Similarities to Trans Gatekeepers
Ever since realizing I'm plural, it sucks seeing plural people in my discord chats have "Self-ID Systems DNI" because it reminds me of when I had to deal with trans meds (also called truscum). There's a lot of stigma so it never crossed my mind to check with a doctor for DID.
The others (alters) are very mindful so there were only a few moments when I caught them controlling the body. It feels like other people think I'm faking because it's not all doom and gloom. I'm actually happy being plural and we're all very close.
I remember being on trans forums where people would lash out at trans people who didn't hate being trans. It feels very similar sometimes to being plural. I'm just used to us figuring everything out by ourselves and the others are pretty smart so they almost always know what's going on before I do.
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We once met a system medicalist offline, she was very angry at us for bringing up anything but DID etc systems as she seemed to have a lot of trauma and thus investment in only medicalised pluraity being the only types of valid plurality.
Thankfully we haven't really met any online.
We didn't reveal we are plural to her, thankfully, but it did force us to come out to a friend about it, so we could explain that we did, in fact, know what we were talking about as apparently the system medicalist then ranted about it on facebook.
She was also a transmedicalist and wanted stronger gatekeeping too, but because of trauma as well, ugh.
We are glad we never really ran into that plural group again as she wasn't that nice of a person in general.
Oh, there's even a word for this phenomenon because of how strongly it parallels with transmeds: sysmeds!
As a plural collective that was heavily traumatized by a cisgender transmed (probably better known as a transphobe), sysmeds really feel the same way to us.
Funny thing is, internalized sysmedicalism is also why it took us years to realize we were plural! This is in spite of two of us having argued about how the body will be presented as, and in spite of us being quite interested in plurality. We don't really relate to a lot of trans egg stuff, but we do relate to that feeling in regards to our plurality.
That's very interesting and I'm surprised more people don't talk about this but it may be because of the stigma. I always wondered how plural people who don't identify as trans view themselves in relation to gender (I think only one of us identified as trans internally if that makes sense)
I'll admit that it's stuff I've seen more on Tumblr (where, for the past decade, there is somehow a "debate" on what can cause plurality) and I hear it's also a thing on TikTok.
In all fairness, collectively we don't consider ourselves trans beyond a political solidarity sense, though that's because our body is also intersex than anything to do with our plurality, we consider ourselves collectively ultergender. Though the experiences section doesn't have our experience, which is "our visibly intersex body is fine the way it is, and we refuse to binarize it".
That being said, some of us do consider themself trans, a few of us consider themself cis, and some of us consider themselves ultergender or ipsogender.