I guess it shouldn't surprise me that there would be debate within the community about whether someone can make themselves multiple. I've seen versions of this debate in other communities before, usually around the issues of whether a) it's even possible and b) if it is possible, is someone who chooses a certain thing as an identification or way of life less pure, real, or authentic than someone for whom it was involuntary.
Usually, the opinions tend to split into four major groups:
-Those who think it's possible, that any form of constructing one's own identity or reality is great and should even be encouraged.
-Those who think it's possible but are mostly indifferent, or regard it as being impossible in most cases but believable for a few.
-Those who think it's not possible but are mostly indifferent, and will only get upset if they think there's too high a prevalence of it in a given community.
-Those who think it's not possible and find it very offensive to even hear about anyone who claims to have voluntarily chosen a certain thing, and regard it as an insult to those they consider authentic.
...so, I have to admit my personal sympathies are mostly with the first group mentioned. Yes, you're going to end up with fakers, frauds and people who jump on it as a flavor-of-the-month identity. However, you're also going to end up with those even if you hold to the idea that someone must be born a certain way (or whatnot) in order to be that thing. I don't think that holding to such a paradigm will actually cut down significantly on the prevalence of frauds, and we certainly have run into enough people who were very invested in certain things, declared they'd been this way for years, sounded just like all the rest of the "authentic ones," etc, etc, and then backed out and claimed none of it had ever been real, that they'd just been misled and/or delusional. And while we've seen people who do this in an obnoxious manner, some people do make honest mistakes, and should be allowed to retract statements they've made about themselves in the past, if they find themselves in that spot. Ghod knows we made enough statements about our own identity while trying to understand ourselves, pre-2001 (when we first came out as us), that we'd now just like to blot out of the historical record.
I'm not going to start blasting people who say they made a mistake and back out from a community; I'm not even going to judge them unless they cross the line into attacking every other member of that community. But again, I don't think that drawing hard-and-fast guidelines for who can and can't qualify as a member of a community or subculture, or how one becomes whatever it is that defines the subculture, will actually cut down on the rate at which this happens. On the contrary, I think that if people feel they have some freedom to experiment with identity, it might reduce the number of people who get deeply invested in a thing before realizing it isn't right for them.
Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, but I've seen a lot more harm done by people being bashed on and driven out of communities for "you can't do it like that!" than by "fakers and wannabes ruining our reputation." Actually, a lot of the people we've seen whose behavior went the farthest towards making their given communities look bad were the "authentic" types who "fit the profile" in every way, if one judges a community by the worst of its members. I just haven't seen this massive problem of fakes that some people claim exists in certain communites and subcultures-- oh, we've seen people we didn't think were for real, to be sure, but a lot of them either dropped out of the community when it became too hard to keep up the act, or got exposed by someone else (if it was a case of something like, say, a 40-year-old man pretending to be an 18-year-old girl). And yeah, there are going to be people who sneak into groups with malicious motives, but what can you do about that? I don't see how drawing strict guidelines about what you can and can't be is going to actually do anything to get rid of them, or how anything short of screening community memberships very closely can prevent it. It can happen no matter how many safeguards and precautions you take.
And regarding the concept that one can "spot the fakers because they make really extreme claims," well, no, that actually hasn't been the case in our experience. We've run into people who claimed, and earnestly believed, things we found impossible to accept as literal truth; however, whether we believed them or not was actually not so much the issue as that they believed it honestly themselves, and weren't putting on an act with any ulterior motive. And often the best fakers are the ones who are good at blending in and not sticking out or being particularly noticeable.
What we have noticed is a habit of people taking certain aspects or ideas that they define to be unacceptable or too weird, and declaring that they "came in because the community was too open" or "came in with the fakes and wannabes," and that this constitutes proof of why the community should have "stricter requirements," even when there's evidence that this stuff existed and was talked about long before the supposed influx of fakes. I mean, with the plural community, for instance, the ideas of souls of dead people as walk-ins, or nonhuman members, or even fictional characters in-system, are not new, no matter what anyone may claim. Neither is "toaster stuff," for better or worse. All of these things were written about and described in books before there was an online subculture, before there was an Internet, before the majority of people complaining about it were even born. Yeah, it's true that you'll see a different spin on it now due to cultural influences-- that you might, for instance, see a lot of people resembling anime and manga characters rather than Sherlock Holmes or Mr. Spock or George from "Topper"-- but again, that just reflects shifting cultural influences, not a higher incidence of fakers. Whether it's more prevalent now or just more hidden in the past is debatable, but the fact remains that if it was less prevalent in the past, it wasn't because it had never been written about or described by anyone.
So, yeah, coming back to my thoughts on the original issue: No, I don't think someone making themselves plural is as simple as going "poof, new person," but that doesn't mean I don't think it ever happens. I've talked to some people who said they deliberately chose it, whom I completely believed. I don't consider it an insult to myself or others of this group if someone describes it as a chosen thing, and I won't tell anyone else that they can't experiment with identity. I think that if it's 'not real,' if it's just a pretense of one person acting like there are others, the act will fall apart soon enough on its own. More importantly, I think someone getting to the point where they take a look at their tried-on identity and can honestly say "This isn't me, this doesn't fit" will be more convincing than other people haranguing them to the effect of "That's not you" before they have had a chance to try it out. You know it's not you, you sense it's not right, or not right any more: end of story. Definitely easier than taking someone else's word for it.
-Lilac with Yushyu (some co-writing/help)
