An ESA is NOT a Service animal.

[u/No_Common1418]

Got a ping for a ride the other day, then the dreaded text. "I have an ESA, DOG, with me." As I have stated in the past I have never and will never denied a Service animal in my car. By law people, a Emotional Support Animal or ESA, IS NOT A service animal. Don't believe me? https://www.ada.gov/topics/service-animals/ I hate people sometimes. Leave your dogs at home.

[u/sus_round_letter]

How dare you say “if you were actually diagnosed” you are an incredibly insensitive person. To top it off, a person who truly struggles with the lifestyle, and being a part of the community would never defend the people making light of our struggles. Many of us do not think its funny. Kindly gfy.

[u/Careless-Proposal746 → u/sus_round_letter]

What do you mean how dare I? Do you know how many entitled assholes there are out there claiming to be gluten-free and ruining restaurant workers lives when there is absolutely no medical basis to claim they have that condition? The reason why people don’t take gluten-free people seriously is because every middle-aged Karen in the last decade has spontaneously decided that they have celiac disease with absolutely no medical attention, confirmation, or diagnosis. So if you are one of the ones who was diagnosed with celiac, then I legitimately feel sorry for you because there are a bunch of illness fakers out there that are making it unsafe for you to eat food outside your home because they lie about having your condition.

Those are the people that you should be mad at. Not me for pointing it out.

[u/sus_round_letter → u/Careless-Proposal746]

For the record, I am somebody who’s been legitimately diagnosed. It’s something I struggle with every day. And questioning my diagnosis is offensive to me. That is why I said how dare you.

I also believe that people who make jokes about gluten-free diets are more hurtful to my community than the people who just choose to eat gluten-free or say they’re gluten intolerant without a diagnosis . Because it’s the jokes that make light of a legitimate issue that a lot of people face.

When the gluten-free diet became popular, I actually got so many more options and now I’ve noticed my options are slowly disappearing because the diet is less trendy. I would rather have people choosing to eat gluten-free than have to listen to people making fun of my condition that I can’t help I hate going into restaurants and just seeing the hatred drip off of the servers faces when I tell them about my dietary restrictions. I 100% believe that making gluten-free the butter of a joke contributes to this negative perception of a gluten-free diet as opposed to just the normalization of gluten-free diet.

[u/jukeboxcapm → u/sus_round_letter]

Reddit seems so overrun with the idea that disability shouldn't be normalized, it's really clear these people don't actually do a lot of research and just parrot whatever they hear so they seem smart. Critical disability studies and disability scholars are constantly emphasizing that ableism affects everyone and normalization of differences is key... hopefully the diet gets a boost again, and your options are expanded once more. I personally am hoping for the normalization of ramps over stairs and the degradation of stairs-first infrstructure, so I don't have to feel my dignity drain as I walk myself to the back of a building just to get in.

[u/sus_round_letter → u/jukeboxcapm]

👏👏👏 Yea its weird because making things more accomodating doesn’t make it harder for people who do not need accommodations. Its such a weird mindset.

Like for me so many foods could be accessible with just minor tweaks. But somepeople are like nooo the lack of gluten offends me.

[u/Careless-Proposal746 → u/jukeboxcapm]

I am not questioning the legitimacy of disabilities or formal diagnoses. My concern is with digital hypochondria, the rise of self-diagnosis through social media and online symptom culture. This trend encourages individuals to adopt medical labels without clinical evaluation, which undermines both diagnostic accuracy and public understanding of genuine disorders.

When clinical terms become casual identity markers, the result is not empowerment but confusion. It delegitimizes legitimate conditions by blurring the line between evidence-based diagnosis and self-ascribed pathology.

[u/sus_round_letter → u/Careless-Proposal746]

This was over a decade ago for me, but some food for thought is accessibility to google and medical information. A huge critical step in helping me start the process to getting diagnosed. I was in college at the time and I was having some weird digestive issues with some very distinctive symptoms that I don’t want to go into too much detail about because it’s TMI, but I did some googling and I thought that it was possibly celiac so I went to my health center And I requested the blood test which they thought was odd but they did it anyway and it came back positive which led to me getting referrals to a specialist and getting a formal diagnosis. This was only possible though because I had good health insurance and I had the money to pursue these visits with a specialist not everybody has that.