Allow me to dust off my Education degree for a moment. Something’s been bugging me.
There seems to be a pervasive alternative definition of “Twice Exceptional” (or 2E) floating about on the internet. I have heard it repeated several times across multiple platforms, and it goes mostly unchallenged: “2E means gifted and Neurodivergent.”
2E is a term of art from the Education field. It means gifted and disabled.
A Blind or Deaf student who receives gifted services is also 2E. When it is only applied to Neurodivergence it erases disability — a legal status that grants certain protections from discrimination — among Neurodivergent and non-Neurodivergent alike.
In a time no so long ago, disabled kids — even the gifted ones — used to be warehoused instead of educated. It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears from disabled activists to get the education system to recognize that disabled people can be not only capable of learning, but smart. And that failing to place disabled students appropriately within educational settings (including in gifted programs) was discrimination that led to poor outcomes for children.
If you do not identify as disabled, you should not be stepping over disabled people to claim 2E as the sole domain of the Neurodivergent.
Not only that, but limiting our definition of 2E to “Gifted + Neurodivergent” while leaving out the disability part is redundant. Giftedness by itself is a form of neurodivergence. It is not just being smarter than your average bear. The reason why formalized gifted services are a thing is because gifted kids are considered a risk group.
A key defining characteristic of gifted students is asynchronous development — where their intellectual capacity outpaces their social and emotional development —and that affects how they process things on a broad scale. This can turn unhealthy if they aren’t given proper guidance from adults and are instead treated like they have more maturity than they really do. People tend to see them as mini-adults because they have reached an adult level of intelligence and being adultified at an early age is never a good thing for one’s mental health.
However, as they near adulthood, their social and emotional development syncs up with their intellect, and they start to converge more with typically developing counterparts. They gain more life experience to add to their book learning and innate cognitive skills. They mature like anyone else. Many former gifted kids still feel the weight of their gifted label and the expectations for spectacular success that are placed on them —often not by their gifted educators, who are for the most part just trying to get them through school happy and healthy — but by what society presumes being gifted means.
Having grown up as gifted children certainly had profound effects on us, but the distinction between gifted adults and non-gifted adults is largely one without a difference. Developmentally, a 30-year-old with an IQ in the 120’s and a 30-year old with an IQ in the 130’s or 140’s are indistinguishable from one another.
People who were in gifted programs might go into the trades, or they might go into academia. So might people who were not considered gifted. Either one might find their careers fulfilling, or they might not. Either one might have dropped out of college. Either might have an existential crisis, or they might lead a happy, but unremarkable life. Former gifted kids are not a different breed of human. Everyone on Earth went through experiences as kids that affected who they became – and having been a gifted child is simply one of those.
Not only should non-disabled neurodivergent folks avoid appropriating 2E, they shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s harmless to give it a colloquial meaning outside of its established meaning in the Education field. It’s no different than when mental health jargon gets misappropriated by the general public — such as when “anti-social” started being used by laypersons to mean “someone who doesn’t like to socialize.”
To be considered 2E, one must have needed an IEP (for a disability, as opposed to a gifted-only IEP) or a 504 plan to access their education, and the education system does not hand those out to non-disabled students. Sometimes they are even hard to get for disabled students, especially ones whose struggles in school don’t look like an inability to do grade level work.
Furthermore, 2E is meant to apply to children within the education system — to name the types of services they receive. If you are an Autistic or ADHD adult and were also a gifted child, chances are you were 2E in school (whether you were identified and received the services you needed or not). But there are no 2E adults; it doesn’t make any sense to continue to define adults by the SPED label they were assigned by the education system, long after they are out of it.
While we’re at it, teachers should stop referring students as SPED or “Special Needs.” It’s what you call the field you work in and the services you provide; it is not what you call the kids you teach. But I digress.
Of course, having gone through the school system as 2E — or even as gifted and Neurodivergent but not Disabled — is a foundational experience that can impact you throughout the course of your life, in ways that differ from people who didn’t have that same experience, and people should talk about it. This goes double for people who were 2E and were never identified appropriately and consequently didn’t receive adequate support. This discussion only serves to name harms you experienced within the education system, so that maybe things are less unjust for future kids.
There are disabled kids who never get identified as gifted because of the implicit biases of both IQ tests and the adults who are charged with referring kids for gifted testing in the first place.
There are kids who got tested for gifted, and due to a “spiky profile” were excluded from gifted services despite a profoundly gifted IQ in one domain, because the other domains were average or even low, and it pulled down their full-scale score.
There are gifted kids whose invisible disabilities are never identified because their intelligence allows them to compensate enough that the adults don’t notice, though the child may be facing a great deal of inner turmoil.
None of them are being served the “appropriate public education” that IDEA promises.
This is personal for me, because all three of these applied to me when I was in school. The first time I was tested for gifted in the 4th grade (based largely on Autistic characteristics like hyperlexia and a pronounced special interest in history and politics), my IQ was found to be just below the cutoff despite a Verbal IQ in the 150’s, because my Performance IQ was barely above average and my processing speed was slow. They let me go to academic enrichment with the gifted kids sometimes without giving me a gifted IEP, but knowing the other kids had all qualified outright gave me imposter syndrome which I still haven’t shaken.
Then, when I started school refusal in the 8th grade due to bullying and social overwhelm, my mom insisted that the school retest me, and my full-scale IQ was found to now be six points above the cutoff. I had a gifted IEP throughout high school.
The diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome wasn’t added to the DSM until I was a freshman, and many psychologists at the time still believed that girls couldn’t be Autistic. Certainly not teenage girls with 4.35 GPAs. Though I was in therapy and medicated for depression and anxiety after a suicide attempt, and was desperately lonely, Autism was never considered (though Schizophrenia was, because my “restrictive, repetitive behaviors” often involved talking to myself). I was still 2E. Disabled even though my disability wouldn’t be diagnosed until I was 31.
Though my IEP was only for gifted, my gifted teacher (and my other teachers too) seemed to innately understand that certain gifted kids need accommodations, too. Mine weren’t written down anywhere; they were given informally. They happened to coincide with the accommodations typically given to Autistic students.
When I panic procrastinated on an assignment or was unable to complete it on time due to executive dysfunction, I always got the extension. When I asked my teachers to go to the gifted room during their class time because I was overwhelmed by their crowded classrooms, I was usually given a pass, and the gifted teacher happily listened to me monologue about my special interests or let me engage independently with them, depending on my mood. My mom called me off school for numerous mental health days, and nobody ever asked for a doctor’s note. The half of my senior year that I attended (I graduated early), 4 out of 7 of my classes were independent studies, where I made up my own assignments tailored to my own interests and got them done on my timeline.
I would never have graduated in the top 2% of my class if not for my gifted program and its incidental accommodations for my Autism. I might not have even survived high school. I was very lucky that my needs were recognized even though an Autism diagnosis wasn’t a possibility for me at the time. My child had a very different experience, in that they were initially denied an IEP for what turned out to be Level 2 Autism, because they were “smart” and verbal.
At the end of kindergarten, they were diagnosed with PDD-NOS (which was changed to level 2 Autism when re-evaluated under DSM-5 criteria) and ADHD and were denied an IEP until the beginning of second grade. This was only after I had threatened to contact OCR because the school kept punishing them for Autistic traits after having refused accommodations for them.
My kiddo was probably also gifted, but their talents were never nurtured at school because IQ tests weren’t especially accurate due to their spiky profile (they scored “bright” but not gifted and had my slow processing speed, but they fit the gifted behavioral profile). Having a high, but not quite gifted, IQ only led to the school dismissing their support needs.
A 2E label would have improved the chances of their support needs being met instead of ignored. It would have underscored their disability while still allowing room for their intellect. I was told over and over again at IEP meetings that their Autism didn’t count, because they were “high-functioning” and that we were just here for the ADHD. This was a kid with level 2 support needs, not getting any Autism-specific support at all.
Conversely, my child was at the same time chronically underestimated by their teachers, who would do things like automatically placing them in the lowest reading group at the beginning of each year, before moving them to the highest by second quarter, losing them important instructional time at their reading level. This rocky start to their education impacted the whole rest of their K-12 experience, because they started out labeled a problem child rather than a disabled, gifted one. They dropped out and got their GED at 17 and are currently gun-shy about college.1
When we separate 2E from disability, it gives permission for schools to deny accommodations to Neurodivergent kids. It puts them in a situation where medical diagnosis and doctor recommendations are not sufficient, and the school gets to make a separate determination whether each child is disabled enough to receive services (even though they wouldn’t have been diagnosed if their neurodivergence didn’t impair them). And it’s less work for already overstretched SPED departments if children are found not to qualify for services, so it’s not as if the school is impartial.
Many educators who aren’t certified in SPED or gifted education still don’t fully understand these specialties. 2E gets mentioned in passing in teacher education programs today, but I suspect older teachers weren’t exposed to it at all and younger teachers totally could have missed it if they blinked. Many still unconsciously hang on to the old assumptions that gifted and disabled are mutually exclusive. So don’t think for one minute that people in the field can’t be misled into thinking 2E only applies to neurodivergence and doesn’t necessarily entail disability, especially if Neurodiversity social media is their first repeated exposure to a term that they’ve only heard one time previously, during a professional development day 15 years ago.
If you give the education system an excuse to deny services by putting it out there in the zeitgeist that accommodating Neurodivergent children shouldn’t be the default (i.e., “it’s not always a disability”), they will deny services at any opportunity. Not based on what support the child or parents say they need or don’t need, but what they as outsiders observe. If that child hands in just enough work to pass, and answers when spoken to most of the time, and waits to have their meltdowns at home, that often translates to “no accommodations needed.”
By all means, share your lived experiences of growing up gifted and neurodivergent , and how they overlapped with each other. It’s valid and needs to be heard. But please don’t use the term 2E to describe yourself and then disavow or ignore the disability part.
Even if you don’t consider yourself disabled as an adult, think of what you needed as a kid that the education system didn’t provide. Honor the children of today who are equally brilliant and need similar supports, but will have a harder time getting them if we dilute their disabled status. A status which serves to protect their right to an education under the law and was hard won by the disabled activists who came before them.
Consent was obtained to tell this story.