The only place I can find any reference to this is in James Damore’s Google lawsuit, wherein there is some correspondence between Google employees about how to properly address “plural beings”:
These are listed as “not okay”:
Questions about 'integration"
Addressing one headmate in particular. All are listening!
Assumptions that we are mentally damaged
Apparently they are talking about Disassociative Identity Disorder. Is this an attempt to turn DID into transgenderism, as in claim that it’s not really a disorder at all to be treated, but just who they are?
At this rate, the psychiatric profession will have nothing to do. Every difference in mental state will be “normal” and anyone who says otherwise is intolerant.
So, what say you, Dopers? Is DID a disorder that needs to be treated, or just another form of identity?
Ah, okay, so it’s kinda like vampire culture? Or would vampire culture be a part of that already? Not a mental disorder I’d say, unless they seriously believe it and aren’t just playing a very involved game of make believe.
There are a few people that actually believe in vampire culture. I had one sleep on the floor of my dorm room for a few weeks in New Orleans and he would go out looking for them every night in a trenchcoat. No bullshit. He was a friend of a friend of a friend from North Carolina and honestly believed in them as far as I could tell. He was disappointed that he hadn’t found any but was always convinced that he was very close to it. I just had to kick him out after he stayed way too long. He may still be looking for them for all I know. He was a very strange guy but not obviously crazy in other ways.
Given that this conversation is happening at Google, are we convinced that the plural beings in question are human? Once you introduce AI, and multiple programs running on the same hardware, the boundaries start getting a lot fuzzier.
I remember reading a really creepy novel about a vampire hunter. The novel was told from their point of view and it was about how they were tracking down and killing vampires at great personal risk. And being as it was a horror novel, you the reader accepted the existence of vampires. But as you kept reading the book, you began to question the protagonist’s premise. The protagonist clearly had mental issues and referred to how other people didn’t believe them. At some point you realized that the protagonist might be killing ordinary people out of a delusional belief that vampires were real.
It’s been mentioned recently in the webcomic Questionable Content. No explanation as to why Tilly uses they/them.
My personal policy is to be polite. If a person’s name is Robert and he told me he doesn’t like to be called Bob then it would be rude of me to call him Bob. I should defer to his personal preference on how he likes to be referred to. And I feel the same rule applies to pronouns.
I agree, but politeness is a two way street. If you get it wrong, you shouldn’t be treated like you’ve committed a criminal offense. People are getting a little touchy these days. Pronunciation of names is becoming a similar issue.
Hm. My thought on reading just the title was “Well, there are all kinds of plural beings, and it’s a matter of style – often different between the U.S. and Britain, and not completely consistent within either place – how they’re referred to”. For instance “Manchester City are running away with the Premier League title”, whereas “New England is in the NFL playoffs” but “The Patriots are about to play”.
I guess that’s not really what the OP is about, though.
I can’t decide whether they are doing harm or good to other groups who have (to the layman) ‘similar-sounding’ personal-identity-related positions.
That is, by their existence, do ‘otherkin’ divert some of the “you’re not normal” abuse, scorn and ridicule away LGBT, or do they make it easier to scorn, abuse and ridicule ‘not normal’ folks by virtue of spuriously lumping them all together?
Isn’t it considered a mental illness if a person cannot separate fantasy from reality? Of course, one might argue that these people are simply role-playing, in which case I’m not sure why anyone should be expected to take them seriously.