I think the whole "DID is/is not a trauma disorder" is coming from a place of miscommunication about what the fuck that means and how that looks.
DID is a dissociative disorder that's characterized by, you might have guessed it, dissociation. DID patients showing up at the doctor's office are going to be talking about symptoms like dissociation, depersonalization, loss of time, amnesia, mood swings, and so on. They may or may not mention childhood adversity or trauma.
For many of them, they will first notice the disorder as teenagers or adults, so somehow correlating that to shit that happened to them when they were six might not even register. Like, we're all human beings, some of us have shitty memory, and it makes sense that memory problems would make figuring out the why of it all difficult, if not impossible.
But a clinician looking at their symptoms and working with them might turn to trauma-management techniques to help them with some of their symptoms because underneath the dissociation, there is a very good chance that childhood trauma was involved. That is something important for the clinician to know, that there's a heavy-ass correlation between DID symptoms and childhood awfulness.
And remember, this is about DID (the disorder, the shitty thing that lands you in a therapist's office). This is not a discussion of plurality (the experience of being many that likely isn't the reason you're in a therapist's office).
DID being a trauma or not being a trauma disorder is actually not that relevant. If you show up to therapy with dissociative symptoms, your therapist isn't going to force you to remember childhood trauma before diagnosing you. But if you remember whatever heck you've been through, that will help them better support you (hopefully). And if you show up to that office and never remember any trauma at all (maybe you had a perfect childhood and still ended up with DID symptoms), the therapist isn't going to panic and toss you out.
So, to recap, a disorder can have dissociative symptoms and underlying those symptoms might well be childhood trauma, but you're not showing up in your therapist's office because of it (or maybe you are, and you're also multiple people, and that might not be DID).
And you might be plural and not have DID and therefore, childhood trauma might not apply to your particular plurality whatsoever. DID being a disorder that occurs because of underlying trauma does not invalidate anyone who doesn't have that trauma. You have the fucking symptoms, you get the funny-named disorder. That's how it rolls.
Edited to add: Anyone screaming "you can't have DID because you were fine as a kid" needs to sit down and shut up. Symptoms are how we identify the disorder, whether or not we can find the underlying trauma. If someone says they have DID but no trauma, well, then, fuck knows -- their brain did a weird something that was unexpected and that's just how it fucking goes. Brains are not great at being consistent.
