What is a sysmed?

It’s a word that the plural/endogenic community uses to describe people who believe that DID and OSDD are distinctly different from non-dissociative/non-disorder plurality, or people who believe that you can not “be a system” unless you have DID/OSDD. 

My own beliefs are that anyone can define themselves as “a system”, but that non-dissociative/non-disordered systems are distinctly different from DID/OSDD systems. We are not experiencing the same thing and therefore we don’t belong under some kind of “plural umbrella” and we don’t belong in “inclusive plural spaces”. Because of my beliefs, I have been labeled a sysmed. 

My main issue with the word “sysmed” is that to avoid being labeled a sysmed, you have to agree with a view that demedicalizes DID/OSDD and that removes the boundaries between people experiencing a disorder and people experiencing non-disordered plurality. I don’t agree with this perspective. I think that there need to be clear boundaries around what is and is not a disorder. 

My second issue with the word “sysmed” is that it was deliberately coined to sound similar to “transmed” and deliberately draws parallels to the idea of transmedicalism. Transmedicalism, broadly defined, is the belief that people can not be trans unless they experience gender dysphoria or undergo medical transition. As a queer person myself, I find this attempt to co-opt queer language pretty manipulative. I’ve also seen several singlets with zero knowledge of DID/OSDD or plural issues just assume that “being a sysmed must be bad because it sounds like transmed”. This is obviously what people had in mind when they coined the term. This attempt to circumvent education and critical thinking by making up a catchy word is pretty pathetic, in my opinion. 

So that’s why if I catch anyone who follows/interacts with me using the word “sysmed” it’s an auto-block from me. Using the word “sysmed” signals to me that someone is an advocate for a perspective that I really strongly disagree with, and I want to distance myself from that. 

Sorry for the syscourse on main, but I found out that someone I had been chatting with and wasting a lot of my emotional labor on had been going back to their blog and reblogging shit about “sysmeds” and I’m pretty pissed about the energy I wasted on someone who apparently held those kind of views.