Gifted education's embrace of OE aimed at protecting intense children from psychiatric pathologization. The strategy had paradoxical effects: it validated intensity in children labeled gifted while reinforcing pathological interpretations for children with similar traits who lacked that label. The same behaviors—emotional volatility, sensory sensitivity, social difficulty—could be understood as giftedness in one context and disorder in another. It's time to break out of this binary. Intensity doesn't belong to one group, and it doesn't need a gifted label to be worth understanding.