In Spain, the authors theorized, Little People are viewed more like what researchers call “deviants,” or outsiders who don’t join forces with their own kind, preferring instead to try to integrate into the larger population. In the U.S., meanwhile, Little People are more like “classical minorities”—outsiders who proudly link arms with others in their group to fight off discrimination from the broader world. It’s not just Little People that make this choice: Some deaf people learn sign language; others get cochlear implants. Some overweight people love their size; others labor desperately to lose weight.

Both paths—uniting with other outsiders or going your own way—are equally valid, and which to pursue is a matter of individual preference. The psychologist Nyla Branscombe and her colleagues write322 that a more independent coping strategy—say, getting limb-lengthening surgery—might help the individual, but it doesn’t really help the marginalized group they’re part of. Drawing closer to the stigmatized group, meanwhile, might ultimately help the group, but in the process, it could attract even more discrimination and hostility to the individual.

However, as Branscombe and the other authors of the limb-lengthening study point out, it’s easier to have a positive self-concept as a Little Person if you rally around fellow Little People, rather than get the surgery. “When the option of concealing the dwarfing condition prevails, it may be rather difficult for the affected young person to develop a positive self-concept as a person with dwarfism,” they write, “especially if he or she knows that most of the people like him/her conceal the stigmatized characteristic through a long and arduous surgical process.” It’s hard to feel good about something you’re trying to hide.

Michael, for what it’s worth, has no shame about his height. In fact, it infuriates him that it’s considered socially acceptable to ridicule someone because of their stature. The m-word, midget, “curls the back of my hair,” he told me. He’d rather see society change than change himself. (He once went so far as to reprimand a seven-year-old who stared at him in an airport.)

As I interviewed different types of outsiders, it became clear that many had grappled with the decision of whether to try to blend in, or whether to stay noticeably different. As the Little People of America activist Colleen Gioffreda put it to the Associated Press in 2001,323 in voicing opposition to limb-lengthening surgery, “Do you just go along with the crowd or teach people difference is okay?”

She seemed to have meant it rhetorically, but it’s an important choice, with major ramifications for a person’s identity.