Neurotypicals are just the majority minority. They’re ~40% of the population, which isn’t the majority, but it is the largest single group of people. It’s also a lone circle on an otherwise overlapping Venn diagram, because all of the other circles preclude being neurotypical. So if you’re meeting someone for the first time and are going to make assumptions about them, the default is to assume that they’re probably in the largest, most monolithic group. Assuming any other group has a large probability to be wrong, because even though 60% is the majority, it is split amongst a bunch of much smaller circles.
All of the other circles on the diagram are messy. They overlap, they have their own special quirks, the lines around the circles are blurry, and that 40% monolith also says that the 60% (broken apart into much smaller circles, so nowhere near as united) is weird and should just fit in. So yeah, neurotypical became the default.
I also tend to think of it like stars: there’s infinitely many stars, just as there’s infinitely many different kinds of NDs, but one star is much much bigger than all the others, that’s NT, and that’s why so many people assume it’s the default.
Neurotypicals are just the majority minority. They’re ~40% of the population, which isn’t the majority, but it is the largest single group of people. It’s also a lone circle on an otherwise overlapping Venn diagram, because all of the other circles preclude being neurotypical. So if you’re meeting someone for the first time and are going to make assumptions about them, the default is to assume that they’re probably in the largest, most monolithic group. Assuming any other group has a large probability to be wrong, because even though 60% is the majority, it is split amongst a bunch of much smaller circles.
All of the other circles on the diagram are messy. They overlap, they have their own special quirks, the lines around the circles are blurry, and that 40% monolith also says that the 60% (broken apart into much smaller circles, so nowhere near as united) is weird and should just fit in. So yeah, neurotypical became the default.
I also tend to think of it like stars: there’s infinitely many stars, just as there’s infinitely many different kinds of NDs, but one star is much much bigger than all the others, that’s NT, and that’s why so many people assume it’s the default.