I’m Deaf and have “perfect” speech. And I want to stop speaking.

July 8, 2023 6:31 PM

Everywhere I go, people compliment me and say they wouldn’t have known I was Deaf if I hadn’t told them. “They say it kindly, but it’s like they’re giving me a cupcake without realizing there’s a razor blade inside it. […] Once my friends and I have ordered, we sign up a storm, talking about everything and shy about nothing. What would be the point? People are staring anyway. Our language is lavish, our faces alive. My friends discuss the food, but for me, the food is unimportant. I’m feasting on the smorgasbord of communication ― the luxury of chatting in a language that I not only understand 100% but that is a pleasure in and of itself. Taking nothing for granted, I bask in it all, and everything goes swimmingly.”
posted by Bottlecap (19 comments total)

I was worried this article would just be a rant about how dare the entirety of society be so ignorant about the way the author prefers to communicate. It's great to see the productive solution that seems to resolve this for her. As a person with a disability, I've come to accept that there is no way in hell 100% of people will EVER understand disability in general much less the nuances from person to person. It comes with the territory. If I ever feel like taking a day off from the effort of setting expectations, it's also easy (after years of practice) to just not be offended or get annoyed when people with good intentions do something imperfect.
posted by thorny at 7:41 PM on July 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

I was fortunate to take regular evening classes in Sign Language a few years back, to a conversational level at the time. I loved it.

I highly recommend it as another language learning opportunity, especially for those who don't grasp learning other verbal languages all that well.

I've always had a lot of admiration for polyglots, but my head doesn't seem to think that way yet unfortunately.

For me, fresh from learning sign language did mean that when I started working in noisy workshops with everyone wearing ear defenders lots of the time, my brain would think 'well they can't hear me so I'll sign' and I'd get into conversations with them in sign as if this was normal, without remembering again that no-one else there understood sign language so didn't know what I was saying most of the time. Then I'd remember, apologise in sign, remember again, and where applicable revert to more simple implied gestures, like 'you time coffee'.
posted by many-things at 9:34 PM on July 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

we sign up a storm, talking about everything and shy about nothing. What would be the point?

This touches obliquely on an aspect of sign language I haven’t been able to understand or discover whether there's a consensus about: does sign language have sharply demarcated lines around forbidden categories of speech like blasphemy, obscenity, and hate speech such as there are in English?
posted by jamjam at 10:11 PM on July 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

's also easy (after years of practice) to just not be offended or get annoyed when people with good intentions do something imperfect.

A single "oh you don't seem $THING" put me off disclosing stuff about myself for years, so I get where she's coming from. Because I don't really need to disclose, I never got practice dealing with this and chose to just avoid it. In retrospect this was a mistake.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:52 PM on July 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

"If you’re a hearing person, please, when you meet someone who says they can’t hear you, take your cues from them. ... Ask them openly and earnestly and respect their solutions, which they’ll undoubtedly have."

This is such a helpful reminder for me as a hearing person of how to be a better neighbor/friend to Deaf people.

Bottlecap, your posts this month have been so great (and it's only the 9th day of the month!).
posted by mcduff at 6:27 AM on July 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

Near the end of the article, she writes that the correct response to "can you read lips?" is "can you sign?"
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 6:32 AM on July 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

does sign language have sharply demarcated lines around forbidden categories of speech

I don’t know, but I vividly remember being on the Tube one night when a party of six rather drunk deaf people got on and sat opposite. They started kind of giggling and exchanging shall we say disparaging comments about me, and I remember thinking: look, I don’t know sign language, but do you seriously believe I don’t understand that?
posted by Phanx at 6:59 AM on July 9, 2023 [14 favorites]

Thank you for posting this! For those who are interested in the author and her work, she recently published a book on her experience as a Deaf teacher of Deaf children in a mainstream school called the Butterfly Cage.
posted by Toddles at 7:35 AM on July 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have a pretty bad hearing loss in my right ear. I'd say I'm around 70% deaf in that ear, especially with high frequencies. Hard to say exactly, but the loss messes with my ability to hear language even if I can hear stuff in general. It's genetic, I've had it my whole life, but it's worse now that I'm 52.

I sometimes tell people straight out that I am deaf in one ear, like when I start a new job or meet a group of people I'll be hanging out with. Just to let them know I'm not avoiding them or ignoring anyone or being "spaced out." I've actually gotten jokes about it, and sometimes people have laughed about it! I don't get my feelings hurt, nor do I really care. I'll just emphasize that I'm being serous, and I'll explain why i told them that. Sometimes people will still respond in a joking way.

Again, I am thick skinned and I honestly don't care. But it does go to show how our world thinks about hearing. I think most people just don't know how to react, or think that I am the one joking around... like I'm saying I'm a seasoned rock musician who's blown out his ears at too many wild parties and concerts.

I shrug and move on. That's their problem, not mine.
posted by SoberHighland at 7:38 AM on July 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

ASL should be taught to all american kids in school by default. A non-verbal language is obviously incredibly useful in many circumstances. You don't need to care a single ounce about anybody else in the world to see see the benefits of having a way to communicate using signs.

I only include that last line, because most times when I bring this notion up, somebody replies with some diatribe about how it wouldn't be a worthwhile investment or effort because there aren't very many deaf people -- which is ignorant and irritating on it's own, but also entirely besides the point. Even an inconsiderate person like that would benefit from us all knowing a sign language.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:29 AM on July 9, 2023 [20 favorites]

In a similar vein, there was a good documentary on the BBC by Rose Ayling Ellis about her experience as a deaf person - she talks to a wide variety of people in the community about how they prefer to communicate, how they were taught growing up - access to signing seems to be very patchy for deaf kids in the UK. Very interesting for me as a hearing person to learn more about it.
posted by crocomancer at 10:01 AM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I just finished the author’s new book on teaching deaf children in a mainstream school as a Deaf person—her stories are hair-raising. The whole deaf educational edifice in the US works hard to alienate children and their parents from the big-D Deaf community, and it’s a huge and often disabling loss to the children.

The Huffpo article really ties in to her work as someone with multiple perspectives on deafness, and how the Deaf community has insight for adults who don’t necessarily identify or live within the community as a whole. Like, there are perspectives and tactics that Deaf people use that are available to late-deafened or hard-of-hearing people, or like BungaDunga mentioned, to people with other disabilities. The more that gets shared, the better off we all are.

But I also want to point out this cute story she posted a couple months back about her former students, because it rings so true to me as a parent of a deaf kid.
posted by Playdoughnails at 10:18 AM on July 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

My school district had all of the hearing impaired students sent to my high school so there'd be a community instead of isolated smaller groups. (Yes, I know I am using outdated language, but it is the language used at the time.) There was a brief initiative to teach all of the students to sign. The first notable effect was that students started using sign to pass test answers under the desks. (You can't have elaborate conversations, but all you really need is numbers and letters to pass multiple-choice answers from under a desk.) The school ended the initiative immediately.
posted by Karmakaze at 7:56 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

That’s a fucking horrific story, holy shit. One of the most aggressive forms of genocide is denying people access to their language. The sheer audacity of the ableist school.
posted by Bottlecap at 9:00 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you mean my story, the students who came in using ASL continued to use it, and there were ASL interpreters for lecture classes if there was a student in the room who needed it. The initiative that stopped was having every student in the school take basic ASL classes. We were welcome to learn it on our own time. I never got much past the alphabet, a little baby talk and a few rude words I picked up from watching arguments in the hallway, but that's just because that's all I needed to get by.
posted by Karmakaze at 3:15 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh good, I’m glad to hear that all they did was isolate the Deaf students. That’s much better. (It is not.)
posted by Bottlecap at 3:52 PM on July 10, 2023

I mean, did they stop teaching writing so that the other students couldn’t pass notes anymore? How about stopping English instruction?
posted by Bottlecap at 3:54 PM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

I love ASL, I'm just stoopid at learning other languages. I would have killed to have gotten to really learn ASL at school instead of having to halfass around trying to find lessons like I used to.

Also, sign language is hella useful (I note that the Liaden sci-fi series actually has pilots learning some form of sign language), albeit....yeah, kids would do this.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:24 PM on July 10, 2023

Yeah, it wasn't ideal. I just wanted to clarify that ASL was not forbidden. Given that the original plan was to teach sign to all the students as part of the mainstreaming and they did manage to keep some of the sensitivity training (for cheesy 1980's values of that sort of thing) I suspect that there was some conflict in plan-as-approved and plan-as-funded. It's a lot cheaper to give out ditto sheets about why one should not use 'deaf' as a pejorative than pay an additional language teacher. Personally, I thought the administration was vastly overstating the amount of successful cheating going on because if kids could do it without getting caught, the administration wouldn't have known about it.
posted by Karmakaze at 4:33 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]