I volunteer for Liberal Currents because:

1. I want to help secure the existence of liberal society and a future for woke leftists,
2. without having to worry about getting harassed for my dissociative identity disorder

Liberal Currents is a niche section of the broader liberal tent - a section I feel safe in, because Adam Gurri doesn't let people mock my medical condition in the discord. Because of that, I can let my guard down and relax when interacting with the LC people. And because I'm so relaxed, I'm so much more productive with my time spent volunteering for that great organization.

Venturing outside of that organization can be exhausting, because a lot of liberals think it is okay to tell someone that they're faking their medical condition, or that their medical condition isn't real, or that they're being brainwashed by some scary source. That makes life hard for my people! So this essay is a public display of appreciation for Armand Domalewski, who did something to make our lives easier.

(1) Excising The Cancer

I'm lucky enough to inhabit a very privileged role in liberalism: I have a condition that a lot of people think is fake, but I'm ""well-spoken"" enough to be considered "one of the good ones". This means that a lot of my liberal mutuals on Bluesky can and will repost or boost complaints about like -

• TikTok is brainwashing people into thinking they have the condition
• TikTok is encouraging people to fake the condition for likes
• The condition probably isn't real, something something social contagion

A lot of my liberal mutuals are super reactionary about this, but they treat me with respect because my insanity is a fluke rather than a pattern. I volunteer for Liberal Currents, I'm a YIMBY, I can defend open borders without saying the word "racist" - But those TikTokers who talk about their inner worlds to manage their various personalities? They're s c h i z o p h r e n i c, or i n s a n e, or a t t e n t i o n -s e e k i n g, or whatever word conveys "degeneracy" while also making them seem like a good liberal.

A lot of these liberals don't really listen to me if i try to justify my existence, much less those wacky TikTok plurals - but they will pay attention to someone normal like Armand Domalewski. My guess is that there are now at least a hundred people out there who have taken Armand's post as a prompt to reevaulate their prejudices.

(2) Funding the Democrats

In theory, my wealthy plural friends would be motivated to support the Democratic Party with labor and money. But in practice, it's not about if they're motivated: it's about how much motivation there is. Armand Domalewski has increased our motivation to support the Democratic Party.

I have friends with DID from all walks of life, such as:

1. Two retired PhDs, burned out after years of service to the federal government
2. A staffer in the Virginia Democratic Party who could make twice as much in the for-profit sector
3. A software engineer worth around a million dollars

The engineer would be willing to directly align with the Democrats if pluralphobia was less acceptable in our ranks, but all of us would be a lot more productive if we didn't have to worry about harassment! To be clear, everyone involved in this conversation - Armand Domalewski, Me, our respective peanut galleries, my plural friends - we're roughly Democrats. We think Orange Man is bad, immigration is good, and a generous social safety net is important to the functioning of a free society.

But plural acceptance? Plural rights? The Democratic Party does not strongly recognize those, because its members do not strongly hold those beliefs. Our identities are not strongly recognized, and our humanity is weakly respected - this causes us to donate $1000 rather than $2000 to a given Democrat, or to canvass for six hours rather than eight. I can argue for days with my wealthy plural friends that the next few years will revolve around fighting an existential threat to our way of life, that the Democratic Party is our vehicle in spite of its deep flaws, so that's why we should be carrying more water for them. And that's exactly what I'm doing.

This essay is not just a public thank-you for Armand; it is also a public case I'm pleading to my people: the Democratic Party is worth further support, because the Democratic Party will treat us better, because members like Armand Domalewski are staking their reputations to do right by us.

(3) A Well-Done Stake

Armand agreed to make a public apology, which is a strong signal of his sincerity. In comparison, it's a lot easier to backpedal on words said in private.

When I was doing amateur housing activism in Windsor, Colorado - I would run into a particular breed of Volk. In private, hushed conversation they would give me a few token words of woke for my transness, my Asianness, or my activism. In public, they would disavow all of that.

Jim Cosner was a notable one. Once, he affirmed me as a woman to my face, but the next day he publicly posted a photo of himself next to Gary Doering - the city's most notorious transphobe. I responded with screenshots of Gary calling us "trannies", "groomers", and "a group of sick, evil people", but Jim simply brushed them off and continued to publicly praise Gary's habit of speaking "truth to power."

Some random liberal - Tim? Jim? Scott? Steve? I've already forgotten his name - would privately tell me he did care about housing affordability. That didn't stop him from loudly telling his fellow waterfront housing neighbors that an apartment development would be a threat to their sensibilities and happiness.

Teresa Bacon? Her friends really hated Chinese immigrants, so she would always get really mean about my legal status when other people could see us talking. But in private, she made sure to distinguish Me (the Well-Spoken Chinese-American) from The Chinese (Who Are Infliltrating This Country).

Why do I trust Armand Domalewski's sincerity? What separates him from the súc vật that infests Windsor, Colorado? Well, it's because he did something good for me and my people even at the cost of some of his reputation. If you look through the quote-tweets and replies to his apology, many of his followers and mutuals have expressed disappointment in his capitulaton to a "fake" condition. This has almost certainly cost him the respect of reactionaries. I'm sure he knew this would happen, but he chose to do the right thing anyway.

But even if you aren't sure about altruism's role in this conversation, you have to admit that it says a lot that Armand values respect from plurals over respect from

(4) A Bit About White Supremacy

In my experience, and with the exception of one person: the most vicious pluralphobes have been white people with weird hangups about being unable to say the n-word. On the other hand, I have Asian friends who aren't particularly active in philosophy or politics, but they have no problem understanding my condition aside from a few clarifying questions. My Vietnamese-American Dad, who has been brainwashed on Fox News, was devastated by my gender transition but excited to learn about the nature of my multiple personalities.

In between the extremes, I had this wasian guy named Dave from Windsor, Colorado. I feel comfortable calling him an Uncle Wong because well, he admitted to me that he didn't like Asian people and struggled with his desire to be accepted by White people. We bonded over our inability to speak Mandarin, but he was weird about the trans stuff. He was weird about the plural stuff. But he actively tried to not be an asshole when debating me about my identities.

Because of this, I have this theory that pluralphobia, like transphobia, is somehow linked to white supremacy. In other words, the ideal of white supremacy is built off fixed, rigid, psychological definitions as much as it is built off fixed, rigid gender roles. DID is not well-researched, so the only other piece of evidence is a paper I can't seem to find again: a low-sample observational study on college students which found that white students were less likely to identify with a dissociative disorder than Asian-American and black students. Admittedly, it's a very weak signal that dissociative disorders are suppressed in White culture.

I don't claim to know exactly what Armand was struggling with, but I know it wasn't easy to buck the trend that this country was essentially built on. It takes a conscious, deliberate effort to publicly stand by plurality and to step away from a culture that dominates the commanding heights of the United States.

For that, Armand Domalewski deserves recognition.

Cover photo source