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What is a Body Native?
(To be extremely clear, this is terminology we use for our own collective. We are not suggesting that this is how it works for everyone, or even how it should work. You are free to adopt the phrase for your own collective, but please don’t treat it like an implicit/universal hierarchy.)
So, one term that comes up relatively often in discussing our headmates is the concept of a body native. The most concise definition we use is that they’re people who “belong to the Body,” but that doesn’t actually make much sense or explain a whole lot.
More specifically, body natives are people who are not only brainmade, but explicitly connected to this body and its lineage. They have physical traits within the realm of possibility for this body, they can be traced back to a host of some kind, they generally split instead of “spawning,” and in our case, they usually have much stronger presence of self (our jargon for amount of power a headmate and their presence has, ie ability to front) than non-body natives.
We want to be very clear that body natives have no more inherent claim to this body and our life than any other headmate. For us, that is exclusively determined by how much a headmate wants to be involved in our life, and how present they are. They also are not any more “real” than any other kind of headmate. It’s the same way that someone who moves to New York is just as much a person and just as entitled to vote for their governor as someone who was born there; they are a person, and they are a part of our collective.
The main difference is just how easy it is to keep front, and how much of our complex/childhood trauma you have grandfathered in. (Our body natives generally bear the burden of complex trauma near-exclusively, non-body natives have only their own separate baggage.)
We often avoid the term in public because we don't want people to devalue or dehumanize non-body natives, but it is relevant to us, especially at a time where one of the three most active adults here is not a body native. And we definitely wanted an explainer to point to, so here y'all go!
So, one term that comes up relatively often in discussing our headmates is the concept of a body native. The most concise definition we use is that they’re people who “belong to the Body,” but that doesn’t actually make much sense or explain a whole lot.
More specifically, body natives are people who are not only brainmade, but explicitly connected to this body and its lineage. They have physical traits within the realm of possibility for this body, they can be traced back to a host of some kind, they generally split instead of “spawning,” and in our case, they usually have much stronger presence of self (our jargon for amount of power a headmate and their presence has, ie ability to front) than non-body natives.
We want to be very clear that body natives have no more inherent claim to this body and our life than any other headmate. For us, that is exclusively determined by how much a headmate wants to be involved in our life, and how present they are. They also are not any more “real” than any other kind of headmate. It’s the same way that someone who moves to New York is just as much a person and just as entitled to vote for their governor as someone who was born there; they are a person, and they are a part of our collective.
The main difference is just how easy it is to keep front, and how much of our complex/childhood trauma you have grandfathered in. (Our body natives generally bear the burden of complex trauma near-exclusively, non-body natives have only their own separate baggage.)
We often avoid the term in public because we don't want people to devalue or dehumanize non-body natives, but it is relevant to us, especially at a time where one of the three most active adults here is not a body native. And we definitely wanted an explainer to point to, so here y'all go!