On Shorthanding

On Shorthanding is a multi-part feature essay on the minutia of headmate identity, the language used to articulate it, and how to reconcile this with the world around us.
We recommend it to those seeking clarity on these topics, but acknowledge that it goes beyond the scope of relevancy for a casual reader with little exposure to living, breathing plural systems.
Discussion of sensitive topics (sexuality, kink, oppression, abuse) lay within, as is essential in addressing these nuanced concerns in full - please be advised.
-S

Foreword

The arguments that follow are the result of 4 years of experience in a variety of plural spaces online. I hope to elaborate a specific perspective on plural identity here, but also to cut through the confusion created when we use the same words to discuss both personal identity and material relationships to oppression. If you find me too kind/too harsh to a given perspective, consider we may be responding to different people or communities, who may have put forward these views in vastly different ways. I am trying to forge a path through some very difficult terrain here, and I hope you will take my writing in good faith. - mk

Intro: Language, Metaphor and Identity

Identity is developed in a social context. Gender, sexuality, fashion and subcultural styles all gain meaning through interaction with others and are constrained by social forces. Seeing something you want in another person, some aspect of their presentation or behaviour, and adopting that for yourself is a normal part of identity formation. Seeing and meeting girls that I wanted to be like, or that I saw parts of myself in, helped me become a girl. As also happened for me with many other identity realisations.

Yet language is inexact and polysemous. To say that I have a particular identity, be it "trans", "plural", "autistic" or "woman" does not guarantee the same experience as anyone sharing those labels, although shared definitions may help ensure some overlap. For some identity descriptors however, the inexactness is the point, attempting to gesture at something ineffable through metaphorical extensions of language.

Metaphorical uses of language, and the shorthands they create, are central to a number of contentious questions of identity within plural and nonhuman spaces. It is my hope that by outlining these subjects and our approaches to them, we can help other systems avoid a number of painful arguments and misunderstandings we have either borne witness to or experienced first hand.

Part 1: Furries

"A girl says her boyfriend is "a golden retriever". Is she simply gesturing at a particular set of affable personality traits? Or is he a furry, who presents online with an anthropomorphic depiction of the animal? Does he adopt more behavioural traits, ask for pets, wear a collar, eat from a bowl? Is he a therian and holds some spiritual or metaphysical belief in his golden retriever-ness?"

Whatever the answer here, there remains some gap between the literal biological canine and the one identifying with it. But this metaphorical identification exists to gesture at a whole range of traits that might be carried across to the person in question to varying degrees.

Cultural shorthands like this can be extremely effective. Presenting as a demon online may easily convey some rejection of Christian morality - embracing behaviours or traits seen as sinful. Many furries report choosing a fursona based on traits of the animal they identify with or wish to embody. At the same time, these are shorthands - not everyone has the same associations and not everyone is gesturing at the same set of traits.

These differences in what a shorthand is taken to communicate can be a point of friction. When someone says they are a dog, that they want to be treated and perceived like one, this is a specific kind of interactional request. And if it feels like someone has misjudged the degree of seriousness of your request, that can feel really disrespectful.

Someone treating this identity less seriously than you do can come off as trivializing and dismissive, like they're merely humouring you. For many creatures these identities hold deep importance. Even outside of spiritual beliefs, animal identities can tie into deep feelings of alienation from human society, or serve as metaphors for past experiences of mistreatment. While all identity may be play on some level, it is also often deeply personal and serious, and should be treated as such.

At the same time, someone treating this identity more seriously than you can hit its own speed-bumps. Someone emphasizing the degree to which they want to be treated like an animal in all aspects of their life to a partner may be met with disgust at the idea of being involved with an animal sexually. While no-one should be expected to be involved in sex they aren't comfortable with, its important to be clear headed about what is actually being invoked here. Fucking a furry/therian/animal headmate is not the same as sexually abusing a bodily animal - most headmates simply are capable of consent in a way most animals are not. In the situations where a headmate is considered to have equivalent sapience to a literal animal, that's a matter for the system themselves to decide and set boundaries around. But this will always have some degree of metaphor, a gap between the two concepts.

One blessing for communicating these kinds of shorthanding accurately is the tool of online communication. For many people using messaging apps regularly, someone's avatar can become closely tied to how they are perceived. Simply setting an avatar to an image that conveys the level of animality intended can often smooth over this process entirely. This is why tools like PluralKit (or more involved forms of digital avatars in games, VR, etc.) can be extremely important for nonhuman and plural communities. Providing both a sense of embodiment/self-recognition, and aiding the recognition of others.

These principles, which I first observed in furry communities, are why I choose to use "furry" as my core theoretical tool of analysis here - preferring to centre interaction over more metaphysical identity-focused terminology. This is also a basis I carry with me into discussions of identity play and other queer or non-normative identities generally. Having established this groundwork, we can move further into these discussions.

Part 2: Fictives

Much of the preceding discussion of furry identity also applies to those who identify with/as a fictional character. However fictives are often treated with significantly more suspicion and apprehension than those with non-human identities - often incurring accusations of outright delusional thinking.

Part of this is likely due to differences in the public perception of both groups. The default furry in many people's imaginaries lies further on the "fictional persona for roleplay/cosplay" end of the spectrum - cultural practices which have experienced some degree of normalisation. Whereas publicly identifying as a fictional character often incurs the assumption you think you are, essentially, an exact copy of the character as though they'd walked directly out of the media and into your brain.

While these more intense identifications do exist and should be respected, these assumptions are out of line with most fictive experiences. Any engagement with media is an act of reading, with meaning created between reader and text. Thus no two fictives will have identical understandings of the character they both identify with. Indeed they may not even intend to invoke the entirety of the character to which they refer. Rather than wishing to invite a long discussion of a particular story or the metaphysics of identity, an assertion like "I'm a Vriska" might simply be a shorthand intended to gesture at a collection of personality traits and physical features a headmate possesses.

The space for these looser associations is often denied to fictives but is critical for respectful interactions with us. How strongly a given fictive relates to their source is something only they can tell you, but over-assuming the strength of these associations can lead to many frustrating and upsetting points of conflict or distress. Being treated like you are the same as or interchangeable with your source can feel extremely objectifying. Similarly, even benign conversations about a fictional character you identify with can become charged when it's unclear how separate from the character someone sees you as. To some degree these conversations will always be sensitive, especially when a particular piece of media was significant enough to affect your identity in this way, but making it clear that your own reading of a text does not negatively impact your perception of others who identify with its characters is an important safeguard.

While being treated as distinct from your source is important, fully disassociating yourself from your source can also feel like losing something critical about your identity - explaining yourself to others without a core piece of you. And while the act of reading means not everyone will intuitively understand what parts of a character are or aren't also a part of you, sometimes understandings do just click together naturally in a way they wouldn't without the reference point of the source character. When someone really gets what you saw of yourself in a character and can transfer those understandings to you, when you have the space to build a rapport on top of that while still being treated as distinct, it can be really special.

Having spaces where fictives can be open with their identities like this, without the fear of objectification or othering, is really important. Distancing yourself from your source by changing what name or visuals you use online is a thing many fictives do as they develop a more independent sense of self. But far too often these same actions are taken defensively - if you cannot be recognised as a fictive you cannot be challenged or interrogated on that identity. When we can create spaces in which these experiences are treated as normal and mundane, we ease that pressure to mask these parts of plural (or indeed singlet) identities.

And these kinds of identity are in fact normal. On smaller scales people appropriate pieces of identity from media all the time. Buying the cool jacket you saw someone wear in a movie, naming yourself after a character you liked, dyeing your hair, getting tattoos or piercings to look more like a girl you thought was cute, emulating or avoiding the decisions of a character in a story - all of these behaviours are essentially mundane. We live in a cultural milieu of both media and other people from which to form our identities, where subcultural styles like "goth" or "punk" can coalesce around particular media and a collection of aesthetic signifiers. As such, it is hardly a shade stranger to watch the development of a "furry" aesthetic, or to see a confluence of girls all identifying as "twilight sparkle".

Part 2.5: Factives

The apprehension felt around fictive identities is only magnified for headmates identifying with real (living or dead) people - often referred to as "factives" or "introjects". While our prior discussion of fictives still largely applies here, and any identification will naturally be an act of reading based on ones own perceptions, this can actually create greater hostility. To claim to in some sense "be" another person, who you only know through a limited view into their life, is often treated like a highly disrespectful kind of "playing pretend".

But our identities are formed through interactions with others. Personally, our system has been repeatedly shaped by interactions with close friends; picking up forms, aesthetics, interests, and incorporating them into our own identity. You might not know you want a particular kind of expression until you see it elsewhere, or you might have a vague "I wish I could be some kind of cool cyborg"-type desire that only gets fleshed out by talking through the idea with others with similar identities. Sometimes these influences are subtle, sometimes you find a critical mass of identity that can only look like a copy of someone else. Experiencing this with public figures you have a one-sided relationship is no different - sometimes the thing that resonates in media is a fictional character, sometimes its a real person (filtered, as they are, through the same media processes).

There are some reasonable concerns when it comes to navigating factive identity. If we introjected a friend from another system, it would be worth making some effort to distinguish their online personas - having identical names, avatars, etc. may cause confusion, and some visual depictions may feel highly personal to the person who originated them. Being conscious of the distinction between a person and the version of that person in your own system, is again an important principle here. But, at the same time, being forced to deny these kinds of connections can really suck. Carefully obfuscating a headmate's source or influences so as to avoid judgemental comments on their existence is common practice - and shouldn't have to be.

Knowing you affected someone else in this way can stir up a lot of complicated feelings, but having an influence on other people's identity formations is a really special thing. Avoid getting an ego about it ("I made you this way" tends to suck no matter the realisation you helped with), but understand it as a natural part of living as a social animal, and the sharing of such information as an act of deep trust.

Part 3: Age Regressors

There are a myriad of reasons one might identify with an age different to the age of their body, but what this identification is taken to mean varies a lot, especially across different communities.

In a lot of plural spaces, system littles/middles, who consistently identify with an age under the age of majority, are presumed to be essentially equivalent to a child that same age, needing to always be treated as such.

This lies in contrast to a lot of singlet age regression spaces, where it is generally understood that having a headspace in which you feel and act like a kid is nonsexual for some and sexual for others (the lines between "age regression" and "ageplay" as a kink often blur here).

To treat plural systems with two identity states (“me as an adult” and “me as a child”) as fundamentally different from a singlet-identified experience of those same two states is definitionally a double standard. Even drawing a clear distinction between one headmate experiencing age regression and the system having a separate little headmate can be near impossible for some. It seems almost inevitable that some systems will have "littles" with sexualities, who want to engage with that in a variety of ways. However suggesting that some system littles may deserve more autonomy, or may be able to consent, often causes some very understandable concerns.

The key here once again is shorthanding. When a bodily/chronological/legal adult states “im 12” this is understood to not be one-to-one literal. The question is which elements of that concept are and aren’t being carried across. For many systems they do use this language to indicate a difference in maturity, capacity for consent, etc. and it is important to respect this and treat those headmates appropriately. For others though, the association can be more abstract, indicating a difference in interests, vibes or aesthetics, but retaining the knowledge or competency of an adult.

Being conscious of the different usages at play and sensitive to the needs and comforts of others is highly important here. For littles who need to avoid mature topics and environments it is important this is recognised and respected. Similarly for spaces that cannot accommodate children, it may be important for a system to keep these kinds of littles out of those spaces, or to try avoid dropping unexpected childcare responsibilities in someone’s lap. At the same time, for some other littles, respecting their autonomy to make adult decisions and live their life despite the younger aspects of their self can be equally important. If the only headmate who can front for an extended period is a mature but childlike little, should they be expected to simply disappear from all social spaces with adults, at the risk of making someone uncomfortable with their age regressor swag? I would hope not.

Indeed headmate ages may be uncertain, or something a system does not wish to disclose at all for safety reasons. Median systems may never be able to guarantee your interactions effect or include none of their younger parts. There is a fundamental trust that has to be extended to systems to know what is best and safest for them and their headmates. If you are asked to treat given headmates as though they are vulnerable children this is an expression of great trust, yet so is expressing to you that I want to be treated like a cute kid but with the freedoms and autonomy of an adult.

Anxieties around these discussions are understandable, especially when it is unclear how much they are acting as proxies for discussions of the treatment of bodily children more broadly. Even speaking in the other direction, gesturing at headmates being "older than the body" can raise hackles about what that might imply of someone's beliefs around ages of consent.

What's important in these discussions is to take care and be clear about what we are and aren't saying. Child abuse happens as a result of the legal and social disempowerment of children, and the power differentials created by vast gaps in experience or understanding that can make such abuse seem acceptable or normal. When interacting with system littles/middles, many or even all of these factors may be absent.

Fundamentally the choice of how to treat a system's experience of differing age feelings is their own to make. But with any discussion of the complex intersections of sexuality and this felt age, its important to avoid kneejerk disgust and be clearheaded about what does and does not constitute material harm.

Part 4: Family

The use of familial terms to describe headmate relationships holds much in common with the preceding discussion of age.

Describing headmates as having sibling or parent-child relationships can convey a number of important facets of a relationship. Maybe you feel like you grew up together with a specific headmate and want to call them your sister. Maybe you provide care and support to a little in your system and they feel like your child because of it.

The shorthanding or metaphorical element here is clear – biological relations, legal rights, and many of the power dynamics of The Family do not exist within a system. Instead this has more in common with other queer re-appropriations of familial terms - the feelings of closeness or solidarity that might make a trans girl call another trans girl her sister, or the nurturing mentoring relationships that might lead to calling another trans girl her mom.

At the same time it's hard to ignore the elephant in the room here - kink. The same closeness that can create familial feelings between headmates often also leads to sexual relationships, and where these intersect it can often be in the form of incest roleplay. Even if the familial terms are never involved in sex for a pair of headmates, mentioning both aspects of a relationship may invoke the association in others. This can lead to situations where systems feel like they can only disclose either the sexual/romantic parts of their relationship or the familial, rather than risk disclosing both and making someone uncomfortable with information they can't take back. Both these aspects of headmate relationships can have deep importance, and omitting parts of them from explanations of your system may feel like giving someone an incomplete picture. Yet discomforts with the blurring of the two are also understandable.

This dilemma is not unique to plurality however - many singlets have important kink relationships in their lives and similarly have to tiptoe around describing them. While the malleability of identity in kink roleplay can facilitate self exploration, the relationships formed this way often permeate beyond the scene itself (Hale 1997). While a role like "daddy" or "pet" might have a sexual context within a scene, aspects of such a role might continue entirely non-sexually outside of such (similar to calling one’s partner “baby”). These relationships can become extremely significant and important in someone's life, as with similar relationships within systems.

We should accept that it may be important to recognise a 24/7 relationship with a day collar in the same way we do a marriage with a wedding ring, and not stigmatise such practices. A similar degree of understanding must also be given to pets and their owners, mommies/daddies and their littles, and so on. The relationship need not be 24/7, allowing for fluid identification as needed (often who needs to be the kid getting cared for flips back and forth in my relationships and system). And while there may be discomfort or triggers associated for some, accommodating this can happen on a case by case basis, avoiding foregrounding or referring to these relationships where necessary, or adjusting what language is used depending on the rules or needs of a space. What is crucial is making sure there are spaces where these relationships can be talked about openly, normalising their existence rather than banishing them to a realm of unspeakable stigma.

Part 5: Gender Philosophy

5.1 - The Material

When reasoning about trans identity and gendered oppression, from a specifically transfeminist lens, words can hold quite specific theoretical meanings (as with most academic fields). In these contexts we may use "transfem" and "transmasc" to refer to specific relationships to gender assignment and the directions these assignments are transgressed.

The same procedure may be denied to a trans youth but pressured onto an intersex youth, based on which genders the medical, legal and social systems around them have decided they each should be. This is the process of gender assignment.

At the same time, how someone transgresses the gendered order is perceived differently based on the nature of the transgression. Feminine gender expressions are devalued, associated with artificiality, and thus transfeminine gender expressions are most strongly marginalised within society. This is the phenomena of transmisogyny (Serano 2007).

On a personal and a practical level, as a transfem system, while some of our headmates identify as boys and have corresponding self images, our body being transfeminized makes all of us subject to institutional transmisogyny. We know the history of how bodies like ours have been simultaneously fetishized and reviled, and that people like us are more often than not the primary target of trans panics.

Plurality can also create a number of strange intersections with the forces of transphobia and misogyny. We notice the ways a boy fronting and performing a more masculine gender will often be taken more seriously. Even when presenting as a feminine boy in a transfem system, there can be more insulation from having your gender undercut by misgendering, and this often makes it easier for some headmates to front than others. The repeated subtle cissexism of being treated better when you present like your assigned gender (or the sexism of being treated better for presenting as a guy) and have the corresponding headmates in front, can be a really pernicious force on a system.

5.2 - The Metaphorical

To position a boy in a transfem system as "cis" however, can feel reductive. Such headmates may have been active participants in decisions to feminise a body (and may reasonably consider themselves also transfeminine as a result), but they may also have had to actively work to make that same body also accommodate them. And for many transgender systems, headmates whose genders align with their assigned gender can be put in strange positions, sharing a number of experiences with those transitioning in the opposite direction.

A boy in a transfem system that has medically transitioned may find they need to bind in order to front comfortably, or use a packer post bottom surgery. A girl in a transmasc system may similarly find herself needing to shave facial hair, or use breast-forms after top surgery. What gender technologies a given headmate uses to help present in a way that works for them, given the bodily compromises the system has had to make, can leave a headmate with contradictory experiences. Often this leads to using convenient shorthands along the lines of "Our system is transfem, but I'm transmasc" or vice versa. (Fictive identities and internal self perceptions may also bring one to this kind of metaphor, albeit for slightly different reasons.)

While this may seem to conflict with the earlier definition of these terms, understanding this as a shorthand can provide clarity here. While it would be obviously inappropriate for a boy in a transfem system to insert themself into a discussion of transmasculine experiences and speak as an authority on the topic, or for a transmasculine system to use "well some of my headmates are transfem" to claim they cannot benefit from structural transmisogyny, these shorthands are, in my experience, generally not being used in such a way. Rather, like any seemingly contradictory use of labels, these identifications are usually meant to draw out the tensions between the two terms and gesture at a range of shared or difficult to articulate experiences.

Use of such shorthands still requires care, and there's a number of less obvious pitfalls to be aware of. Implications of a headmate as "transfem because they're a girl with a dick" or "transmasc because they're a boy with tits/a pussy" are going to read as transphobic, even if that’s the professed identity and self concept of a given headmate. Simply put, those traits are not what makes someone trans, and are not universal traits among those trans populations. Similarly, a headmate wanting or having a set of sex/gender characteristics outside the binary would not make them intersex (unless the system already was), because that term refers to a specific relationship to gender assignment.

We are in the messy deep end of shorthanding now, and it pays to talk to the people around you about your language use and make sure they're comfortable how you use these shorthands. But language can serve different purposes in different contexts, and what matters here is being aware of what context you're in and what language is appropriate for that context.

5.3 - Synthesis

More metaphorical identity language can help articulate nuances of experience.

"In many ways it feels like our transition was not Male to Female, but a transition to Plural. To being able to be understood as multiple, and as disparate genders within specific social spaces"

But there is also a place for the specific and the technical, especially when reasoning about systems of oppression.

"No matter how I choose to identify, the choices I have made about my body position me as transfeminized and I interface with systems of power and oppression on that basis”

Part 6: Race

Before we continue, I'd like to put my cards on the table here. I'm a white girl. For every previous section where I have been writing out of personal experience, I have had a claim to epistemic authority by nature of my identity. But for this section I lack the firsthand experience of racialization. While it would be easier to say I simply shouldn't touch this topic, and leave this work to a system of color, I think that would be doing a disservice. Racial allyship requires listening - true, but it also requires meaningfully engaging with the experience and theories of the racially marginalised, critically engaging with that work, and being willing to speak to it yourself. To simply defer to the opinion of any system of color in earshot on these topics, absolving myself of any duty to engage with them critically, would be an act of intellectual cowardice. I think it has done our fledgling plural communities a disservice to only refer to these topics in hushed tones, and so I offer you my best effort at openly reasoning with them below.

6.1 - A Preamble on the Pragmatics of Talking Race

Many online discussions of cultural appropriation get bogged down in questions of terminology; is something really appropriation, is appropriation always wrong, etc. Discourse flattens entirely justified critiques into a simple taboo. "That's AAVE you shouldn't use it" gets responded to with "isn't it kinda racist to say i shouldn't use words invented by black people" and we have thus entirely left the vicinity of the original point.

While it's possible to respond productively on these terms (articulating, say, the differences between natural linguistic contact and linguistic appropriation), I think it's often much easier to avoid the moral argument, and take a more pragmatic tack on these discourses.

Put simply, if you carelessly pick up a bunch of words and cultural signifiers without regard for their original meanings, it's gonna look embarrassing. Putting on a bad blaccent will get you side-eyed from people who understand the dialects you're crudely imitating, and can tell it isn't natural for you. I'm no fan of employing social stigma to shape behaviour, but I think "its a bad look" is often a much more straightforward argument to make, and often cuts closer to the core of the issue.

It's not a moral issue for a kid to want to regurgitate a bunch of funny memes they saw online, but when their idea of "gen z slang" includes AAVE they seem to think is funny in and of itself, that sure ends up looking racist. You avoid this by educating yourself and making conscious decisions about the language you're using and why, and cultural signifiers are no different.

6.2 - Actually Talking Headmates and Race

The principle that headmates do not always look like the body has an often uncomfortable implication that we do have to address before we can finish here - sometimes people's headmates look like a different race to their body.

While there are nuances to self perception, and many systems have some degree of choice on how they conceptualise themselves (a fictive might choose to distance themself from elements of their depiction deemed racist, for example), that kind of control does not appear to be absolute. Bottom line, these identifications do and will exist, whether we like it or not.

It's important here, to make sure we have some distinctions clear;

Take the case of a white US-American system with a "black" headmate. While their headmate may share a number of perceived features with black Americans, they will not have the same experiences of racialization, and will likely have some distance from black culture. The same way a black American therian won't lose their experiences of racialization and culture even if they'd prefer to be perceived as a wolf.

Simply put, experiences of racialization and culture exist irrespective of internal appearance and identity. "Is my furry headmate white? I mean they're not even human" is a confusion solved by simply separating your concept of "race" from how someone looks.

Keeping a clear head about these distinctions when discussing these topics is essential. If we know which things we're referring to and everyone involved is on the same page, shorthanding around racialized features may be possible, similar to how we conceptualised gender. But it's again important to be conscious of how and where you invoke these shorthands, and I'd advise greater caution here. It would be obviously inappropriate to use a headmate's appearance as an argument for your epistemic authority in discussions of race, but its also important to avoid seeming to trivialise these matters more generally.

This is also where the prior discussion of optics and "bad looks" becomes important. The question of, say, how a fictive of a character from another culture should present, is mostly one of pragmatics. Using a name from a culture that is not your own, artistic depictions of yourself as a race other than your body - these may all be possible in contexts with close friends who are on the same page as you with regards to these issues. But in broader public spaces its often going to be necessary to adjust your behaviour, to avoid seeming to present yourself as a race/ethnicity you are not. It can suck as a fictive, identifying strongly with your canon depiction, but needing to choose e.g. alternate names to use in more public spaces, so as not to unintentionally deceive acquaintances and come off like a white girl race-faking online, but this is inevitably worth doing.

It's not a bad thing to identify with works from, or aspects of, another culture. And I don't believe plural systems, fictives, or factives, are any more prone to being disrespectful than singlets are. For any system playing too fast and loose with names they liked from an anime, or cultural practices they lack a claim to, there's a singlet who's also become obsessed with that culture and engages with it in similarly inappropriate ways. The only difference is the plural system has specific headmates to pin these behaviours on. There's certainly plenty of white rap fans singing along with the n-word, wearing dreadlocks or cornrows, or picking up aspects of hip-hop style without needing to claim they have a black headmate - some of these are obviously inappropriate behaviours, some require a level of discernment about an individuals distance from, or engagement with, the culture who's styles they are emulating.

There are nuances to these matters too. Racialized systems may have more leeway when identifying with the dominant culture (a "white girl headmate" is more clearly a claim to identification with dominant cultural tropes than to a lack of racialization), but should still be cautious around identifications with differently racialized groups. For mixed race systems, or those who've been raised cross-culturally, there may be genuine cultural connections to multiple different groups, which may express themselves across different headmates (e.g. some headmates speaking a mother tongue better than others). What matters is having sensitivity to the cultures you're engaging with, and being authentic and open about your own experiences.

Negotiating these dynamics is inevitably hard, and each system will have to find their own balance. It's important to understand the material consequences of racism, and defer to the comforts of racialized people in your life as to what kinds of shorthands they're comfortable with you using around them. But avoiding these topics entirely, for fear of getting it wrong, only prevents us from having those conversations in the first place.

Part 7: Disability

Differences between headmate self-conceptions and a system's body also come into play for discussions of disability. It's not uncommon for headmates to have differences in height, limbs, or sense organs, and while this is largely unproblematic for the 40ft tall eight-eyed dogtaur, it can become a point of discomfort where it aligns with real world disabilities.

Mismatches between body and sense of self can be really painful. Dysphoria about height. Desires non-human features like a tail or claws. Outright alienation from a "human" body. Any feeling of wrongness like this is deeply personal and sensitive.

But, while the 10cm tall faerie can use this language to describe her idealised form with ease, a headmate closer to 4ft, who's body is taller than this, will have to contend with the fact there are many people that height, some of whom are adults who've faced significant discrimination due to their stature.

Phantom limbs can hurt, and many systems' headmates limbs differ from their bodies'. The werewolf headmate can wear a tail to substitute for missing sensations. The headmate who's form lacks legs, in an able-bodied system, has to be sensitive to the experiences of those with disabling limb differences.

A headmate who's self conception lacks vision may find their body's sight actively painful, but significant vision impairments are still disabling within society, and its important to remain sensitive to this fact. Similarly, a "deaf headmate" in a hearing system still will need to be respectful in their interactions with Deaf culture and when learning sign languages, as any hearing person would.

The question of how to square these realities is simply another variation on our prior discussions of shorthanding. Distinguish between internal perceptions and physical impairments. Be more careful where your language could be ambiguous as to which it refers. And talk to those in your life affected by the discrimination at hand.

Part 8: Fatness

8.1 - In Society

When we talk about differences between headmates internally felt appearances and their systems' bodies, these matters exist on a spectrum. Race is a matter of lived experience that may shift contextually as someone moves through different cultural contexts, but is relatively static. Disability is a category many people enter at different points in their lives, but can also be lifelong. Species is essentially fixed, but good allegories and communication can shift perceptions. Gendering is deeply malleable, and often the way someone is gendered is simply down to a handful of cues the people around them have learned to make predictions from. So where in this should we place the category of "fat"?

People who's bodies are deemed unacceptably "fat" are discriminated against in all layers of society. From large scale issues of medical neglect, clothing and the built environment rarely considering the needs of fat bodies, to bullying, harassment and abuse in interpersonal contexts. Many people are fat their whole lives, and most attempts to change this are actively harmful.

Yet this category is malleable. Definitions of "fat" are not fixed, with many people leaving the category and many more entering it at any given time. It is also, straightforwardly, not wrong to want to become fatter. Intentional weight gain, be it for eating disorder recovery, weight gain kink, or any other reason, is just as beautiful an act of bodily autonomy and self-creation as gender transition or body modification (including for species affirmation).

8.2 - In Kink

With kink based weight gain, there's a line to be walked between these tensions. Lots of fat fetish art deliberately plays with negative tropes associated with fatness, depicting it as gross, unhealthy, or a result of poor diet and lack of exercise. Bringing these tropes around your fat friends, who have likely experienced discrimination over their weight, or at least lived in the cultural milieu in which fat people are the butt of the joke across most popular media, can easily be rude or outright triggering. But not all weight related kink art is this way.

I would personally credit a lot of fetish art directly with improving our own body image. Fatfur and fat fetish art that expanded our conceptions of bodies that could be desirable to be or be with (often the distinction making art "fat fetish" content is simply that someone is depicted as fat and desirable). Weight gain art that depicted eating and gaining weight as joyous and healing. Putting on more body fat directly helped our dysphoria, due to shifts across all of our body - not just those parts deemed socially acceptable to be larger.

It is reasonable, as a fat person, to want to be kept away from the more negative tropes around weight gain kink, feedism and fat fetish art. The same way a trans woman might want to avoid forcefem and sissification kinks for the way they often treat becoming a woman as a humiliating and shameful thing. Yet in both cases we must understand these categories to not be fully separate. Many trans women come to their identities through feminisation kink spaces, and many weight gain kinksters are fat, or are becoming so (it's kind of the whole point). Barring those with unpalatable kinds of body desires from our communities only hurts our most vulnerable, though careless evocation of tropes and stereotypes can too. So we must again balance the comforts of the marginalised in our communities, with that which we find expressive or affirming.

8.3 - In Plural Systems

When this comes down to the matter of headmate depictions, there are a few concerns at play. For some, gesturing at the concept of "fat headmates" and "skinny headmates" can seem trivializing in ways that bristle against personal histories of oppression. Yet understanding members of our system's ideal forms as fatter allowed us to intentionally work towards that as a goal for our body. At this point the "skinny headmates" are those who have not kept up, associating themselves with past forms of our body, or struggling to conceptualize their aesthetics as something available to larger bodies.

It's always worth taking care in the comforts of those around you, but understand people's body images as deeply personal too, and be careful when approaching any seeming mismatches in descriptions of weight. That "fat headmate" might also have a fat body, or a complicated and sensitive history with their body's weight too.

Conclusion

We have avoided, for most of this essay, moralizing the shapes anyone's headmates take. But I do think it is productive, as a system, to think about your headmates' representations and what they reflect. Fictives often have to reject parts of their sources that they disagree with or find objectionable, and thinking about what tropes and biases may be reflected by the shape of your system is important. But it's also easy to trap yourself in a specific realm of expression based on what seems available to you: deciding you can't have a "sexual alter" and be forward or provocative or even hot due to self esteem issues or fears of how those behaviours would be construed, deciding to sideline the "straight boy" parts of your identity or sexuality in favour of those that seem more politically liberated, defaulting to seeing your headmates as skinny because being fat while being hot or having a cool aesthetic is almost never depicted in media you see.

These perceptions can change, and open up new possibilities for personal expression. Maybe your body doesn't always need to change to meet your internal self, instead letting these perceptions exist in dialogue with one another: The hormones that change your body, the allegories and signifiers you adorn yourself with - horn headbands and collars, and the allowance for images of yourself to get fatter, include mobility aids, or any other part of yourself deemed less palatable by society. Accepting this dialogue between the idealised, allegorical, and physical selves opens up space to embody parts of yourself that cannot physically manifest: the space to unmask and be more of an animal, the space to age regress and connect with different parts of yourself or your history, the space to be plural itself.

We have not aimed to give conclusive answers here. Language is inexact and inevitably sensitive to each persons own context. Declaring a given identity claim (or discomfort with that claim) an inherent problem would indicate a certainty I don't claim to have. What I do know, is for each of these topics, in public or private, we've watched an argument spark up that could have started on better terms. These topics are sensitive, and plural identity is often reduced to very absolute and essentialized terms. What I hope I've offered is a better starting point for talking about these issues; that you can productively engage with these perspectives and experiences, integrate them with your own, find the points where you disagree or your context is different, and take that into the world to actually have these conversations, and have them better than you would have otherwise.

-mk

References