The In-Person Plural Groups Spreadsheet (& Why We Made It)

[bodyetal]

(Alternative Title: You've Heard of Hot Singles In Your Area, Now Get Ready For Chill Multis In Your Neighborhood!)

We've been working on a spreadsheet of local communities/groups/etc. for plurals, dissociatives, and similar! So far the list only includes three groups, but we intend to keep adding to it. (Obligatory reminder to read the disclaimers though--we can't guarantee anything about any of the groups listed, aside from DMV Plurals, which we run.)

You can view it here!

One of our pet projects for a while has been DMV Plurals, and more broadly, getting plurals to exist in IRL spaces more often, for reasons that LB Lee have conveniently and coincidentally recently posted about; the short version is that seeing plurals in person does infinitely more to break down stigma than basically anything else. This includes intercommunity stigma (ie stigma from singlets towards multiples) and intracommunity stigma (ie stigma from dissociative plurals towards 'endogenic' plurals*.)
*endogenic in quotes not because we don't believe they exist (they do), but because we hate -genic labels and the idea that a system's origins are relevant to anyone except maybe themselves and their therapist. Also exclusionists tend to say "endogenic" when they mean "anyone who doesn't fit my very narrow definition of True Plurality."

We are firmly of the opinion that the majority of the community's woes comes from the fact that most members of it simply have not existed as plural in the real world or seen other plurals in the real world, which makes it a lot easier to assume that a.) respectability politics are vital to survival (false) and b.) everyone that disagrees with you is an evil monster who deserves no compassion or respect (also false, and goes both ways). This is massively helped by just... seeing other kinds of plurals and not being a dick to them. Seriously. That's it.

That being said, not every community is going to be good, and that goes for in-person to. We are compiling this list to make it easier for people to find potential groups around them, but you are still responsible for your own safety and vetting. It is quite literally impossible for us to check on everything listed, in no small part because it's a list of local communities and we only live in one place.

Also, if you're looking to set up a local group and want help, or know of a group that isn't on the list, please let us know! Either through our Discord, the Google Forms linked in the spreadsheet itself, or in the comments of this post. :)

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[bodyetal]

we ended up renaming our research doc to it—Riley thinks we should make it a shirt in the style of one of those ads -crow&