A Little Background — OpEd

2018 has been a long strange year for us. Following a year of working in Albany NY on a peer services alliance, we added dozens of plurals to our life, went on a road trip and bunked with other plural systems, went to mental health and trans conferences, and made major progress on our self-help books for plurals.

A common theme in all of this — 2017 & 2018 — is advocacy. Having a voice. Standing up for ourselves. Creating our own language to describe our experiences (which hearkens back to our early Internet days in 1998 plowing through these issues with the Otherkin community, or a decade earlier with queer youth, but I digress), finding a community voice, demanding to be treated fairly, asking for what we need in the world, and if it’s not given to us then tearing the barriers down to get it — sometimes nicely, sometimes a lot more like a temper tantrum.

One of our closest new plural friends was holding a domain name for a plural news media watchdog site. But they hadn’t gotten further than that. Writing is deep deep in the bones of this human spaceship we navigate life in. We can hardly help it. Give us a story — doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or reality — and we can write. Given the story of a plural news media watchdog, and our former business of web design, web content experience, etc. we pledged to put up the site for them and fill out all the about and make it look pretty and basically make the infrastructure so that their dream could become reality.

And here it is. To fight for our rights we need a voice. To have a voice, we need to be more organized, to know where to shout the loudest, where to write letters to editors, where to post comments, where to decry injustice, and where to hit the “Like” button to encourage more of what is good when stories are covered, where to boost the signal if you will.

Plurals won’t always agree about what is good or bad — but our 1-3% (or more) of the population will be heard now. Cerberus Plural won’t tell you what to think, but Spot& will sniff out stories with their 3 noses and post them for us all to applaud or boo however we (each, internal and external) see fit. We’ll check whether content needs any warnings, and you decide whether you want to click on the links, watch the show, view the movie, read the story, etc.

Please help plurals have a voice in the world by sharing yours — comment, post, share, contribute, write, share links with us, and boost signals. Help us pull the sprawling community under one big umbrella because together we can make waves and make a difference in the way the world and media treats us.