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Sadly, many educational institutions still teach a prescriptive form of English that fails to acknowledge this, but singular "They" is decades older than using "You" instead of "Thou" as a singular second-person pronoun. It was already in common use way back in Shakespeare's time. If thou thinkst this confusing, change thyself before demanding others change for thine own comfort.
Also, some people are plural, so the ambiguity of "they" is inclusive to them.
Also-also, the only other pronouns in common use that aren't explicitly gendered are "it/its", which some people find dehumanizing. Nonbinary and agender folks often (but not exclusively) prefer "they/them" over "it/its" or neopronouns.
Also-also-also, "picking new words to use" is extremely non-trivial for pronouns because it requires the entire English-speaking population to relearn fundamental communication habits. It's much easier to simply accept the fact that singular they is extremely common.
Like the former Queen of England's royal we?
Yeah!
The Royal "We", aka the "Majestic Plural", is the use of a plural pronoun to refer to a single person holding a high office.
For plural folks, using a plural pronoun to reference the multiple persons existing within a single body is also appropriate (though I don't know if that usage has a fancy name yet~). And when referencing these persons individually, we just use their own pronouns the same as with non-plural folks. 🤓
The first paragraph sounds like the royal we, and the second paragraph sounds like dissociative identity* disorder, lol
They're calling that one "Dissociative Identity Disorder" these days, and it's clinically distinct from plurality.
DID is usually a trauma response, one marked by memory gaps as the separate personalities are partitioned off from one another. One can't switch identities consciously, but rather does so involuntarily as a stress response.
Plurality is usually benign and doesn't involve notable memory gaps as the different alters can be co-conscious and are not strongly partitioned apart. Plural individuals can often switch which personality is "fronting" consciously. Rather than a disorder, it's an uncommon form of neurodiversity.
Thank you for the correction, it was mostly my mind blending DID and the outdated MPD together.
I guess it is notable form a grammatical perspective, though I can't say I'd personally put it at the same level as the gender-neutral/singular "they".
I'd be interested if there's some sort of biological basis for plurality (as there is with being transgendered, for instance). The wikipedia page describes it as an online subculture, mostly akin to roleplaying (from my impression), so it doesn't feel like it should be in the same category, lol
I have had a plural friend since before they started building communities for themselves online and the consistency of their identities over the years leads me to suspect that there is a biological basis, but the scientific research on the topic is still in its infancy.
That said, there is some adjacent research that seems to point in that direction. The Internal Family Systems Model is a perspective on psychotherapy that begins with the assumption that all individuals contain multitudes, and works to restore mental balance and harmony by identifying the disparate parts of one's self and addressing the conflicts between them. There are multiple studies over the last three decades showing therapies based on that model to be effecatious for the treatment of depression, anxiety, trauma, phobias, and other psychological symptoms in some populations, and the practice was formally recognized as being evidence-backed in 2015.
If I'm not mistaken, similar psychotherapies were/are used to treat DID. Generally, it works better to treat the patients as they want to be treated...for instance, treating all identities separately rather than telling them "You are just one person, stop this switching nonsense!" lol
I'm also thinking about this from a more... sociological (?) perspective, where everyone has different "selves" or "masks" for different situations. A work self, a home self, an online self, a friends self, etc... this is completely normal, and everyone does it. Plurality sounds to me like trying to say that these are all distinct individuals, which seems like DID in an extreme case, or a matter of roleplaying (or similar).
I guess I'm still having difficulty grappling what Plurality really is. It almost seems to me like an equivalent to someone deciding to call their inner monologue (something normal) the voice of god (something "special"), and making a community around that.
I'm quite curious to learn about the particular mechanisms behind the phenomenon as well, but what I know for sure is that my plural friend got a big boost to their self-esteem and overall mental wellness when they came out to me and got an affirming response.
Whether their alters are distinct individuals, shards of a fragmented self, or something else entirely, I've found that taking people at their word when they tell you who they are and treating them how they ask to be treated to be a mutually-beneficial social habit. They get the comfort of not having to mask themselves around me, and I get to learn from a whole new perspective on the human experience. 🤗