This week, a prominent US politician publicly stated that a person with a learning disability should not hold the office of president – specifically citing the dyslexia of another politician who is widely regarded as a potential future presidential candidate. The remarks generated some controversy but, within a day or two, the political back-and-forth moved on, as these things do.
And yet the exchange left something unresolved – a confusion that existed long before this particular spat and will unfortunately probably persist long after it. That confusion is this: a learning difference is not the same thing as low intelligence, and treating these as interchangeable does real harm to millions of neurodivergent people.
The confusion at the heart of it
The politician’s remarks bundled together several distinct things – dyslexia, low IQ, and general incompetence – as though they were naturally the same or closely associated. This framing contains a conceptual error that is worth addressing directly, regardless of who made it or why.
Dyslexia is a neurological difference in how the brain processes written language. It is not a measure of general intelligence. It is not cognitive impairment. It means that a person’s brain encodes and retrieves written symbols differently – and in a world built around standardized reading and writing, that difference creates genuine obstacles.
Obstacles are not the same as deficits in intellect.
IQ is an attempt to measure general cognitive capacities – including logical reasoning, working memory, processing speed, and verbal comprehension. It is an imperfect instrument with a troubled history, and does not capture the full breadth of human intelligence. Crucially, IQ and dyslexia are statistically independent. A landmark brain-imaging study found that children with reading difficulties show the same underlying neural patterns regardless of whether their IQ is high or low [1]. Dyslexia occurs across the full range of the IQ spectrum. Conflating the two does not reflect scientific reality. It reflects an assumption: that if you struggle with tasks schools and institutions traditionally reward, you must be less capable overall.
According to the International Dyslexia Association, between 15–20% of the population has some form of language-based learning challenge, with dyslexia the most common [2]. Dyslexic people are not, therefore, a small or marginal group in society.
What neurodivergence actually means
Neurodivergence is a term that describes neurological development that differs from what is considered typical. It includes dyslexia, but also ADHD, autism, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, and other neurological differences. These are not categories of deficiency. They are descriptions of different cognitive profiles – distinct patterns of strengths, challenges, and ways of processing the world.
What is common across many neurodivergent profiles is a “spiky” cognitive profile: marked strengths in some areas sitting alongside genuine difficulties in others. A dyslexic person might have exceptional capacity for spatial reasoning, narrative thinking, or big-picture problem-solving. And yet they will find written language challenging. An autistic person might demonstrate extraordinary depth of focus and pattern recognition. And yet they will find navigating social scripts difficult. These people are not a broken version of a neurotypical profile.
Neurodivergent people simply have a
different neurological profile.
This matters because the assumption that neurodivergent people are globally less capable – less intelligent, less competent, less fit for demanding roles – is not supported by evidence. It is supported by the fact that most institutions were designed by and for neurotypical people, and those who don’t fit are penalized accordingly.
The barrier for neurodivergent people
is often structural, not cognitive.
In the UK, research from Birkbeck University found that over 80% of neurodivergent employees reported the strength of hyperfocus, 78% creativity, and 75% innovative thinking – yet 65% still fear stigma and discrimination if they disclose their condition to an employer [3].
The unacceptable exclusion of neurodivergent people
When someone in a position of power argues that a person with a learning disability is unfit for high public office, they are making a claim that extends far beyond political commentary. They are suggesting a category of people who are presumed to lack the qualities required for leadership, regardless of their individual abilities, achievements, or character.
At a first glance, this is the mechanism of exclusion that neurodivergent people encounter in everyday life. It rarely announces itself as obviously as it did this week. More often it arrives quietly: in a hiring panel that penalizes slow reading speed, in a classroom that equates handwriting with intelligence, in an interview process that mistakes processing differences for disengagement. The logic is the same.
Taking a deeper glance, the politician’s statement questions everyone’s right to aspire to public office. How would society react if there was a suggestion to exclude people of a certain ethnic background? Or people of a certain race?
Declaring a group of people to be unfit
for high public office is an unacceptable
statement in democratic systems.
Neurodivergent doesn’t mean less capable
Neurodivergent people do not need advocacy only when they are publicly mocked. They need it in the places where the same assumption quietly operates – in schools that treat academic struggle as a failure of effort rather than a signal to adapt, in workplaces that accommodate neither difference nor disclosure, in systems that define competence narrowly and then declare those who fall outside as lacking.
What happened this week was harmful not
because it was a political attack, but because
it treated a neurological difference as
evidence of general incapacity and proposed
excluding neurodivergent people from elected office.
Considering all neurological difference as incapacitating is factually wrong. And it is the kind of wrongness that, repeated at scale, shapes how neurodivergent people see themselves – and how institutions decide whether to include them.
Dyslexia does not equate to low IQ. It is a different way of processing one specific domain of human experience. The world contains many such differences. Building space for dyslexic people is not an act of charity – it is an act of accuracy, recognizing that the full range of human cognition is broader, stranger, and more capable than any single standardized measure can capture.
Sources
[1] Tanaka, H. et al. (2011). “The Brain Basis of the Phonological Deficit in Dyslexia is Independent of IQ.” Psychological Science. MIT / Stanford University. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797611419521
[2] International Dyslexia Association
https://dyslexiaida.org/dyslexia-basics/
[3] McDowall, A., Doyle, N., & Kiseleva, M. (2023). Neurodiversity at Work: Demand, Supply and a Gap Analysis. Birkbeck University of London.
