We're plural.
Wow, this is a relief. Scary, but a relief.
Hi, I'm Sarah. The guy who writes ever-so-pedantically about computer security is David.(I'm not that bad, am I? Oh, right. How come I can't immediately tell when you're joking?)Together, we are David-Sarah Hopwood. It is almost certainly a very bad idea that we are coming out as plural publically under our real name. We've been told that in no uncertain terms.
So why are we doing it? Because it's necessary. Because we're fed up (
more than that, that doesn't begin to describe it) of pretending to be a single person. Because
the situation of people coming out as multiple/plural now is much like coming out as gay or lesbian in the 50's or earlier, and that's not acceptable. Because our experience of coming out as
bi-gender was overwhelmingly positive. Lots of reasons.
It's very likely that most of what you've heard about "Multiple Personality Disorder" or "Dissociative Identity Disorder" (unless you have direct experience of it) is wrong. Certainly almost all of what we had heard, before we realised that it could apply to us, was wrong. Even just thinking of it under either of those names is a category error.
"The fundamental sign of absence of cultural permission is the lack of words in the language of the dominant culture which would suffice to describe an experience." -- Anthony Temple
For a start, there is a much greater range of ways in which multiplicity can be experienced than you might think. (So, don't assume that anything I/we say about us
necessarily holds for other multiples.) The stereotypical idea of someone who "switches" between "alters" and has "missing time" (partial amnesia), is only one possibility. That isn't how it works for us; we are co-conscious most of the time, and have no missing time. Some times we are more clearly separate than at other times. Our plurality was not the result of childhood abuse. There are currently only two of us -- David and Sarah -- who want to be publically known, which seems to be fewer than most multiples.
("Plural" is a term often used for multiples with a small number of members, and "
median" for systems who experience a varying degree of separateness at different times.
Astraea's web is a good resource for information about multiplicity, although we don't necessarily agree with everything there.)
But we don't really want this first post to be just a rant about society's lack of acceptance of multiplicity or plurality or anything else -- as important as that is. This blog is going to be at least as much about the techie stuff that you might expect us to write if you know David from various security and programming language mailing lists, as about being plural or trans.
A few conventions for this blog:
-
orange text is Sarah, speaking for herself
-
blue text is David, speaking for emself
- black text is David-Sarah (text that is co-written or written when we are not feeling as separate, but that we both agree with).
(Are these colours sufficiently readable? LJ seems to show entries with your own style's background colour on the "friends" page. If this isn't readable for you, we're open to suggestions.)
If we're writing in plain text, we might use "d:" and "s:" instead. (Stateful rather than delimited? You have no taste :-) Make it "(d: ...)" and "(s: ...)". Yes, that's better.)
Please use "they" as the third-person pronoun when referring to both of us. (Pronouns are, as our sister put it, "a grammatical minefield" when you're plural, but we make do.)
Hmm. "Show this entry to: Everyone (Public)." That seems very final, doens't it. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound.
okay
happy
optimistic