The Trump Administration has proposed a policy that would implement new surveillance of disabled people’s social media accounts. The goal is to see if people are disabled “enough” to warrant their disability payments.

As part of an effort to cut down on the number of fraudulent disability claims, disability examiners could be allowed to flag cases based on photos they dig up from social media.

As someone who spent much of my adult life trying to prove I was disabled, I recognize this proposed policy to be nothing short of discriminatory.

The administration’s basic argument goes something like this: if someone is receiving disability for a crippling back injury but is posting photos of themselves on Instagram doing back flips on the slopes in Vail, Colorado, then those photos should be able to serve as evidence against the person’s disability status.

I suffered from chronic Lyme disease, which brings with it hundreds of possible symptoms. Here’s why. The Lyme bacteria  goes wherever blood goes in the body. If the disease is caught early and you get the proper antibiotics, it can be eradicated.

In my case, the disease wasn’t caught early. So it became chronic and crippling.

Between my diagnosis in 2005 and 2015, when I was finally able to start rebuilding my life, I was hospitalized dozens of times. My disease was misdiagnosed and mistreated more times than I can count.

At times, I used a wheelchair, or a cane, or two canes, or a walker. There were a lot of neurological effects that caused me to twitch, lose my balance, and forget how to do routine activities such as making coffee or driving home.

My social media presence was decidedly limited for many years. I was embarrassed by my symptoms. I was ashamed that I hadn’t finished school and gotten married and become a success. That’s all I saw when I got on Facebook — my gorgeous, smiling friends, with their gorgeous partners and smiling new babies. The few times I did post pictures on Facebook, it was of me having fun.

There’s a photo of me at Easton’s Beach in Newport, Rhode Island from six years ago. I’m on top of a lifeguard stand in the middle of winter, looking like I’m about to jump off it. It was the first time I’d made it not just to the beach, but out onto the sand and up a lifeguard stand ladder in about five years, though I lived less than a mile from that beach.

So this was a momentous occasion. It was celebratory. It was worth posting. What you don’t see is my cane, which my brother was holding. Or the fact that I spent days recovering from this great adventure.

The proposed policy is willfully ignorant of my triumphant trip to the beach. It doesn’t care about the narrative. Disability examiners would be able to look at those photos, which mean so much, and judge me to be a con.

Disability cases are difficult to navigate and difficult to prove. Invisible disabilities are that much harder.

The process can be demeaning and disheartening. I remember every raised eyebrow if I showed up to appointments in makeup and real clothes instead of sweats. It seemed like wanting to feel normal was reason enough to deny my claim. And it was. I was denied repeatedly.

Unfortunately, being denied did not make me better. It didn’t pay my medical bills or take away my pain.

Looking at the Trump Administration’s proposal brings back a lot of that pain and uncertainty. If I had been judged by my social media profiles, it’s likely that I would have refrained from using those platforms altogether.

Though it’s not a certainty that I would’ve missed out on learning some very important medical information from other Lyme patients in Facebook groups, it seems pretty likely. I’d hate to see that happen to anyone with a chronic illness, injury, or disability.

The proposed policy dictates that disabled people shouldn’t be caught having fun or being successful. But more than that, it encourages them to become the very thing they’re being judged as — fakers.

This policy encourages people to fake the effects of their disability to make it look worse than it is. Because reality isn’t cruel enough. It has to look cruel.

The administration contends that it could authorize the surveying of social media by regulation, without action by Congress. Social Security has drafted a timeline, which proposes the publication of a final rule in spring 2020.

It’s decidedly unfair to tell people on disability that they aren’t allowed to be active or do cool things and document them the way other people do. This policy needs to be called what it is — discriminatory.