Asked of me on Quora, 18 September,2021

“Is everybody normal?”

Yes, human beings have always had differences of many kinds, from the unnoticeable to the obvious. Since this has always been true, and is very likely to always be true, yes, everyone is “normal”.
When someone is deemed “different”, or “abnormal”, the people making the judgement are using societal mental constructs, depending on who they’ve grown up around, and then other social, peer-influences they’ve adopted in their lives, so far. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention childhood trauma that can cause people to have an irrational “sore spot”, or in modern vernacular, a “trigger”.
Almost always, when someone is judged to be “different” or “abnormal”, that judgement is entirely a subjective judgement by the person doing the judging.
Even scientists and medical professionals are sometimes wrong because of subjective, opinion-based judgements. That’s why, in real science, conclusions reached from any kind of scientific study are not considered valid until there has been peer-review and independent replication of the experiment in question, a “p factor of 0.05 or less.
Many people adopt opinions that they have grown up with, or have 'bought into’, considering those opinions to be “fact", and extremely resistant to having their error explained to them.
When a person tires of learning, because they crave the comfort of “certainty”, they close their minds' to anything that would upset…