorry sweetie, the adults are talking and you can't be here. Even if you're capable of understanding, consenting, etc. You're not allowed to be here with us if you're not a real adult." "Littles can't take care of themselves or handle any adult responsibilities, ever!" "Is there an adult I can talk to?"
Blue, an anthro cat sitting down, looks angry at the above phrases.
What are adult-bodied systems with no "brain adults" supposed to do? Drawing of a family of stick figures, all of whom are either child-short or hunching to be shorter.
What about systems whose caretakers are their children? Systems where there is no older person to supervise? Systems finding ways to live an adult life when no one inside aligns with it? What are you supposed to do when a 5-year-old does your taxes and drives you home?
"Just grow up." Do I get a choice, or are you ripping that away from me too?
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Why is "mental age" the bar people are using to decide whether someone is worthy of autonomy and respect, anyway? Where does the concept of mental age come from in the first place, and why does it exist?
From Wilson, R. A. (2024). Eugenic Thinking and the Cognitive Sciences. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.c9a5f080:
"Eugenic traits:
Prominent among the eugenic traits found in sterilization laws were those concerning cognitive ability and mental health. These traits, ordered in terms of their frequency in U.S. state and Canadian provincial sterilization laws, included feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, criminality, imbecility, idiocy, sexual perversion (or depravity), mental unfitness (or deficiency), and moral depravity (or degeneracy). As this listing suggests, these laws especially targeted those perceived to have some kind of cognitive limitation or psychiatric condition on the grounds that they were unfit and would propagate these eugenic traits to their children; approximately 70% of all eugenic traits mentioned in sexual sterilization laws in the United States and Canada concerned cognitive ability or mental health. Given this, there was a clear role for psychologists in programs of eugenic sterilization, given their expertise in psychological testing (Rose, 1985). Such testing and subsequent sterilization were conducted through emerging forms of institutionalization, such as “training schools for the feeble-minded,” especially as eugenics gained state-level backing (Miller et al., 2015).
One of the roles of psychologists was to develop ways to measure those who were cognitively or psychiatrically subnormal. Emerging intelligence tests were adapted to quantify and classify those deemed “feeble-minded”or “mentally deficient” (Thomson, 1998; Trent, 1994). Binet’s famous test of intelligence, for example, incorporated the more specific existing folk categories of “imbecile” and “idiot,” adapting these to designate developmentally delayed children with mental ages, respectively, of 3–7 and 2 years. Following the translation of Binet’s test from French into English by Henry Goddard in 1908, “moron” was coined in 1910 to pick out those in the general population with a putatively fixed mental age of 8–12 years. This resulted in a three-tiered schema of intellectual subnormality—moron, imbecile, idiot—that came to be widely used in the eugenics movement.
In the hands of the psychologist Lewis Terman, what became the Stanford-Binet test initially was deployed in selecting army recruits near the end of World War I (1914–1918) before being used on the general population. The three-tiered scheme was accordingly fed into the newly minted idea of an intelligence quotient (IQ) that remains with us 100 years on, with the fixed mental ages of moron, imbecile, and idiot mapped onto standard deviations from a normalized IQ of 100. From the 1920s, these tests were widely used to identify children who were candidates for eugenic sterilization, whether they were already housed in segregated institutions or within the regular school system or general community."
From Asilverm, & Asilverm. (n.d.). What’s My Age Again: Why Mental Age Theory Hurts People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Retrieved May 31, 2026, from https://www.disabilitywisdom.com/2018/12/21/whats-my-age-again-why-mental-age-theory-hurts-people-with-intellectual-and-developmental-disabilities/:
The concept of “mental age” was first introduced by Alfred Binet, co-creator of the first IQ tests, in the early twentieth century. Generally, “mental age” has been measured by comparing an individual’s score on a standardized IQ test with the average performance of their same-age peers. For people with IDD, “mental age” may also be estimated by comparing the person’s demonstrated physical, speech, adaptive or cognitive skills against the average for various age groups.
Not surprisingly, “mental age” came about alongside the eugenics movement in the United States. Mental ages were used to classify various groups of “feebleminded” individuals by severity: Adults with a mental age of 9-12 years were classified as “morons”; those with a mental age of 6-8 years were classified as “imbeciles”; and those with a mental age of 2-5 were classified as “idiots.” Individuals from any of these groups were thought unfit to reproduce."
A drawing of Blue looks annoyed and concerned. It's labelled, "TFW it's eugenics again. :("
Oh yeah. Why is it always eugenics?
To be clear: I'm not saying anyone is ableist or practicing eugenics for having a sense of their own internal age. I am pointing out how systemic ableism affects how system kids are treated, how the concept of mental age stems from ableism in the first place, and how terribly many cultures treat children and deemed-children to begin with: how children and disabled people are often regarded as objects, burdens, or annoyances who don't know enough to have a say about their own needs. Is this really how we want to assume all system kids should be treated? How anyone should be treated?
How much of how system kids are treated ties back to some form of ableism, in the end? I wonder about this a lot and I feel like I never see people talk about it.
And like, at a certain level, you have to know that's not true!
The first tag on your post is "anti tulpa"!
It's pretty well known by now, even in sysmed circles, that our community started completely disconnected from the general plural community. The first tulpamancers started over on 4Chan before broadening to other websites!
Daemonism also developed independently, a practice which was inspired by His Dark Materials. And long before that, we had soulbonders.
Non-traumagenic plurality has independently been discovered many times in many different forms!
So hate to inform you, but if none of you were here, we still would be!
Also soulbonding too! And otherkin multiples/hosts - they did take a lot from the natural multiple community at the time but even then a lot of their experiences were spiritual/non-traumagenic in nature. All of these communities would have existed with or without the CDD community!
A place to share bad experiences in plural spaces, whether that’s servers, subreddits, Tumblr groups, or general community interactions.
This account exists so people can talk about things that went wrong: bad moderation, exclusion, manipulation, harassment, toxic environments, uncomfortable interactions, misinformation, or experiences that were ignored or dismissed.
The goal is discussion and sharing experiences. Not harassment, dogpiling, or targeting people.
This blog is intended for plural spaces only. Anti-endo spaces, exclusionist spaces, or communities built around denying people’s plurality are not the focus of this account.
What can be submitted:
* Discord servers
* Subreddits
* Tumblr groups/spaces
* Moderation issues
* Toxic community dynamics
* Negative or uncomfortable experiences in plural spaces
* Situations involving exclusion, misinformation, manipulation, or conflict
Rules:
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* Usernames are not required to be censored, but it is preferred where reasonable. Please use discretion, especially with smaller accounts or private individuals.
Submissions can be anonymous.
About the blog:
Run by the founder of r/plurallounge / @kandibah , a mixed-origin, pro-endogenic system.
This blog exists to talk about the parts of plural communities people don’t always discuss.
The truth behind plural spaces.
Credits for banner , dividers and dni goes to myself. All things are made alongside the color scheme and vibe of r/pluralloung. Please contact @kandibah to discuss anything relating to them.
I was a really soft-hearted little kid who cried a lot and liked to play games about making big families and nurturing things, which, since I was a boy, meant I got the shit kicked out of me a lot by other boys for being girly. Boys were supposed to be tough and fight and compete and try to be the best, you see, that's how our imagination games were supposed to go. And that's what media aimed at boys when I was a kid focused on - heroes who beat the shit out of people and are tough and don't cry et cetera et cetera.
And I learned to like that and see the appeal in that, sure. There are lots of stories that were made for an audience of little boys that I ended up liking. But I always wanted something that told me boys like me, who didn't want to be violent or competitive, who liked nurturing things and making friends, who avoided fights whenever allowed, were valid.
So I was really happy when Steven Universe came around and was exactly that - the kind of show a sensitive little boy like I used to be would have killed to see. And very shortly after that I was crushed when the growing criticism of the show repeated the refrain that it was bad mainly because Steven was a pacifist who cried and didn't want to be violent and liked nurturing things and making friends instead of killing people. I wasn't surprised, no, it made perfect sense people would hate it for being that, but I was crushed all the same.
Our society only accepts a very narrow definition of masculinity, and kindness isn't allowed to play a very big role in it. That's one of the reasons I quit it.
Anyway, I'm a daycare teacher now, and one of the kids in my class is a really sensitive little boy with big feelings and a bigger heart, who acts very nurturing to his little 3-D printed dragons, and gets very upset at how mean and rude the other little boys can be when they're trying to prove they're mature and tough. Recently he's been talking to me about a show he found and has fallen in love with called Steven Universe, and I've been delighted to hear him regale me about how much he loves it. I bet it's doing him some real good to see that it's ok for a little boy like him to have a big heart and to want to make friends instead of fight all the time. He's making up his own crystal gem OC too, isn't that nice?
Warnings: mentions of eating disorders and cannabalism
I/we were in this discord server and oh my god the moderation was. Something. They had an ‘other language’ chat, for talking when using typing quirks or another language, with a translation provided in small text below. That’s fine, right? But you can’t speak English there. Which means if someone with a typing quirk wants to talk to someone who doesn’t, they either have to just not use their typing quirk (not possible/hard to do for some) or just not talk to them.
Eating disorders could only be mentioned in the TW vent channel. Which felt wrong to me. What we have to say about our eating disorder isn’t always negative! I understand using a TW, but it shouldn’t be restricted to the TW vent channel. Not to mention, speaking of cannabalism (? I can’t spell it) without a warning of any kind or spoiler barring the message was perfectly fine.
Eventually, we were banned. No warning no reason nothing. We had to reach out to a no-longer friend who was on the mod team to figure it out. Said server claimed to be a place where paranoia/anxiety inducing statements/images/actions were not allowed. Banning someone without telling them why can be extremely anxiety inducing (especially for us).
Oh, and another thing. There was a questions channel if you needed help from staff, but if you weren’t staff you were completely unallowed to answer? I understand it for questions like “hey, this role isn’t working” but even just “where could I find [so and so] channel?” you weren’t allowed to answer.
I’m disappointed because that was the only pro-endo discord server we’ve been able to find. We had some more critiques but I can’t think of them right now.
becca king who has an active sex life and a boyfriend and wants to be independent and not infantilized and known first and foremost as 'becca' and not 'mel's sister'...............mel king who has structured her entire life around becca's needs and care and being 'becca's sister', even moving to pittsburgh specifically because becca got into an independent living center there, now not knowing what to do or who she is if becca is keeping secrets from her and no longer needs her..............pitt writers you are cooking with gas
(I really do love seeing Filipino representation on the Pitt though. They’re not there just for comic relief or as a stereotype, they’re fully human and respected right alongside everyone else.)
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