Except that that’s not true in the X-books. There’s a lot of stories where mutants who don’t hang with the X-Men or the Brotherhood (or X-Force, X-Factor, The Acolytes, etc) - mutants who, in fact, just try to keep their hands down and be normal people, suffering abuse for being mutants - in fact, that’s part of the backstory of a significant portion of the characters in those books.
The assumption of the public, in the X-books, is that anyone who looks funny, or displays special powers, is a mutant. The only exceptions I can think of are Nightcrawler who was misidentified as a demon, and Wolfsbane who was assumed to be possessed - both because their specific mutations suggested something else.
The assumption of the public in Avengers or Spiderman or whatever, is that anyone who displays special powers, or looks funny, is a supersoldier, or had an accident with gamma rays, or etc.
It’s an inconsistancy across the titles.
To a certain extent, it’s understandable: The X-books deal with mutants who set out to improve the lot of mutants, and the villains - mutant and otherwise - who set their cause back, so they’ll deal with anti-mutant discrimination more directly.
The non-X-books don’t, so they won’t.
The problem is, it’s not even THERE.
J Jonah Jameson never speculates if Spider-Man might be a mutant. Nobody ever tells the avengers they should be dealing with the mutant menace - or with the rabid anti-mutant types. Peter Parker never photographs anti-mutant demonstrations. Since they’re not X-books, anti-mutant types simply don’t exist, as far as you’d know if you only read, say, Avengers or Spider-man.
Conversely, nobody ever sees Caliban and wonders if he had a runin with a gamma bomb. People didn’t think Jubilee’s powers might have been tech-based or mystical. Leech is never mistaken for an alien. Since they’re mutants in X-books, they’re easily identifiable.
