6:57pm February 19, 2014

Parents in ‘gifted’ communities tell each other to get their kids tested young…

…so that they’ll still be identified as gifted before their IQ drops below the threshold for ‘giftedness’.

…and yet people also simultaneously find it so hard to believe that by the age of 15, the normal age that that happens and is known to happen, I no longer had an IQ in the 'gifted’ range.

I mean yeah it’s somewhat weird it dropped as low as it did by 22, but that’s not that weird for autistic kids who were identified as 'gifted’.  I know tons of autistic people who had 'gifted’ IQs as kids and average or below IQs as adults.  Just like I know tons of autistic people who had average or below IQs as kids and 'gifted’ IQs as adults.  And tons of autistic people whose IQ varied a great deal back and forth in the same year or even in the same week.

(Please don’t tell me what my 'real IQ’ is, or reassure me that I’m 'still gifted’, there’s no such thing as a 'real IQ’ that somehow lives inside a person as an attribute of a person, and I’m highly uncomfortable with the concept of giftedness as applied to IQ.  I always have to put this warning on my posts or I get bombarded with messages that tear me up inside with their prejudice.)

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