fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3125 ]

[ SECRET POST #3125 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3125 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 066 secrets from Secret Submission Post #447.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It is a disease, not a community.

Um, no? I'm deaf because of my congenital genetic disorder, not a disease. And the Deaf community is legitimately a community. Soooo 0/10?

Do you think most people care about the difference between a disorder and disease, lets just use the lay meaning and leave the hair splitting behind us. The deaf "community" is a response to the disease, to ameliorate its effects. If it starts retarding efforts to cure deafness instead of helping the sufferers bear it, and try and work around it, then the community has become as much a problem as deafness itself.

God dammit I want to agree with you (I'm deaf too for those of you just tuning in) but you're phrasing everything in such amazingly douchey ways.

If a cure was found for kids in-utero then it changes from helping a deaf person navigate a mostly hearing world, to essentially deliberately deafening a child so the parents feel more a connection with them. It makes the parents have a closer connection, but it means the kid is going to go through a lot of hell and isolation they wouldn't need to. That is just cruel. That is how I see it.

Yeah, I actually agree with that (and thank you for wording it so much better than AIRT.) I'm mostly just reminded of an apocryphal story I heard years ago where a deaf woman gave birth to a hearing baby and stuck pencils in her baby's ears to make it deaf. I'm not sure the story is true, but I know a lot of deaf people who think it's okay and I wish I didn't.

Wow. I really hope that is just an urban legend (to Snopes!), but that people actually think it would be cool if it happened is scary.

Yeah, that's the problem with the deaf community. What started off as a need for solidarity in the face of discrimination has now become a very insular group that just as easily tears down its members as it fights against ableism that isn't always there.

It is scary to think you might no longer be needed, but then you have to take a step back and remember why you were needed in the first place. Not just for deaf support groups, but for a great many groups, do you learn to let go and move on or do you perpetuate the same status quo that you formed to help cope with, just to avoid that fear of change? For some people that means also going from being a big noise in a small pond to just another fish like everyone else on the reef. It can be a real loss of status too.

Re: DA

dethtoll - 2015-07-25 22:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: DA

(Anonymous) - 2015-07-25 22:15 (UTC) - Expand

Re: DA

dethtoll - 2015-07-25 22:16 (UTC) - Expand

....I personally think (I may be wrong) the residential schools played a big part in the psychological...issues...Deaf people have, IMO. After all, look at the results the residential schools had on the (undisabled) First Nations kids; there are/have been documented intergenerational effects (i.e., the kids of the kids who went to residential school but never went themselves, are affected). Especially Deaf children who were forced to be oral, but then not really given the proper tools to be able to function in society, and still isolated from wider society, after they got out of the schools.

holy fucking fuck

fuck

AYRT

That "hell and isolation" (it's really really not, trust me) can be fixed, by fixing societal attitudes towards the D/deaf, IMO. But that's too much to ask, let's stick cochlear implants in their ears that will give them robot hearing instead! (Just frex.) So that's the Deaf community's position on it.

OTOH, if the parents are hearing and want to mainstream their kid, raise their kid auditory-verbal (hello, this would be me), I can tell you with absolute certainty, that it was/is not my deafness that has irritated me/stopped me from doing anything in this life; it has been societal attitudes towards my being deaf (as opposed to seeing me as a person first and foremost) that has caused me the most irritation.

Example, "My brother had an operation and he was completely cured and didn't need hearing aids anymore! You should get the same operation!" Cue ten minutes of back-and-forthing, and this idiot's refusal to understand I AM NOT LIKE YOUR BROTHER, and you have a typical example from my life. The mouthbreather was absolutely too stupid to comprehend any kind of explanation, and I was never going to see him again, anyway; but it wasn't my being deaf that was the barrier in that example, it was the other person's attitude towards my being deaf.

Yeah, I get that it's nuanced. And I mostly support auditory-verbal therapy, and I know that, even if I lose what's left of my residual hearing, I'll never be a member of the Deaf community, even though I'm deaf. I still don't think it's right to make a decision for an unborn child, either way (that's the key phrase right there) as to whether they will be Deaf or hearing. That's getting into "designer baby" territory like whoa. From both sides.

I was like you - mainstreamed in the late 1970s onward. It was apparently the "standard" of that era, though I am given to understand that since the late 1980s/early 1990s it has been more common to not push mainstreaming as hard.

For me though it was absolutely vital, I think. Being able to function auditory-verbal allows me to communicate in ways that are utterly blocked to me on occasions when I can't do that (for example in loud multiple conversations, I'm stuck and sometimes have to shut off my hearing aids).

But yeah, I've had people be total dicks to me back in my school years over having HAs; since going to university it hasn't been as much of an issue though.

...only I'm not suffering, just because I'm deaf. It would be the same thing as me saying to you, "you're suffering because you have blue eyes, and we should eradicate all the blue eyes from people".

But you're legit trolling now, so w/e bro.

NAYRT

But blue eyes don't confer any benefit or disadvantage.

Deafness does.

Deafness can get you killed - for example, simply by not being able to hear a warning.

I don't know of ANYONE whose lost their hearing who doesn't wish for it back.

Someone who is born without legs is not less disabled than someone who had them blown off or lost them in a car crash.

I never lost my hearing, though. I just never had as much of the standard quota from the beginning. As for not hearing warnings, well, I'm not deaf-BLIND you see, I can tell when people are acting differently around me...if a large number of people are running in one direction, or pointing at something and yelling, it's pretty clear, even to a deaf person, it's time to get outta Dodge.

SA

Let me put succinctly: Disadvantage and suffering are polar opposites. I may have some of the former, but I have none of the latter. Does that make sense?

Except... Blue eyed people don't have a disability? Are you sure you're not the one that's trolling?

SA

Just for reference, so others understand where I'm coming from, I would take a "miracle cure" for my arthritis in a heartbeat. Being deaf? Nah. I've made a good life for myself, and my deafness has about as much bearing on that as my eye colour does. IOW, it doesn't.

But do you have the right to choose that for others? Such as your own child?

Because while you say you'd be fine it, I have to tell you that if someone, say, purposefully damaged my brother's eardrums so that he lost his hearing, it would take all of my willpower not to kill them in retaliation.

And you can say, "it's not a big deal, he can make a good life for himself and his deafness will have as much bearing on his life as his eye color" but that is ZERO comfort. It's absolutely DEVASTATING to lose your hearing. Even if he lost it at a young age, before he had memory of it.

I'm happy you've found a good life. But I also think the phrase "you don't know what you're missing" is very applicable as well.

AYRT

But do you have the right to choose that for others? Such as your own child?

No, I don't, nor does my child. That's what I'm trying to say. If my child chooses, as an adult, to have purple eyes, then they have the free will to make that choice. Or to be hearing versus deaf.

It's absolutely DEVASTATING to lose your hearing. Even if he lost it at a young age, before he had memory of it.

Your first sentence makes sense, your second sentence doesn't. Technically, I "lost" my hearing during cell division in my mother's womb. That's long before I had memory of it, and I'm here to tell you, that's not devastating.

Hearing people losing their hearing is devastating, because they haven't had a lifetime of living with it. They're so unprepared, that it is devastating. But that's a completely different situation from someone (like me) who is born deaf.

But I also think the phrase "you don't know what you're missing" is very applicable as well.

...and this would be a prime example of the societal devaluing of a person with a disability (in my case, my being deaf).

Or, to spout an old cliche, "My life is different, NOT deficient!"

As someone who is losing their hearing slowly in their mid-30s I have to agree with you. It IS devastating. Yes its happening slowly due to a brain condition that comes ans goes, but having just received my first hearing aid and realizing how much I was missing that 10 years ago I could hear, I cried. I missed hearing paper rustling and the sound of socked feet walking in a home. But in a way I didnt realize I wasnt hearing that until I could again, and finding out its not reversable has been devastating - I actually need an aid in each ear but cant afford it. And now getting used to it, the batteries, things that people who have had a hearing aid their whole life maybe dont even think about is a real challenge for me.

Add to that I have other physical disabilities (the aforementioned brain condition, chronic pain, arthritis of the cspine just to name a couple), and mental illnesses including PTSD and MDD and GAD with 4 other anxiety related conditions) I have had longer to get used to the rest. This needing a hearing aid or I cant hear conversations in the room with me is new, and I am having a really really hard time adjusting to it. Much harder than all the other conditions I have. And I dont even know why. But anyway sorry for rambling, youre right is my point, it is devastating and also hard to handle when it happens to someone who had normal hearing until recently. I love my aid because it makes everything so much easier to hear but amazingly, I love turning it off when things get too loud just as much and I wonder if thats normal...

Good for you! That's great.

DA

I would take it on one condition - I could still "turn off" my hearing when I wanted to.

I disagree on the statement that a disorder is the same as a disease. It's simply incorrect.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #3125 ]

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