I feel like Simpo and his Usual Suspects fake limp need to be incorporated into it.
Whether 'Simpo' is actually a real person or just a character Jessica has created, I think he says something about her worldview.
She paints a clear picture of someone with learning difficulties or other additional needs when she describes his ban from using anything sharper than plastic safety scissors, the limp, and the sleeves that were soggy from constant chewing. As an academic psychologist I carried out a lot of my research with vulnerable young people. Reading that anecdote, my first thought was to wonder whether 'Simpo' was targeting someone with an obvious marker of vulnerability (the baby in the pram) because it happened to be more prominent than his own. It's pretty clear from the contempt with which JT writes about him that he was bullied himself - if bad treatment of 'Simpo' and people like him hadn't been normalised, she wouldn't be able to sneer at him without realising that it doesn't actually make her look like the bigger person in that situation. Kids who have been bullied don't automatically become bullies themselves; that's a very crude oversimplification. But if they lack the linguistic and/or emotional vocabulary to describe their own experiences and make sense of how they feel, if they haven't grown up in a consistently safe, nurturing environment with caring relatives and skilled professionals to help them them fill in those blanks, then yes, they're at greater risk of becoming bullies too. I've met quite a few 'Simpos': young people who just couldn't grasp that it might be possible to have a relationship when they weren't at risk of being scapegoated, and who believed that the only way to draw fire away from the target on their own backs was to try and stick a target on someone else's. It wasn't something they did consciously, but this is how they experienced the world.
Would I blame teenage Jessica Taylor for not understanding that? No, because she was a kid herself. But I think it's reasonable to expect someone who markets herself as a "leading trauma-informed psychologist" to understand it, and to show a little more compassion and insight than she has in that excerpt. Why does she even bring up the features that marked Simpo out as 'different'? It's certainly not part of any thoughtful exploration of how working class kids with SEN are failed by almost every system they come into contact with. It's to show off how sassy and resilient she was as a teenager. That line basically reads as, "Even when I got bullied for being a teenage mum, I didn't feel inferior or ashamed. I just thought about Simpo's obvious disability and wondered how come the sp*zzy r*tard got to drive! Haha."
Then, as if working class disabled people don't get accused of being lying benefit-scrounging leeches often enough, she announces that doctors had found his limp was faked "for attention". (There is no mention of how she would know this - were the local GPs were so in awe of Jessica's prodigious intellect that they were calling her in to share the details of all their patients and get her personal take?) Even if there was no physical cause for his limp, any psychologist worth their salt should know that people with cognitive disabilities sometimes develop psychosomatic physical conditions. There are multiple possible reasons for that, but the simplest - and saddest - is that intellectual disability carries such a painful stigma that people can end up taking refuge behind a problem that feels more acceptable, or at least easier to bear. This doesn't make them fakers. Even if the cause isn't organic, it's a manifestation of genuine distress that needs actual treatment from an actual trauma-informed clinician.
Even if 'Simpo' is just a figment of her imagination, he still exposes her lack of psychological knowledge or capacity to reflect, because the way she's framed that anecdote makes it very clear that she thinks this is a perfectly acceptable way to talk about people like him. A lot of ignorance and prejudice on display here, Jess.
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