Please don’t mock or berate people who thought that T’Nia Miller was being genuine in her Cameo video.

For many neurodivergent people, inferring someone’s intentions or meaning from their words alone can be difficult, so we rely on indications of tone to communicate this (1/6)

In T’Nia’s video, she suggested that she knew who the new Doctor was, and pretended to say their pronouns by mistake.

As she didn’t exhibit any outward behaviour associated with joking, such as winking, laughing, saying “I’m kidding” etc many of us took this at face value (2/6)

Neurotypical people often intend to communicate more meaning through their words than the words themselves contain, and sometimes the silliness of the words may itself be a source of humour. “There’s an elephant sat on the car” is meant to be funny because it’s ludicrous (3/6)

Neurodivergent people may take words more as communicated. If someone says there’s an elephant sat on the car, we don’t pause to ponder the probability of it being true & determine if there’s humour to be derived from its unlikeliness. We wonder where the elephant came from (4/6)

So, in this case, for a neurotypical person, the silliness of the words may have indicated that T’Nia was joking. “She wouldn’t have been allowed to say that so it MUST be a joke” or “the idea of her dropping classified info on Cameo is so ludicrous it must be pretend!” (5/6)

But for a neurodivergent person, we saw someone delivering information in a convincing way, so we believed her.

Our brains are just wired differently, something intuitive to you, may not be to someone else.

It’s not stupidity, or naivety, so please be kind. (6/6)

Side note: The elephant sat on the car story is from a genuine story called “Elephants Don’t Sit on Cars” where an autistic character called Jeremy James tries in vain to explain to his family that there is actually an elephant sat on the car and they assume he’s joking.