Some people thought I was a weird little kid. I liked microscopes instead of Barbies and the closest I got to playing house was building a fort and persuading a friend to pick wheat and grind it into flour with rocks. I collected bugs and shells, delighting in knowing their names and cataloging my collections. One birthday early on, I really really wanted to ask my friends to give me notebooks and pens for gifts. For Christmas, I asked my family to give me gift certificates to Hickory Farms, which fascinated me because it was the only place I knew that had so many different kinds of cheese. One family vacation, I ate nothing but hashbrowns and hot chocolate at every restaurant where we stopped.

Eventually, though, I figured out how to mask it well enough to be a fifth grade cheerleader and high school student body president. Yet I did also gravitate toward the groups and activities that had a bit wider latitude for weird: speech and debate, drama, newspaper. I became a college professor, another place where there’s a bit more leeway.

This is why I can’t go along with calling Trump and Vance “weird.” They are much less like the weird kid I was (am) and much more like the bullies hurling that epitaph to disparage (and yes, using language like that definitely made me a weird kid, in fact, still risks making me sound weird in some circles). Trump and Vance are mean, and that’s different. The weird little kid I was didn’t seek to exclude others—more than anything, I wanted others to share my interests and I worked quite hard to figure out what it was “normal” to like and do so that I could try to emulate that to get along.

A column I read yesterday in the newspaper was delighted that “weird” seems to have some traction. Apparently calling Trump a bully or a fascist doesn’t bother him because it still makes him sound powerful. Calling him “weird” hurts because it’s marginalized. So to elect a government that might actually do things to help the weird kids, I have to pretend to be “normal” and get on board with using “weird” as an insult. There’s lots I like about Tim Walz but I’m hoping that naming him the VP today doesn’t mean more of the “weird” comments. I’d rather follow Michelle Obama’s advice about how to deal with bullies: “When they go low, we go high.” Enough with the name calling.