On Sysmed

I wanted to make a writeup on this because I feel like when people hear me or people in my system critsizing the term sysmed they think that we are system gatekeepers, but this is not the case. This critisism of the term comes from a transgender and agender entity in a non-medical system who has delt with both gatekeepers and transmeds more than he would like, and who has researched system hisory. Sources for this are extremely hard to find due to much of this occuring on Tumblr and Discord, so any sources people have would be very much appreciated.


Sysmed was created by endogenic and transgender systems to compare transmedicalism and system gatekeeping around the time when movements to pushback against transmeds such as "trendercore" started to take form. This is a fair comparisson and not exactly one I'm arguing against, and my system did participate in thoes discussions when they started since we're a transgender system harmed by gatekeeping and transmeds. It was effective with getting some transgender people in particular to realize the exact harm of it.

The problem is this term was made as a comparisson for a specific intersection meant as a discussion, but the term now has morphed into being used as the sole term that is used to describe this specific type of mentalism. This is not a good idea for a number of reasons, which I will go over.

1) Relying on another group's exclusionist politics to descirbe our own is a very bad idea. While yes it works as a conversation piece nad might get people to think, the way it's presented as the exclusive term to describe this can cause problems with not being taken seriously, ignoring issues exclusive to one or either rhetoric, and causing too much reliance on an otherwise unrelated community.

2) System gatekeeping and transmedicalism have no related history. System gatekeeping has its origins on Livejournal and were caused by disagreements in views between multiple origins while transmedicalism came from the true transsexual movement. I have researched system community history and in the potentially over a hundred resources my system has saved, I cannot find any link between transmedicalism and system gatekeeping before some systems started to make the comparisson.

3) The comparisson fails in some key areas. Namely how common intra-community abuse is within the system community and how that's a massive problem with both sides, how you have differing origins and how ultimately attempting to label and seaprate those origins caused this whole mess in the first place, how there are systems who's entire existance is medical and how attempting to integrate the self is a viable thing for systems to do, and in general the nature of how different things such as dysphoria are to trauma.

4) It seems to be causing a lack of understanding of the history of system gatekeeping. System gatekeeping started because of people trying to divide the community while at the same time not respecting how there might be subculture or experience differences, many modern plural groups seem to be repeating this.

5) Not every system is capable of making this comparisson. While yes, systems are commonly also trans, not every system or system member identifies as such. It is not the place for cis people to be making these comparissons, and it's not a good idea to try to make our exclusive term for this to be a comparisson not every individual can make.

There are better alternatives such as but not limited to: system gatekeeper, syskeeper, pluralantagonist, sysmisic, pluralmisic, anti-system, anti-plural, anti-endogenic.

There also comes an issue with other controversies regarding the term. It was heaivly popularized by Plural Hub, which is a long subject so I'll only link this post for now. It was also popularized by systems looking for a replacement for traumascum. Though these aren't representatative of everyone who uses the term sysmed, I thought it was worth bringing up as they can be associated and another reason that systems may be uncomfortable with it.

My and much of my system's views on it isn't that sysmed isn't a term which shouldn't be used, but that it's better kept as a comparisson by and for trans systems and it becomes very innacurate as a general term for gatekeeper. It can be an effective conversation yes, but system gatekeeping and transmedicalism have very different histories and have some different rhetorics. System gatekeeping is a unique issue and we should see it as such if we want this rhetoric to end.