The people in the communities believe in a moral right to having self-diagnosis believed. Having a diagnosis is almost considered a form of privilege reserved for wealthy white males, an observation rooted in scientific evidence of systemic under diagnosis for minorities and women.

It is a banable offense from disability communities to doubt somebodies diagnosis. I was told nobody lied about faking a diagnosis, so I faked a diagnosis under extremely suspect circumstances, was believed, revealed my deception, and was permanently banned. Regardless of the morality of my actions, the point is that people want to truly believe that everybody they meet that self-diagnose themselves with disabilities is valid, and anybody who attacks this delusion is an enemy to be expelled from the community, even if such a person is doubtlessly disabled. The way I see it, ideology has become more important for membership in these communities than actually having a disability, because somebody ideologically misaligned is a threat to “safety” or whatever.

I’ve seen people call for moderators to be taken out over “fakeclaiming”. I find the entire ideology espoused in TikTok to be deeply naive and grounded in a false implicit assumption that a label of disability will make peoples lives better and thus to deny them that label is some sort of cruelty. I’ve been in conversations where somebody asks “am I diagnosed”, they will describe something that disqualifies the diagnosis, I point out no they can’t be they don’t fit the criteria, and others in the thread will start saying “oh they must not have meant that they must have meant this” and I’ll just sit there stone cold fucking baffled. I wonder how many people will suffer untreated illnesses because strangers on the internet talked them into thinking they had a developmental disability when they really had hypothyroidism or something because they treat not having a diagnosis like failing to catch a Pokémon.