Why the Gatekeeping
Edit to say: I don’t so much mean people in this subreddit because you guys here tend to be a lot more respectful, and actually provide a whole lot of information. Most of the issues that I see are outside of Reddit.
As the title asks, I have a genuine question: why do people in this community gate keep so much? Side note: I do not yet have a service dog, I do use us a lot in this post. That is referring to us as a disabled people not us as service dog handlers. I am not a handler yet, just working towards that goal.
Between gatekeeping the tasks that your service dog performs to prevent task shopping, having a service dog at all. I just don’t understand. We as disabled people have had to fight so hard to have access to this support. Why do we try to prevent other people who are also disabled from having this access to the support too? A lot of the problem that I see is primarily “ that’s not a disability” or “service dogs are task trained to mitigate a real disability”.
Both people with visible and invisible disabilities every day have to deal with the able-bodied population questioning whether or not we’re disabled enough. Acting like we’re not actually disabled. Saying things like you’re just doing it for attention, or that’s not a real thing. Why are we doing it to each other? Why are we trying to tell somebody else that their disability is not valid? We don’t know what someone else’s experience is. We don’t know what it takes for them to move through life, we only know what it’s like for us.
I know that there is a high prevalence of people who are trying to pass off pet dogs as service dogs, and that that’s 100% not OK. And I know that there are people out there who don’t have disabilities and say that they do, and that is also 100% not OK. But who are we to judge whether or not somebody’s disability is real or not? We don’t like it when it’s done to us. Who are we to decide if somebody else’s disability is valid enough to have a service dog? We get outraged when that’s done to us.
Another question with the gatekeeping that I have is on telling people that their service dog is not real. I fully understand. The people are bringing their untrained pet dogs into the stores and that’s not OK. The ADA specifically states that a service dog must be individually trained to perform a task to mitigate a person’s disability, they must be housebroken, and they must be under the control of the handler at all times. The issue that I take is with that last statement. Must be under the control of the handler at all times can have many interpretations. Not all of the interpretations are correct, but it’s still an interpretation. That one statement is not clearly defined, enough so that when I read that I was like, what does that mean, like what does that even mean? I only have a picture of what that should mean based off of watching other people service dogs and trying to learn about training a service dog. Other people like me who have literal thinking, brains, or struggle to understand broad concepts that can have many interpretations like that could be out in public with their service dog that they think they’ve done a good job of training (doing the best that they can with what they have) and get a whole lot of flack for having an untrained a dog that they’re passing off as a service dog. I understand that within the service dog community there is a level of training that is expected, but that training is not clearly defined. Why do we not have more easily accessible resources that define what that training should actually look like? Instead, we have to come onto things like Reddit (which isn’t even something that everybody out there even knows about) to gain more information, or watch YouTube videos or TikTok‘s or shorts or something that have people in the comments contesting little legitimacy of that video. It makes it very hard to weed out what is right and what is wrong. I don’t understand why we make this information so hard to get. Not everybody knows where to go or how to look the right way to find the right information and well so much of it coincides with each other or or matches, so much of it is also contradictory. And then people get hate for not full understanding even when they are legitimately disabled and have a legitimate use or need for a service dog. I am in what I want to say is kind of a unique position because dogs and service dogs has become a bit of a special interest for me. I am consumed with the need to research and learn and understand before I am getting a prospect. I also understand that my brain works differently from someone else who has a different disability. Someone else who even has the same disabilities as me might not think things through in the same way that I do because they don’t have the same processes I do. And even if I think that it’s kind of stupid to not think things through before you’re actually doing this, I don’t understand why people get hate for not having thought something all the way through when the information is not all that easy to find. I mean, you can find a lot of information that just scratches the surface of what a service dog is, but doesn’t actually detail and outline what it really entails. That is the problem that I’ve run into. I only know and understand as much as I do because I have laser focused in and asked questions and multiple different groups and multiple different places to gain a perspective based on what other people have done. I truly do not understand why we are not actively trying to help each other. I don’t understand why we are not being kind to other disabled people and acknowledging that just because we know and understand something doesn’t mean that they do and just because they don’t understand the way I do doesn’t invalidate them.
The way that we treat each other in this community (the disabled community) is often honestly no better than the way ableist not disabled people treat us. The way we treat each other is often no better than the biggest who treat us like we don’t have the right to exist in the same space. Why do we do this? Why do we gatekeep, information, resources, disability as a whole? I truly do not understand.