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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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chapotraphouse
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There are a lot of hearing people who say this, I believe that Deaf people actually see this type of utterance as an incredibly, outright tediously cliché thing to say... Yet I wonder how many hearing people have actually taken the time to really think about why hearing is important to them personally, and actually attempted to imagine what they would do without their hearing, as opposed to just saying "I can't imagine" upfront. Now this is obviously not to say that there is anything wrong with valuing one's own hearing, I'm not exactly going around blasting airhorns into my ears 24/7 desperately trying to make myself deaf — but it is just a fact that a lot of hearing people go around with audist brainworms, that make them not think about d/Deafness soberly, as it were.
If I were to lose my own hearing I honestly think I'd gain just as much as I'd lose — Deaf people actually have a term for this I know, "Deaf Gain" they say.
This being said, obviously there are some number of d/Deaf people who think of (their own) deafness as a disability, just as there are neurodivergent people who think of (their own) neurodivergence as a disability. What sets Deafness apart as a cultural identity separate from disability is the shared history, the passed-down stories and values and traditions, and the languages unique to Deaf people, that make them advocate for themselves as a language minority — but cultural Deafness and medical deafness do not form a perfectly circular Venn diagram, hence why people often write d/Deaf rather than just deaf or just Deaf.
I think it is always important to recognize that no group is a monolith and there is going to be a breadth of opinion in all forms of advocacy. I am autistic myself and personally don't really have a strong opinion at this point about whether or not ASD "is" a disability. There are certainly aspects of autism that are just a matter of someone being a little different and society deciding to take issue with that for no good reason, but there are also aspects of autism that actually are disabling — and autism being a spectrum, I think that some people will naturally understand themselves more in terms of the non-disabling but still pathologized aspects of autism, and others will understand themselves more in the disabling aspects. So the relevant question is maybe less "Is autism a disability?" and more "When is autism a disability?", those are my two kopeks.
Thanks for your input, I agree. I actually do have reasoning why I don’t want to be deaf. It’s my AuDHD. I think I’m the auditory equivalent of hyperlexic. I can process very fast words and stuff and I have constant internal and external echolalia. Music is always playing in my head and I make a lot of noises and stuff. Hearing is like my most important sense. Podcasts and music are huge coping mechanisms. When I’m understimulated the only thing that can make me feel ok is simultaneously physical activity and music. I don’t think I could survive a world without headphones. I also need to multitask while I listen to people. It would be an interesting experience but I suspect were I deaf I would simply be understimulated all the time. I’m really curious what that would do for echolalia.
I’m the type to tend to the former and even thinking like I’m superior, but given further thought I notice all the many accommodations I’m lucky to have, and how much I’ve struggled and the problems I still face. Thinking about it dialectically, it’s a plain truth that comparing any two things there will be relative positive and negative aspects, and even those aren’t isolated. I don’t wish I was neurotypical, but I can’t say I’m not disabled. At the end of the day, “disabled” is a sort of excuse that is helpful for getting people the help they need.
I could write a lot more thoughts, but since it's late and I've got stuff to do tomorrow, I'd rather just give you a few specific questions to reflect on:
I have no idea what being deaf would actually be like. If it’s partial I’m already used to finding difficulty hearing things sometimes, so I imagine it would be a bit like my experience with derealization.
Yeah, if shit hits the fan and I don’t have music or the internet that would suck. Also, I could dissociate again. I could be put in a situation forced to mask and “pay attention.”
I mean it does seem like it would be harder to multitask and absorb information. Of course books are things, but my ADHD doesn’t like that I’m an average reader.
I must admit that deafness would have some personal upsides too. I could focus without paying attention to annoying sounds. I could just get stimulants and be fine. My other senses would get more stimulating. Not sure what the echolalia would do or if I could make noises without knowing if it was at a volume people could hear. Suppose I could sign words to stim.
I’d never really thought about going deaf before, thank you. I do stand by the statement that it is a “disability” because it makes certain things harder and requires accommodations, but I don’t pity the deaf.
There's plenty of resources out there if you ever become curious about how Deaf people live, accessibility for Deaf people, or what Deaf culture is like or how it intersects with this or that. I try to share the interesting things I stumble upon, I even suggested making a /c/deaf here on Hexbear and this suggestion was met well — but it seems like progress on making that community a reality has stalled, unfortunately.
I already now stim by fingerspelling random words or phrases I hear or see or that pop into my head, so you don't need to be Deaf to do this, necessarily. For me I find this is a nice way to quench the urge of vocal stims without being too noisy, and I get to practice fingerspelling to boot.
Deaf people do generally place some limits on how hearing people can use sign languages, but I don't think what I'm doing with my stimming is a faux pas, necessarily. I've only heard Deaf people complain about things that are really pretty obvious like "don't teach a sign language if it's not your first language", "don't interpret without a certification", and "don't give yourself a sign name, nor beg Deaf people to give you one" — or, I say these things are "obvious", but there are still myriad criminally unqualified hearies teaching broken sign, myriad Thamsanqa Jantjies going "HELLO CIRCLE SMOKING doaisjdasfnadaskda CIRCLE SMOKING HELLO SMOKING HELLO CIRCLE aduhuasdanssz", and myriad hearies being exactly as annoying to Deaf people about getting a sign name, as they probably also are to Natives about getting a "sacred indigenous spiritual name, preferably something to do with hawks or eagles because they're cool".
Most people don't, but I do think it is something that's worth thinking about more often. I think that Deaf people are often kind of neglected in leftist spaces, and I think this is a shame, because Deaf people have a lot of struggles that should be fought for in solidarity by hearing people, and that hearing people of different marginalized groups can see themselves in and learn from. I think that a part of remedying the lack of awareness or consideration for Deaf people might be for people to better understand that anyone can become deaf, and that you might've even met a Deaf person before without realizing — I myself met a Deaf woman who I didn't realize was Deaf literally for months, despite seeing her basically every day, because she fully hid her CI behind her hair and she didn't open up to anyone about being Deaf for fear of the hearies being weird about it. I learned my lesson then and there that even if I had unlearned the "cishet is default" attitude, that I still had not unlearned the equally harmful "hearing is default" attitude. Audist society is set up in such a way that for the hearing, the Deaf are "out of sight, out of mind" — that is, like many other marginalized groups, the Deaf are turned into a one-or-two-sentence abstract concept to be at most debated between members of the hegemonic group, or more often wholly unacknowledged. This is my thought, and this is why it's important to fight against the "hearing is default" attitude and the thought patterns this attitude manifests as.