Written by: 🌊 Mel (she/they)

I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about the labels and words that are used surrounding plurality. Partly because we are trying to come up with Norwegian words for a lot of this stuff. (send us a message or email if you have thoughts on that)
And there is a thought I keep coming back to enough that I kinda need to get out.

I fucking hate role labels for headmates.

Now that's a fairly strong statement, let me clarify slightly before anyone gets mad at me.
I don't mind others using them. Hell we use a few for some of the people in our system, they have their place. But there is something that I have noticed with the way they get used, and more importantly interpreted, that gets on my nerves slightly. And from the few others I have talked to this seems like something people agree with me on once they have had a minute to think about it.

The issue is stereotyping.

I keep seeing this thing in the people and communities around me where people get very hung up on the labels used to describe headmates.
Where this has been the most obvious to us is with the word "host."
We don't use the word host for anyone in our system anymore, but we used to use it to describe a member of our system who was the main fronter in our day to day life. We used this term talking about this person in spaces where they weren't the primary person interacting too. This occasionally had an incredibly interesting effect on people where the instant we used this term to would instantly very clearly stop giving a shit about anyone in the system who wasn't described as the host. I have seen people go from interacting normally with most of the system to not remembering names and starting to assign the host personality traits they have seen in others.
Now some of this is on our ex host having a severe case of host-syndrome, some of this is very clearly not that.

Though I think the worst one I have seen isn't with host. The label that really bugs me is "protector."
People have a weird idea of what a protector is "supposed" to act like. If I tell someone that someone in our system is a protector and whoever I am talking to hasn't met the headmate in question, more often than not they tend to get this strange assumption that they know what the headmate is like.

An example: A while ago we described Will from our system as a protector to someone, this someone having never met Will.
When they then bumped into Will at a later occasion they acted like they were stepping on eggshells to avoid making him angry. This is fucking hilarious because one of the first things most people pick up when talking to Will tends to be that he is absolutely impossible to piss off. We have had people try to do so deliberately and fail miserably. Later this person when talking to someone else described being scared of Will getting angry at them.
The read I got off of this person was that they seemed to think that since Will was a protector in their mind, he was only there to protect, so they started treating him being around as a sign that something needed to be de-escalated. Even when he was just there to chill and drink tea.

More complaining with a different heading for no reason

(My ADHD ass brain struggled to get though this without a heading here for some reason, enjoy a break before more complaining)

Caretaker, people tend to just assume that this headmate is just fine to vent to without asking or any warning and that they are always in the right space to help out with people's issues, or people get weird about asking for them to front any time a "regular headmate" is doing badly.

I have one more I wish to talk about specifically:
Gatekeeper, this is one of the few terms we do actually use these days purely because it actually denotes a difference in ability and not just what people happen to do most.
And people tend to get really weird with our gatekeepers, singlets in particular tend to assume that the gatekeepers have the power to do whatever they want at any time and get frustrated at things like people being frontstuck or people not remembering things. There is this assumption that just because the Director has some control over memories that he can give whatever memories he want to anyone at any time, and that therefore someone not remembering something that was said to another person in our system is a fuckup on his part.
People also seem to get really weird when the gatekeepers decide to just front themselves and not just be there to fetch others. I don't have a specific example of what I mean with that last one as it isn't super obvious.

This goes for a bunch of other labels too though we have a lot less negative experience with most others purely on account of not really using any others. Though I could probably write an entire blog post about how I have seen the word "persecutor" be used against headmates, both from external people and from within their own system. But I will leave that post to someone who as actually experienced it first hand as I think that would be much better put together than whatever I could manage to write.
"Introject" isn't a role label but is also a word where I see some similar things. Though same as persecutor, I am not the person to write about this as our system has a grand total of 0 introjects, that's not my discussion to interject myself into. (heh)

Ending thoughts

Of course a lot of this is just people being weird in general and not a core issue with the words being used. But we have found that people generally tend to treat us much more normally when we just drop a lot of these labels. This again doesn't mean that words like this are entirely without value. Even we use some of these labels in specific contexts. What bugs me is the way these labels are clung to as prescriptive boxes that people are expected to fit into instead of being used as just words that systems use when talking about how they function and the weird ways people react if you mention something like being a protector in an intro or bio.

I also feel like I need to specify again that I really do not judge others for having things like host or protector in bios and such or using these labels at all. You do you, and if you think this is useful information for yourself or others then more power to you.
I just think that it might be useful to also think about why we use these words, and why we might not want to use them always, especially in more public facing introductions.
I think it encourages dumbing down people's personalities into just stereotypes a lot. And I see a lot of people offer up a headmate role label the same way people introduce themselves with a name and pronouns, and when you get this as a default thing that people always offer up as an initial thing you get a sort of social pressure to do the same. Which as someone who now wants to avoid labels like this, isn't a whole lot of fun.

What I do like on the other hand is more wack labels or less used ones. For example Arc from our system describes herself as "Logistics manager" which comes with a lot less judgement about who she is as a person, but still describes a bit about what she tends to do when around in front.
Or Will who calls himself "craftsman" since he tends to handle things like mending clothes.