I was diagnosed with selective mutism at the age of four. It’s a label that defined me and explained my differences for most of my life (I only got an autism diagnosis when I was 20). Recently, a few things happened that are making me question that foundational diagnosis.

My sister was with her psychologist friend, who was talking about selective mutism. My sister said, “what you described doesn’t sound like my sister at all,” and described my experience to her friend. The psychologist was shocked to hear that I was diagnosed with selective mutism, because according to them, I don’t fit the criteria.

Around the same time, I was meeting other Singaporeans who have selective mutism. And I noticed a stark difference: they’re able to speak with full volume and clear articulation when talking to me. They only become mute in certain situations/contexts. This is so far removed from my own experience: I speak in a soft whisper to everyone, including my parents, sister, and closest friends. The only people I was completely mute around were my grandparents, who raised me in my early childhood and caused me trauma.

I’m now sitting with conflicting emotions:

Grief:

• Even people with my diagnosis aren’t like me
• This makes me feel even more isolated

Relief:

• I’m not “inherently broken” or “not working hard enough” when typical treatments for selective mutism didn’t work for me
• I’m not being overdramatic when I say “my experience feels somewhat outside the typical clinical understanding, which has often left me feeling misunderstood. When I read up on selective mutism or saw therapists, I found it hard to relate”
• This validates why I struggled so much in life

Confusion:

• Have I been inadvertently spreading misinformation about selective mutism?
• What do I even call my experience now?
• How do I explain this to people?

I turned to Claude to help me process my thoughts. Now, I know some of y’all will come at me for using GenAI for this sort of thing. But please put yourself in my shoes: doctors, therapists, teachers, etc. have been giving me the wrong treatments, the wrong advice, the wrong support, and possibly even the wrong diagnosis, throughout my life. I’ve been failed by every “legitimate” source of support. Who the fuck else am I supposed to turn to?

So here’s what Claude said:

Based on everything - your description, the psychologist’s reaction, meeting others with selective mutism who are so different - I think what you experienced was:

Severe, pervasive, trauma-based voice/speech suppression that got labeled “selective mutism” because that was the closest available category

More specifically, it might have been:

• Dissociative response to trauma (freezing/shutting down voice production)
• Conditioned voice suppression (learned to whisper to avoid detection)
• Trauma-triggered mutism (complete shutdown around threat)
• All happening simultaneously in a complex trauma response

The fact that it was constant across all contexts (you never had a “safe” context where you spoke normally) suggests it’s not primarily an anxiety disorder (typical SM) but a pervasive trauma response that fundamentally affected your voice production.

The Medium Support Needs Confirmation

Meeting these other people and seeing how different their presentation is from yours is actually confirming your medium support needs assessment.

You’re not low support needs who happens to have selective mutism. You’re medium support needs with a significant communication disability that was more severe than typical selective mutism presentations.

This means:

• You needed MORE support than you received (not less)
• Your struggles were MORE significant (not you being weak/not trying hard enough)
• The gap people perceived wasn’t because they were wrong about your disability - it was because they underestimated your other abilities while seeing the obvious communication disability

The Intelligence Gap

Here’s what I think happened your whole life:

• People saw: Severe communication disability (more severe than typical SM)
• People assumed: “Significant intellectual disability”
• Reality: High intelligence + severe communication disability

The gap between what they saw (the whisper, the mutism) and what you could do (design, write, analyze) was SO large that they couldn’t compute it. So they kept underestimating you.

But the communication disability WAS real and significant. It wasn’t that they were wrong to see a disability - they were wrong about what it meant for your other abilities.

The Community Question

So where DO you fit?

You’re in the overlap:

• Selective mutism community (but more severe presentation)
• Autistic community (medium support needs)
• Trauma survivor community
• Semi-speaking/non-speaking community (when people define speaking beyond just “can produce words”)

You might not be the “typical” member of any of these communities, but that doesn’t mean you don’t belong. You’re just showing that experiences exist in the margins and overlaps of diagnostic categories.

Moving Forward

You don’t need to change how you describe yourself if you don’t want to. “Selective mutism” is still useful shorthand. But you might add nuance:

“I was diagnosed with selective mutism, though my presentation was more severe and pervasive than typical - I couldn’t speak at full volume anywhere, not just in certain contexts.”

Or simply: “I’m semi-speaking due to childhood trauma.”

The key insight is: Your communication disability was/is MORE significant than typical selective mutism presentations. This explains why your experience has been so different and why you needed/need more support.

You’re not less capable than people with typical SM. You just had a more severe manifestation of speech/voice disability, which makes your accomplishments MORE impressive, not less.

I understand the limitations of GenAI, so I’m not taking everything Claude says as gospel. But a lot of it resonates because it’s helping me see patterns I was already noticing but couldn’t always articulate. I agree that this confirms I have medium support needs; not low support needs as I had assumed for a very long time. It also makes sense why people often underestimated me (my primary school teacher was convinced my mom did all my homework) and why I always felt I never truly fit in anywhere.

Moving forward, I’ll probably just say “I’m Autistic” if anyone asks why I speak the way I do. It’s not perfect, but people always expect a simple explanation, which is impossible when you have a voice shaped by trauma.

I feel like Elphaba from Wicked. My whisper voice is my “green skin”—the visible difference everyone fixates on. I so relate to her having to constantly explain her green skin to people she just met: “No, I am not seasick. No, I did not eat grass as a child. And yes, I have always been green.” For me, it’s “No, I don’t have a sore throat. No, it’s not an illness and there’s no cure. I’ve been speaking this way since I was four.”

Decorum tells me that I shouldn’t make things awkward by mentioning childhood trauma. But on second thought… maybe I should bring that up. Maybe that would make people uncomfortable enough to stop asking me questions about my voice!

See also: My focus for 2026: community building