Whoa, there. I know enough people who never got the label, but who suffered all the same social problems anyway. In their cases, they had no idea why they didn’t fit in, so they concluded it was because they were defective, unworthy people — and in two cases I’ve heard of, concluded that they must be mentally retarded if they couldn’t think the way everyone around them thinks. No, it’s not the fault of the label, it’s the fault of being gifted.

It angers me to hear people blaming the label. The label isn’t the problem. The label acknowledges and validates the reality of the difference for the kid living with it. The label isn’t at fault for the misfit between GT kids’ social skills and the social demands of normal childrens’ environments, the actual, material difference is. Without that label, the kid has no other way to figure out what is happening to them or how to respond to it; they conclude they must be going crazy. Calling it what it is is never wrong.

Good grief: GT people are not the one minority on earth where growing up in ignorance of what you are is somehow developmentally beneficial.

Calling it by name allows kids and the people around them the opportunity to handle that difference consciously and maturely. Opportunity — one not always taken: sometimes the label is also used as a grounds for very bad behavior. But that’s not the fault of the label, that’s the fault of a lot of other things which are much less fashionable to be concerned about. It’s so much more popular to pretend that if we just don’t name the elephant in the room, if we just don’t ever talk about it, it magically goes away. Like all such elephants, it doesn’t.