Teenagers – and I speak as one who has experience of once being a teenager, albeit just within the range of living memory – are strange, and do strange things. Many of these things are centred around rebelling, and rejecting their parents’ values. It’s hardly a surprise that this happens at the time of life when they start spending more time away from the family home, expand their social circle, and become hormone-driven to be in an in-group. As I’ve written before (In defence of gender) the latest 112 genders thing doesn’t really bother me. If their rebellion is dyeing their hair and claiming that they’re a demisexual masc-presenting non-binary rotating queeroid then let them get the fuck on with it. The correct parental response is, “That’s nice, dear. Now, what would you like for tea?”

Where it gets weird, and weirdly fascinating, is when a sub-set of these gender people claim to have a serious mental health problem.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) was, until about 30 years ago, called Multiple Personality Disorder, which at least has the virtue of doing what it says on the tin. The sufferer has multiple, distinct personalities, which may be very different from the, usually passive, main identity. Stress is typically a trigger to switch between personalities, and the disorder is almost invariably linked to prolonged physical or sexual abuse in childhood. Some psychologists believe it may be a defence mechanism. The brain creates a separate person that the terrible things are happening to, allowing the victim to view the abuse as happening to someone else.

Whatever the cause, life for sufferers can be pretty dreadful. They may feel that they are watching someone else control their words and actions. Extended periods of memory loss, which sufferers typically feel compelled to deny or minimize, are one of the key symptoms. Anxiety and severe depression are common side-effects. The condition introduces enormous difficulties in terms of employment, home life, and relationships. The DSM-V reports that around 70% of diagnosed DID sufferers have attempted suicide.

Which is why TikTok has video after video of smiling teens claiming that they have DID, and doing little chats where they introduce their distinct personalities one-by-one.

Like any other teenage subculture, it has its own lingo. The personalities are called alters or headmates, the collection of them all is a system, the one currently in control is fronting. Searching for those terms on social media will bring up a load of people who really don’t sound like they’re trying to live with a debilitating mental health problem.

Now, this being the age of identity politics, it’s considered wrong to tell them that they’re lying, or at the very least mistaking something as mundane as being in a different mood with being a different personality. Nowhere demonstrates the tensions this causes more neatly than the Wikipedia page, and associated Talk page, for Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is a mess of trying to describe a real psychiatric illness, while simultaneously trying not to invalidate anyone who doesn’t actually have it, but has claimed it as their identity. It contradicts and undermines itself throughout, as it tries to present what a well-researched clinical handbook says alongside what a bunch of teenagers think will earn them social media kudos.

Where this gets interesting is when it gives us a bit more insight into a pretend sufferer than they perhaps intended.

Now, first off, this is an unsourced Reddit image that was shared on Twitter, so there’s a real possibility that everything in there is just made up. In case it’s not, let’s look at what it’s saying. This is a person claiming to suffer from DID, where their system contains multiple lesbians. One of these lesbians isn’t attracted to people born male (CAMAB = Coercively Assigned Male At Birth). Following this revelation, the poster had an argument with themselves, got that part of their personality to say they were sorry, but doesn’t know how to make that part fancy men who present as women, as is properly ordained for a lesbian.

Leaving aside the “It’s all made up” explanation, there are 3 others:

1. The original poster made this up to get attention. This is quite likely, after all they’re pretending to have a serious mental-health problem to get attention.
2. The poster is a man, and is making up an excuse why they won’t be having any sex with lesbians who aren’t actual women, thank you.
3. The poster is actually a lesbian and is trying to ask a real question in a way that won’t get her flamed to hell and back. She’s been taught to believe that transwomen are women, and is happy to say that’s the case in most situations (which is why the other lesbians in her system are cool with it), but just can’t bring herself to actually fancy them, because sexual orientation isn’t a choice.

Through the prism of possibility 3, it’s a desperately sad story. A young women doesn’t want to have sex with men, but is arguing with herself, and asking for help in the most submissive way possible, in order to try to perform conversion therapy on herself. In effect, DID – albeit faked DID – is her defence mechanism. It’s not her having these terrible thoughts about not seeing transwomen as women, it’s removed to one of her headmates. The cognitive clash between what she wants to believe and what she actually knows to be true has become an internal argument, that she doesn’t know how to resolve.

And that’s where, “That’s nice, dear,” is inadequate, because it can’t be healthy to live like that.