Q

Normalize accepting it might be a different disorder.

Normalize not calling people who were wrong with their suspicions fakers.

Flashbacks are not just any instance in which you are remembering a traumatic event and getting upset about it. They are specifically dissociative reactions in which you experience the event as if it's occurring in the present.

It occurs when a normally compartmentalized traumatic memory and the associated psychobiological personality systems of defence completely take over your consciousness, leaving you immersed in the memory and unable to access the part of you that handles daily life.

Of course there's variability in how it presents. You don't need to be having a flashback in all your senses at once and completely forget where you are for it to be a flashback. Some people also experience it as "the trauma never ended" as opposed to "the trauma is happening again". And so on.

But in order for it to be considered a flashback you need to be experiencing the event, at least partially, as if it's happening right now.

This is true for emotional flashbacks as well. Feeling anxious or upset, even in response to a trigger, doesn't necessarily equal an emotional flashback. For it to be an emotional flashback, you need to be re-experiencing the specific emotions you felt at the time of the trauma. It's not just being upset that it happened. It's being put right back in the exact emotional state you were in when it happened.

That's not to say the symptoms people are describing are fake. They're just misclassified, and better explained by other (usually intrusion category) symptoms. Namely:

Intrusive memories: recurrent and distressing intrusions where a person remembers the traumatic event (or aspects of it), without the distinct feeling of re-experiencing it as if it was happening in the present

Psychological/physical reactivity to reminders of trauma: distressing emotional responses (i.e. fear, anxiety, dread, anger) or physical responses (i.e. racing heartbeat, difficulty breathing, shaking) in response to trauma triggers

Hypervigilance: being on high alert and searching for danger, often experienced as a chronic state but there can be episodes where it gets worse than baseline without it being a flashback

How dare we say that a disorder is medical, right?

It stems from transmed, a term used to describe people who believe that trans people should transition medically and experience dysphoria, or they aren’t valid.

The fact that it stems from a transgender related term implies that being a system is an identity. Despite the name, DID is a dissociative disorder, not an identity.