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03/24/22
I consider my plurality an alterhuman experience in itself.
As a pluran, I am not considered a human being by the majority of singlets. Depending on what the individual in question knows about plurality and how they interpret it I may be considered a psychological phenomenon, a mood, a plaything or fictional character, a metaphor, or even a "part" of a whole human being -- but I, as an individual, am not human, and not a person. This is different to me than my experience with being dehumanized as a consequence of queerphobia or broader forms of sanism; my system may at times be treated as subhuman thanks to our expression of gender or mental illness, but the people and social systems that revoke our rights in these ways do not generally believe that these things make us literally nonhuman. To them we are human incorrectly, or they are human in a superior way, or we have revoked our right to humanity through our actions, and they have therefore rejected us from the social class of humanity -- but literally, physically, we are still considered human. In fact, rejecting humanity as a species or identity is often considered absurd and a basis of further rejection even to people who already consider us socially subhuman. In some cases we may be allowed to regain some modicum of social humanity by performing the right kind of human identity -- if we are "human incorrectly" then it is expected, however impossible, that we can change or suppress whatever makes us less human.
This is not what I experience as a pluran. While my system as a whole may be regarded as "incorrectly human" and expected to perform our humanity in certain ways, I am not. Instead I am regarded as a different species, or, more commonly, as a thing: a tool, or a character, or a routine. As a trans man I am denied access to a presumed inherent humanity; as a pluran I am told outright that I do not exist and ought to start acting like it -- or, more and more as I get older, I am simply pressured to accept as I go about my life that I am not a human being. I can be a positive coping mechanism as long as I accept that as my "species." People will humor me my existence as long as they're allowed to treat me as an interface through which they engage with the body. I may even be allowed "person" if I don't try to be too much of one. But I am always something other than the humans around me, and it is often important to them that I know that. This, to me, is very much an alternative experience of humanity, and I believe I would consider myself alterhuman even if I was not nonhuman as well.
But, I am nonhuman. In my species identity I am entirely nonhuman -- I consider myself significantly "human-like," but not human. Were I a singlet my identification with humanity might end there. Human-like, alterhuman only in the sense "alternative to humanity," and nonhuman. I am a pluran, though, and instead of humanity being something that other people have applied to me and that I have the option of rejecting I find it held away from me like a taunt. I know that some people with similar experiences feel comfortable going the voidpunk route and embracing nonhumanity, but when it comes to my plurality I find myself thinking more along the lines of "I am human only and specifically in the ways that you think I am not."
I don't know what that makes me. Am I socially human? I have called myself that in the context of discussing misanthropy, but in the end I meant something more like "human-like." Not human, but not differentiable from human for the purposes of a given discussion. Am I politically human, because the only time that I really consider myself human is when it has an implication of...what? Anti-psychiatry? Mad pride? Is there an inversion of voidpunk, a "human as in fuck you" identity? My cohost calls themself a human copinglink, half-facetiously. I could call myself human-hearted, as fond as I am...but that doesn't get into how I relate to humanity as an identity. Not human, except in the ways that I am.
It's a point in defense of broad terms, I suppose. I'm not sure to what extent mine is a human experience, or a nonhuman experience, or a plural experience, but it certainly is an alterhuman experience. And though my plurality itself is obviously a plural experience, it is also an alterhuman experience in the ways that it affects my relationship with humanity, with nonhumanity, with fiction, and with being in general. Maybe that says less about plurality or alterhumanity than it says about me; that's fine.