Profile: Mike/Mia
You can call me… Mike, Mia, or just M works. It depends on who is present at the time.
I identify as… Bigender. Two halves of a whole. Two souls in one body: one the monotonous and seemingly straight-laced male I grew up being, and the other the coy, fun-loving but somewhat bitchy lesbian who I’ve recently come to terms with. (Mia’s been rubbing off on Mike lately, though, with positive results.)
As far as third-person pronouns go, … together we prefer plural “they,” but separately, we like our respective gender pronouns. Mike is male, Mia is female.
I’m attracted to… The lifestyle, the scene, the community. All things genderqueer have come into focus, and it’s something we’d never want to let go of. Intelligence, creativity, being slightly outside the norms of conventional societal structure… artists, writers, dancers, activists, anyone with passion about what they do.
When people talk about me, I want them to… realize that there’s more to a person than how they present themselves; that just because I may seem like a normal trans-supporter cis guy on the outside doesn’t mean that is the extent of my personality. There’s another side to everyone; mine just happens to be someone else entirely. We aren’t just differentiated by our genders.
I want people to understand… that Mia isn’t a figment of my imagination or some psychotic episode. That even when I’m in control she’s listening, and she’s really sensitive underneath her hard exterior. I’ve come to love her like a sister, and the more she develops the more protective I am of her. Integrating her into me would be like killing her, and I never want to do that. Besides, we’re both having a lot of fun.
About Mike/Mia
Mike is a photography student who grew up in New York before going to Chicago. Never identifying with cis male culture (or gay male culture for that matter) yet interested in women, he thoughts turned to the lesbian community, but he had no way of expressing interest in this area. Later when a friend became trans, the trans and queer community opened up, and new insight revealed a comfortable niche to inhabit.
With the suggestion of “maybe you’re a lesbian” having time to germinate in his head, Dissociative Identity Disorder soon set in. Mia was born as an alternate personality, followed by the discovery of the Bigender identifier that they now use to describe themselves. The two are firmly different people, despite residing in the same body, and are now looking for a comfortable middle-ground for the both of them.
Mia doesn’t get out as often as she likes, especially when we’re at home for the holidays (like now). Most of the time this results in her getting bored and posting to our blog, which can provide more insight into our inner workings:
» Define yourself. «
Category: profiles 8 comments »
December 26th, 2011 at 4:41 am |
I read the Pervocracy blog, and there’s a regular poster there with DID. Most of them are some variant of queer/gender variant. I’ve learned a fair bit about DID from them.
You both seem like really neat people. Best of luck in all your endeavors. :-)
[Reply]
December 29th, 2011 at 2:05 pm |
As a psych student, I’m often puzzled by how often my profs seem to talk about DID as though it weren’t real, as though alters were just figments that you create to deal with trauma. That doesn’t really mesh with my perspective on things, though: The way I see it, a person is basically made up of the information that’s stored in a human brain; the data that makes you who you are. You could put that data anywhere–write it in a book, or store it in a computer–and as long as your chosen medium still had the flexibility of a human brain, then that would still be a person. From that viewpoint, why can’t two people share the same brain? It seems to me that the best way to approach DID is to make sure every person in a multiple is psychologically healthy and communicating with the others. Integration is a personal choice and a valid option, but it’s not the only option, just so long as the end-result is one or more stable individuals.
Seems to me that often times psychologists forget that no matter how odd or unusual someone is, or how rare the traits they have, they can’t just label it an illness. It needs to cause distress, or interfere with your daily life, before you can call it that. Now, DID, yeah–it’s a mental illness, at least at first, because of how most of the time it comes from trauma that you have to deal with; but if you can get everybody emotionally stable and healthy and talking, then it wouldn’t be a mental illness anymore because there wouldn’t be either distress or dysfunction, even if you did have more than one person sharing a brain.
[Reply]
radical/rebel replied:
December 29th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
Thank you so, so, so much for this really valuable comment. I’ve been reading Mike and Mia’s blog and thinking a lot about what they both have to say. I also am really interested in mental illness, diagnoses, Gender Identity Disorder, DSM, and classification of disorders/illnesses in trans and queer people generally… so, yeah, this comment is really interesting to me.
Thanks for being on Genderfork and contributing!
[Reply]
Anonymous replied:
December 29th, 2011 at 4:57 pm
This. Thank you. For me, I’ve been dealing a lot with the fear, the negative stereotypes of something like DID, and even my own gender expression that I’ve internalised and continue to “pick up” from people around me. It’s as though I cannot just let go of the opinions of other people. I’m getting there, but it’s beyond difficult.
Again, thank you for saying this. You worded it much better than I could have right now.
[Reply]
Lane replied:
December 29th, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Thirding the kudos. I’m also fascinated by psychology, and one thing that really irritates me is the tendency by some members of the psychological community to pathologize anything sufficiently “different.” I’ve started working in special ed, and there is some of the same problem there. Luckily the people I’m working with seem to understand that point of special ed is to help kids learn, not to stamp out their individuality.
[Reply]
December 30th, 2011 at 5:19 pm |
As a psych major I’m so pleased this is here. I didn’t realize how lacking my instruction in DID was until now. Thanks Mike and Mia, and thanks everyone who posted such thoughtful comments. This has really opened my eyes.
[Reply]
December 30th, 2011 at 5:32 pm |
I’ve found that lots of nontraditionally gendered people are interested in DID, I know I certainly am. I’d like to suggest the book _Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls_ by Matt Ruff. It’s a novel, not a textbook, but the main character is the dominant personality in a very diverse group of alters, and much of the book deals with the relationships between them and how they work together to meet all of their various needs in life. And since the different personalities have different gender identities there’s a genderqueer angle as well.
[Reply]
March 16th, 2012 at 10:05 pm |
I’m so glad this is up and out there for other folks! I miss you both. <3
[Reply]