The Harm of ‘Validity Culture’ - A Scathing Criticism of Online Validation and Its Opposition
Alternate Title: Why I’m Not On Either Side of the Argument
Hello, Remy again and today I wanted to talk about ‘validity culture’--i.e., “if you experience it, it’s valid” and similar statements, as well as those who oppose validity culture and attack vulnerable parts of the community because their systems present differently. Buckle up, this one gets a little long.
Content warnings: Discussion of fakeclaiming and harassment, being wrong about being a system and similar topics.
Introduction
On a surface level, this doesn’t actually seem bad, and, on a surface level, it’s not. Validity is something we all crave as people, especially when we’re talking about something like systems, which can come with amnesia, hardcore denial, fakeclaiming, self doubt, and more that can cause us to think “no, I couldn’t possibly be a system!”
But there’s issues with places that don’t allow you to be wrong.
Some people come into certain spaces and say, “well, I don’t know if I’m a system or not, but here are my experiences, can someone help me figure out if I’m a system?” And a lot of what they’re describing might not sound like being a system, but instead something else, like identity issues, dissociative amnesia, a personality disorder, etc. But nonetheless, the people of validity culture will step in every time and say, “that’s valid!” And “there’s actually a term for that!” Without using any critical thinking skills about whether or not what this person is actually experiencing is related to being a system at all, all because it would require them to think harder about their own experiences and question whether or not they’re a system.
There’s a reason this culture exists, though, one that nobody really wants to address.
But Where Did ‘Validity Culture’ Come From?
‘Validity culture’ exists because of fakeclaiming and harassment, full stop. People wouldn’t need spaces like this if fakeclaimers didn’t act like being wrong about being a system was the worst thing in the world, if fakeclaimers didn’t create such a horrible reputation for those that were wrong about being systems, if fakeclaimers just left people they didn’t know alone.
Because people were being fakeclaimed and harassed to the point of distress, some people wanted to create spaces where they wouldn’t be harassed, spaces where they could be validated in their experiences without people acting like they were wrong for existing a certain way that didn’t look like certain other people’s experiences, and over time it evolved into what it is now. Pluralgang.
‘Validity culture’ was created in direct response to extreme harassment, fakeclaiming, subreddits like r/fakedisordercringe and r/systemcringe, anon hate and death threats from strangers on the internet. Validity culture exists because of the harassment people received from fakeclaimers, and that is something nobody wants to address.
Years ago, people used to harass anyone who claimed to have introjects, god forbid you be introject-heavy. Now, it’s full of people who may or may not be systems but are claiming to be because they either are systems, or they’re afraid of what being wrong would do to them, considering the reputation people who are wrong get due to how fakeclaimers behave. They’ve always behaved like this, too. If you were wrong back then, you were an irredeemable asshole, and if you’re wrong now, you’re still an irredeemable asshole.
But now with the introduction of ‘validity culture’, if you’re wrong about being a system, then you’re an irredeemable asshole to some people, and to others you’re someone who can be made into a system to prove them wrong, or you’re secretly a system and haven’t figured out your real headmates yet, or you’re actually a median system leaning towards being a singlet on the plurality spectrum and etc...
People on one side can’t accept that someone might’ve been accidentally wrong about being a system and that doesn’t mean they’re inherently a bad person or were faking, as faking is a conscious choice. It just means they were wrong.
People on the other side can’t accept that some people are just wrong about being a system, and choosing not to be after figuring out they aren’t doesn’t make them an inherently bad person or mean they’re rejecting anything. It just means they aren’t a system.
What Needs To Be Added To The Discussion?
The discussion of syscourse has such extreme black and white views on people because of fakeclaimers and because of the resulting validity culture that expanded from them, and people wanting to be seen without being attacked for existing in a way that some people didn’t like, and on some level, i can empathize with not just one, but both sides. I am part of an introject-heavy system, and that’s something that would get me fakeclaimed pretty easily in a lot of places, and I have been. I’ve been fakeclaimed, or implied to be faking by people I considered friends for a myriad of reasons, one of the weirdest being that we somehow ‘acted similarly’.
On another level, I want people to take what I’m experiencing seriously, and when people treat it like some fun identity that doesn’t really mean anything and can be picked up or dropped at any time, when people deny that DID is a trauma disorder despite the studies, or when people outright deny science, when people use my disorder as an excuse to be an asshole or liken being a system to being LGBT, it’s incredibly frustrating all of the time. I get it, believe me.
But ‘validity culture’ is just as toxic as fakeclaimers in a lot of scenarios. People involved in ‘validity culture’ are not in any way, shape or form innocent, or free of blame or criticism for their own actions and toxicity.
Remember how people discussed things like ‘toxic positivity’ when the trend of being critical of ‘Steven Universe’ was a huge discourse? ‘Validity culture’ is the living embodiment of ‘toxic positivity’.
Somewhere, I saw someone asking if they could use terms like ‘plural’ to describe themselves even though they weren’t sure if they were a system, and were aware that they had identity issues due to their CPTSD. Someone chimed in and said, ‘hey, I think you should be careful with questioning if you’re a system considering your identity issues, here’s what I suggest’, and people tried to shut that down. Even the person themselves said it didn’t feel ‘right’ to be a singlet, or something along those lines. There was then a long discussion about median systems that lead to this person identifying with the term ‘parasian’, which refers to a median system that leans more towards the singlet side of the plurality spectrum.
I can’t tell if this person is part of a system or not because I’m not an expert of any kind, all I know is that they have CPTSD and ADHD, according to them.
But I can say that immediately rejecting the idea that someone could just be a singlet, even causing themselves to reject the idea of the possibility of being a singlet, (they even rejected the idea of creating headmates, which was suggested if being a singlet was so uncomfortable to them), and instead identifying with a term that just sounds like having a fluid personality, (at least to me, since I don’t really understand the term myself), feels infinitely more harmful than someone being able to open a dialogue of potentially not being a system.
And this is the problem with ‘validity culture’.
Toxic Validation: Where Things Go Wrong
Validating everything someone is experiencing instead of being able to open a dialogue and say, “hey, what you’re experiencing doesn’t sound like my experiences, and I think you should talk to other people about it and do more personal research, possibly talk to a therapist, people who have been diagnosed with DID or other people who have been in the community for years before saying you are a system or before genuinely questioning if you are”, is incredibly toxic. It does so much more harm than good, because some people will be out here, singlets in denial, applying names and ages and genders to parts of themselves that are not fully autonomous, to parts of themselves that aren’t separate in any way, shape or form, mistaking kin-shifts for alters, mistaking dissociative amnesia for alters, mistaking PTSD EPs and BPD and OSDD2 and other disorders known to cause identity issues with alters and refusing to recognize that they could be wrong because validity culture told them it was right, and validity culture does what it does best and constantly validates these people, and says, “if you experience it, it’s valid” and “if you experience it, it’s normal” and “everything you’re experiencing is valid” and “label yourself with what feels most comfortable, even if it’s not accurate to what you’re experiencing”. They’re doing it because validity culture said what they were experiencing was ‘valid’ for a system, and these people never bothered to do their research.
What’s worse is that most of these people weren’t even around to know what ‘Astrea’s Web’ is/was. They’re often times /that young/, and don’t know where to go but their peers for information, and often times that information just comes from severely misinformed carrds and twitter threads instead of genuine, scientific research and decades of personal experience.
And this is, again, in _direct_ response to fakeclaiming. We would not have these issues if fakeclaiming and harassment weren’t so rampant in the online system community. Because fakeclaiming and harassment have become so rampant in the online system community, it’s caused people to see any kind of criticism of their validity culture-style community as coming from a gatekeeper that doesn’t think they’re real, that it’s just someone who’s trolling or gatekeeping and they aren’t someone to take seriously because they’re spouting ‘pluralphobic’ or ‘sysmed rhetoric’--the definition of which changes depending on who you ask due to the term being so watered down, but, like usual, that’s another post for another day.
Both of these toxic sides of the community feed into each other, and they do it heavily, and nobody seems to ever see the cycle.
Fakeclaimers feed off of seeing validity culture validate some of the most impossible and insane things, like the ‘singlet fictive’ discourse that went around twitter a couple months ago, to say ‘hey, look at these whacky inclusionists, you shouldn’t listen to anything they say because they all support this’, (they don’t all support these things, actually, and it’s pretty obvious that this was either a troll or someone severely misinformed), while ‘validity culture’ feeds off of the harassment of fakeclaimers to say ‘hey, these people are just gatekeepers, and you shouldn’t listen to them because they’re like transmeds and TERFs’ (they’re not even comparing them to anything accurately comparable at this point, either, but another post for another day; ‘sysmeds’ are not anything like transmeds or TERFs).
It’s a toxic cycle of harassment, confusion, misinformation spread through carrds and twitter threads, and miscommunication on what the DSM and ISSTD guidelines actually say due to laypeople trying to be the mouthpieces of these medical texts without understanding how to read them.
Everyone is yelling at each other and it doesn’t make sense, because both sides are horrifically toxic and need improvement, and neither of them want to see it or take any kind of criticism, because they see the other as somehow inherently infringing on their right to live, somehow. Both sides have a tendency to see criticism of their arguments as ‘the other side’s rhetoric’ instead of coming from a place of wanting to better the community. It gives me the same vibes as that one book that was banned in the US for being ‘communist propaganda’, and banned in the USSR for being ‘anti communist propaganda’. Neither side wants to see the faults in their own communities, much less try to fix them, and it’s made the community horrifically toxic, and forces people to pick sides they don’t necessarily agree with because of how toxic either side can be.
People need to be mature enough and have nuanced enough views to recognize that both sides of the argument are extremely toxic.
What Can We Do?
We need to be able to open a dialogue about being wrong about being a system, and we need it for certain people’s health, because for some people who incorrectly believe(d) they’re a system, it’s extremely detrimental to their mental health to separate parts of their own subconscious off just to believe they’re a system, or because they’re mislabeling their symptoms, or to fit in or because that’s what they feel like they have to be for whatever reason, or even just because they want attention, because that happens sometimes, even if people don’t want to believe it--but it’s not nearly as common as some fakeclaimers like to believe.
We need to open a dialogue for people who were/are wrong about being a system, we need to be able to pin down certain experiences as irrefutably plural, or groups of experiences when, grouped together, are irrefutably plural experiences, and other experiences or groups of experiences, as irrefutably not, and to stop treating being plural like an identity and start taking it much more seriously due to the fact that it’s disrespectful to actual plural experiences to /not/ take it seriously.
No, it’s not always serious and doom and gloom being a system. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that we should take ourselves more seriously so that we can pin down what experiences are actually plural, and which ones are actually just things like identity issues and dissociative amnesia caused by other disorders, and what’s just code switching and people having normal, fluid personalities, because labeling all of these things as alters or headmates arbitrarily causes someone to lose a sense of self and causes them to start to fragment their own personality piece by piece. Someone falsely believing that they’re a system is part of what can lead to a disorder like OSDD2, which is a dissociative disorder that refers to identity disturbances, but no autonomous parts/alters.
We need to stop treating being a system like being LGBT, because it’s disrespectful to both LGBT and plural experiences to act like both are the same thing, or even remotely similar, speaking as a queer DID system. Being a system /affects/ your identity, but it is not, itself, an identity in the same way that LGBT labels are, and applying things like pride flags and symbols to every aspect of being a system is extremely uncomfortable because it feels like the two are being severely conflated when they don’t deserve to be.
But most of all, we have to realize that being wrong about being a system is /always/ an option, and that it doesn’t make someone a bad person. It just means they were wrong about being a system. It’s not that deep.
Food For Thought: A Lack of Progress in the Discussion
Really, it’s both sides of the argument are extremely toxic and lacking the nuance needed to actually get anything done. Making fun of either side or pulling up receipts from either side being shitty doesn’t actually prove anything. It just shows that either side can be vehement in their arguments and harassment and abuse of other people online. That doesn’t mean anything other than some people take it way too far, which is something that happens everywhere and isn’t special in any way.
We’re not making any progress with system discourse or system community discussions like this, and we won’t be until we add more nuance to the discussion until we’re able to be critical of our communities and the people in them, until we can deplatform abusive people, until we can be mature enough to admit our own faults. Because there’s a special kind of maturity in being able to admit your own faults and try to grow from them or build off of them and make them make you a stronger person and that, in turn, makes a stronger community. but the online system community has nothing but weaknesses relating to their faults. All you do is weaponize the other side’s faults while refusing to address the ones in your own communities and acting like you’re better for it, but you aren’t. It just makes you immature.
What people refuse to recognize: Both sides of the argument are incredibly toxic and both sides attack each other vehemently and without regards to the other person behind the screen and refuse to accept any kind of criticism for their community, and they do it like they can do no wrong and act like any criticism is bad and ‘the other side’s rhetoric’.
Conclusion
In conclusion: Learn to accept criticism. Learn to accept your faults. Learn to grow past them. Listen to the other side’s argument. /Really/ listen. Don’t just wait for your turn to talk. Respect the other side’s argument for what it is, because discourse is about intelligent discussion, not whiny bickering. Show the people you’re discoursing with more respect. Accept your faults and the faults of your communities. Bring nuance into your discussions and discourses, because almost nothing is black and white, ever.
Really, what I’m telling you to do, is grow up. Mature. Stop blindly believing in one side just because they told you the other side is bad. Form your own opinion on the subject through your own research on both sides. Try to have an intelligent discussion, for once, because we’ll never get anywhere if we’re constantly arguing and bickering with each other, it’s childish and nobody is going to take your arguments seriously if you’re acting like that, especially not outside of any kind of internet discourse.
Sorry if any of this sounds rude, but I’m a pretty blunt person and I’m not going to try and sugarcoat myself just to make myself palatable to a community that doesn’t take itself seriously and won’t stop bickering.
-Remy
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