System Failure

DID as Acquired Internet Identity Disorder

I considered myself a member of the transgender community for several very formative years before I underwent hormone replacement therapy in 2019. This perspective stems from my experiences and from several months of obsessive research trying to get to the bottom of why this happened to me and where to go from here. This is the fourth piece in an ongoing series.

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The False Mirror, Rene Magritte

Let me start off with a disclaimer: I am not, have never been, nor will ever be a psychologist or a psychiatrist. This is purely based on personal experience and anecdote, not rigorous inquiry and study, and any medicalized terms I use are used with a low degree of precision. Please do not use this essay to diagnose anyone, especially not yourself or your children, with anything.

In all my essays so far, there is a common theme of alienation, of dissolving and reconstituted social bonds, of liquified personal identity, of how being too trapped in one’s own mind can lead one to believe their very flesh is a burden. I initially planned to discuss this in more depth but was sent a Medium essay by a Twitter mutual which summed this problem up with much more of a philosophical backing than I am able to offer. Others with concerned interest in the transgender boom have duly noted the social contagion effect that transgender ideology has on children and mentally vulnerable, usually autistic or traumatized adults. Namely, that its psychogenic effects spread like wildfire when seeded in chatrooms and classrooms alike, and that this is being observed throughout much of the world (at least, the parts of the world with access to the Western internet).

Transgenderism appears to be only one branch of a much broader issue, highlighted in graphic detail by Skirt Go Spinny on YouTube, of teenagers and young adults self-diagnosing with rare and serious mental illnesses and personality disorders. Sometimes, this is absorbed by unconscious osmosis, in much the same way that someone begins emulating a friend or a role model they admire. Other times, this is deliberate, an attempt to make one’s personality stand out, ascribe deeper meaning to otherwise ordinary feelings and struggles, or an attempt at cementing a sense of self that is still very malleable. This is where multiple personalities, or “systems” or dissociative identity disorder comes in.

Almost all of the people who profess to have dissociative identity disorder also profess to be transgender in one way or another. Many of these people, save for the obvious performance artists who make a living selling DID merch and busking for donations, appear to exhibit signs of Cluster B personality disorders, autism, or some other significant mental health condition that weakens their ability to form a stable self-image. A significant feature of borderline personality disorder for instance is “splitting,” i.e., extreme black-and-white thinking wherein the sufferer cannot reconcile two different, but co-occurring self-images. Often these two self-images are excessively positive or excessively negative: self-aggrandizing caretaker and genius or malevolent force of chaos and sorrow, with no gradation between the two.

Unlike bipolar disorder’s manic and depressive states, BPD splitting can happen in the blink of an eye, be triggered for the most inconsequential of reasons. Social media platforms can often trigger this type of behavior even in people who don’t have BPD. The lack of meaningful social context between strangers’ interactions often leads to spaces which are excessively positive (hugboxes) or excessively negative (troll caverns). Often, they are one and the same. Look at any post on any platform that’s received even a moderate amount of attention and you will see a comments sections slathered in nothing but extreme emotion, no matter how mundane or inane or foul or incredible the content itself may be. It is no wonder, then, that we are seeing Cluster B-lite behaviors emerge in almost everyone with an internet connection.

When it comes to those professing to have multiple personalities, they do not have dissociative identity disorder as any expert familiar with the condition would recognize it. True sufferers of DID, if they exist at all, are largely unaware that they have several personalities inhabiting them and are generally the victims of extreme and consistent abuse spanning decades, far worse than anything even most victims of sexual, physical, and/or emotional violence tend to face. We are talking about an extraordinarily rare set of circumstances, a prolonged period of total isolation, complete imprisonment, and unrestrained torture throughout the entire childhood. The theory goes that an individual who suffers DID dissociates unconsciously, driven by a Pavlovian fear response in order to make themselves unaware of the abuse they are receiving, internalizing the trauma into a different “self,” protecting the true “self” from whatever it is that’s happening. I am skeptical that such a condition actually exists that is not just a rare complication of PTSD, but as I said, I am not a psychologist.

What is seen instead in alleged sufferers of DID is a set of behaviors mirrored from what amount to performance artists on TikTok and other social media sites like Tumblr. As Default Friend has pointed out in a recent newsletter, this form of internet-acquired “DID” (if it should even be called that), has existed for at least a decade. TikTok is not the originator nor the first major popularization of it (Tumblr has the latter distinction, but not the former). It very likely has origins in MySpace or even older chatrooms and teen-focused internet fora that the current generation of afflicted are largely unaware of.

New York Restaurant, Edward Hopper

When I say this is performative, I do not intend to offend; it is. The strict barrier between the created self and the actual self that is allegedly seen in “true” DID is not there in these individuals, nor have many of them (I’m tempted to say none) experienced the kinds of prolonged extreme environments required for such a label, which renders their actual diagnosis something else entirely, with the DID “system” being nothing more than an expression of that “something.” I also consider it performative because some of the more popular accounts are literally just performing an act; they don’t seem to believe they have it, but they make money and accrue clout by spreading the contagion around. They “fundraise” and “raise awareness” and provide merch to the teens that they, knowingly or unknowingly, groom into developing DID by making it a positive, quirky, fun and interesting personality trait. They construct elaborate narratives wherein they have conversations with their “selves,” or “alters,” which would never happen under any realistic expression of the disorder, and which look more like your average comedy skit than the uncontrollable ramblings of a truly afflicted individual.

However, there is the reality that many of these people engaging in this performance, whether soliciting money or just likes and comments, do fully believe they have the disorder, and may be engaging in dissociative acts deliberately for one reason or another. For some, it’s still obviously just histrionics for the camera; they may actually be dissociating, but it’s for the attention, much like an actor may dissociate and embody a character in a play, completely unlike the involuntary and unconscious dissociation of “true” DID. Each individual “alter” (alternate personality) performs a function for the rest of the system in an elaborate ritual architecture that allows them to access these different sides of themselves. There are “gatekeepers,” i.e., those that hold information on all the other alters in the system; “protectors,” those that protect the system from hostile environments; “persecutors,” alters engaging in self-harm or other self-destructive behavior; “introjects,” fictional characters or real-life role models that are external to the system; “hosts,” the original personality within the system, and so on. This level of complex navel-gazing is only possible due to isolation and alienation from one’s physical and social surroundings, which the internet makes tolerable (if we can even consider these outcomes “tolerable”), if not addictive.

Such a complex internal architecture often becomes uncontrollable, and they may find it difficult, just like the BPD patient, to reconcile these severed selves into the same person again. They are like imaginary friends, but internal; someone to be when you’re bored, or alone, or stressed, or just watching different types of content than one normally would. In more serious situations, these “other people” may actually be parts of one’s actual personality spun off into another person entirely: the masculine side, the feminine side, the inner child, and so on, rather than entirely constructed personas cut from whole cloth. It seems that each time such a severing of the self occurs, the personalities grow more complex and convincing, but lack someone behind the eyes. In doing so, they sacrifice those parts of their base personality to people who will never be as robust or as complete as the person they were stolen from.

This calls to mind (and I hate making this reference, so you know it’s serious) the concept of Horcruxes in the Harry Potter series, magical artifacts containing parts of a user’s soul in order to transcend death, which carry the unfortunate downside of stripping the user of their humanity. When compartmentalizing these bits of themselves, they feel the need to split more and more frequently just to feel every part of being human, rather than simply acknowledging and embracing whatever emotional texture is coming up in the moment and incorporating that into themselves as they are. The impact this has on a teenager’s development cannot be understated, even if it is poorly researched. If they did not have a personality disorder to begin with, it is easy to see how such behavior and incentive structures can cause one to emerge. They are stunting their own development, and very often, this is not a conscious choice. Their free will and their existing social bonds are being taken from them via this machine-driven conditioning. After all, how is a teenager supposed to realize what this is doing to them after years and years of internet exposure, especially when couched in all of the grave pseudoscientific therapy language that proliferates on platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr?

That so many of these individuals are also transgender or claim to have an “alter” that is transgender is hardly surprising. This signals to me that these psychogenic illnesses are not discrete phenomena, but in fact the same thing, often presenting with the same symptoms, albeit with very different language describing and sustaining them. It would be more accurate to collapse these psychological issues into one comprehensive syndrome that gets at the root of the problem: I call it Acquired Internet Identity Disorder. Again, I am by no means a psychologist, and this is for rhetorical purposes only, but it is something to consider. The internet is the most significant vector in the spread of these conditions, and I have serious doubts that this is going to stop any time soon. While not everyone is vulnerable to these extreme and obvious manifestations of it, everyone is vulnerable to a certain degree. We all seek to emulate the people we admire, even unconsciously, and we are all vulnerable, in our own unique ways, to certain forms of hypnosis, emotional manipulation, cognitive suggestion, and optical illusion. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to absorb any information at all, and that’s exactly what these attention-driven platforms prey on: our unconscious ability to absorb information.

People with fragile identities, like teenagers, happen to be especially vulnerable. If one spends most of their waking hours consuming internet media, in social circles focused on consuming internet media, they may absorb the personalities and character traits of dozens, perhaps hundreds of random assholes they don’t even know, who feel – and who genuinely may be – integral to the consumer’s social and emotional fabric. This is what a parasocial relationship is in a nutshell, a one-way friendship wherein the person on the screen is perceived to be a friend in the viewer’s actual life.

At one time, entertainers had a dividing line between their professional and personal lives; increasingly, they are required to market the personal as a professional form of entertainment unto itself. The kinds of internet celebrities who cultivate these parasocial relationships sometimes break the fourth wall of performative friendship by acknowledging this arrangement, often to try to coax their audience away from forming unhealthy, obsessive, or inimical attachments to the images on the screen. What these celebrities often fail to recognize is that since they make their livings doing this, they have no power to stop it short of quitting the game altogether. It isn’t just them doing it though; the platforms themselves cultivate this kind of attachment, an attachment that is at once so shallow as to hollow out the person on the receiving end of it and so deep that even being told directly by the oblivious object of their affections to stop being freaks isn’t enough to get them to seek real flesh-and-blood prosocial relationships.

This is much like when men and women choose pornography over sex with a real partner. The porn is safer, self-contained, self-directed, less emotional, it protects the user from forming an emotional bond that demands responsibility, reciprocity, and respect. The only thing that differentiates the two is the lack of a sexual dimension, and even this is increasingly both not the case and not even necessary. One of the easiest ways to cultivate a parasocial relationship is to speak or joke openly about sex and sexuality, a deeply intimate, private thing that young people often feel very ashamed about, especially early in puberty. Some stranger telling you it’s okay to feel a certain way, or even sharing funny stories about their own sex lives might cement the bond even further. Often, they don’t need to do this themselves, the audience will do it for them by writing fanfiction and drawing pornographic content about the creator (which is usually the point where they break the fourth wall). And then of course, are all the “midcore” content creators that blur the line between softcore pornography and other forms of content like video game streaming, political commentary, ASMR, vlogging, cooking tutorials, unboxings, etc. This isn’t a dig at these content creators, this is simply the nature of the business, and if you can do it well enough it’s a good business to be in.

Unfortunately, they almost inevitably end up attracting children. Often, these creators are not actually targeting their content for children, it’s the platforms doing that for them, forming subcultures within subcultures, each more esoteric and self-contained than the last (especially with apps like Discord now in the mix) without the creator’s express knowledge. The trends change fast too, which leaves creators in a position where if they don’t adapt their content to match the trend, they will soon lose revenue. They may not even notice their preferred platform’s algorithm occasionally warps to show their content to children because they’re more concerned with chasing growth metrics than questioning why the algorithmically generated style guide has changed in the first place. And then of course, there are those deliberately targeting children who know what the algorithm expects from them in order to get their content in front of kids, and act accordingly. Often, it is their content specifically that ends up dictating children’s media trends. Thus, the algorithm itself becomes the most effective groomer of all.

A Pair of Shoes, Vincent van Gogh

I had an episode recently where I had accidentally talked myself into a minor state of psychosis. I had convinced myself, through very light research into the connections between autism and schizophrenia, that I was experiencing apophenia, i.e., noticing nonexistent patterns in unrelated phenomena. I spiraled myself into a dissociative headspace where the objects on a table were indistinct from each other, and that though I could easily tell them apart, there were no physical boundaries between them. An alarm clock, a vase with flowers in it, and the table itself were all one object, even if I were to pick up the alarm clock or move the flowers around in the milky vase water they sat in. They appeared enveloped by each other, and an aura developed in the air around them.

Trying to separate them out into their own distinct objects was even more stressful. I kept breaking them down into constituent parts down to cellular and molecular levels. I was, in the moment, unable to see them for the mundane, discrete objects that they were. They were infinite in every direction, everything was, and I was the odd one out, unable to integrate into my blending surroundings. The air in my shallowing lungs felt thick with water despite the dryness of January, and I began to fixate on minute changes in the air current grazing my skin. Though I was obviously receiving sensory input, it felt distant, disconnected, like there was a layer of cellophane between my thoughts and my nervous system. When I went to lie down, the walls melted and warped, my paintings shook, and my eyes couldn’t focus on anything, just stare into the distance. It should be noted that I have never touched a psychedelic drug in my life; weed was as far as I ever took it, but I hadn’t had any in weeks.

I found I was unable to ground myself unless I first retreated into that old security blanket I’ve only now begun to slough off: my constructed female identity. I had to travel through that less distressing dissociative state in order to reach reality again, and when I did so, I still felt fractured, absent, lost in thought. This episode lasted several hours, and the residual effects lasted two days. Before I grounded, I called out “Liliana, Liliana,” (my trans name), as though I were looking for myself in a dense fog. Once she settled in, I took a moment of respite, focused my eyes so the décor would stop shaking, rubbed the fabric of my clothes to remove the hallucinatory plastic wrap enveloping me, and began calling my real name. Once I grounded, I was still floaty; things had less weight to them, and I was shifting between these two versions of myself, but I made a sincere effort to remain present and that feeling eventually went away. Several years ago, I lived inside the plastic full-time like the cuts of meat you see at the grocery store; “being” Liliana was the closest I could get to reconstituting myself as an intact living thing, but I was still coated in the plastic preserving me for someone else’s consumption.

I cannot say whether this is exactly the same as what the TikTok DID sufferers are experiencing, as these kinds of things are unique to each individual, but I imagine it’s not very far off. Someone who DM’d me recently said something that resonated enough to include in this post: The internet is human psychology turned outward. While this isn’t strictly true, especially since it isn’t organized like any human brain would be, it carries a truth: it is a feedback loop of people’s internal projections of the world, some more accurate than others, none fully formed. It’s an intimately interactive Platonic cave, only with a sadomasochistic twist: not only are the shadows on the wall real, but you’re one of them too.