road-trip-girl

hit with the gay baseball bat

hi. i'm hanging out. i like fire emblem and comics and stories and women. i don't post very often.

i am over 18


my neocities website
road-trip-girl.neocities.org

scoliwings
@scoliwings
Comic panel of a deaf person sharing their culture with hearing people. The deaf person thinks, 'It's so nice to share my culture!', smiling brightly. Someone asks, 'What if you just got a cure? What if your culture died out? Wouldn't that be better?' The deaf person's shock is palpable. 'Why don't you and your people just die?' The two of them are surrounded by textual snippets of deaf history, which is largely depressing. A pause. Then the deaf person tackles the hearing person to the ground, thinking, 'Who the FUCK do you think YOU are?' The tackled screams out in silence in the darkness. ... stay calm, the deaf person thinks. Be nice and polite. 'That's genocide,' they respond, worn out.

This is a question I get a lot, usually after sharing that I am deaf and I do not speak English. Deaf people get this in general. We've likely been asked this thousands of times in our lifetimes.

Most people treat it as a casual, sometimes playful question. Like it's something that would have a "why, yes, I'd love to be hearing!" answer. As if it's obvious that everyone who's ever deaf or disabled should simply choose to be abled. As if it's even remotely easy to get that kind of treatment, to simply learn a language you've never even heard, to simply have your ears altered to take on a small, artificial fraction of the full range of hearing people have.

I've been asked that question so much that it all sounds like "Why don't you just die?" to me.

I'm used to shrugging it off and I constantly educate people about deaf culture and accessibility and why these kinds of questions are wrong. Now, I'm surrounded by people who defend me if this is asked. It's a nice balm to the decades of isolation and pain I've been through, particularly when I rarely find any deaf people online or in person.


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in reply to @scoliwings's post:

I have a severe hearing disability (right ear is completely deaf and the left is at about 30%) that came on suddenly a while ago. Thank you for writing this and the part “…to simply have your ears altered to take on a small, artificial fraction of the full range of hearing people have” hit me like a brick because that’s exactly how it feels to use a hearing aid.

I was born deaf with Deaf parents who didn't see the need to have me use hearing aids, but I learned about how they and cochlear implants really worked in a class at college. It was a surprise to me, but I used to wear hearing aids in childhood (gave up on them) and from what I've heard about deaf kids and adults alike throwing them to the ground... it makes sense. I'm glad this resonated with you, and I hope you're doing well.

This hits amazingly close to being autistic in public as well, but I don't want to hijack your post. So, solidarity. I wish I knew how to make people understand that being different doesn't immediately equate to forever suffering.

Funnily enough, I'm autistic too! I don't know what it's like to be hearing and autistic, but being deaf and autistic is like... hearies look at me and think my weirdness is because of the deafness, deafies look at me and think my weirdness is because of the autism. Might make a comic about that sometime.

Oh jeez I can only imagine. It's enough for me being autistic and having an audio processing disorder. Sometimes even though I can hear people it just sounds like syllable salad instead of words and that's even more frustrating. They get even madder when you ask them to enunciate and yeah.. it's a whole deal.
That does sound like a heck of a comic idea on your part.

Everything you said here is exceptionally well said and good and just reminds me how it's entirely possible and practical for people to learn sign and they just don't, and like, there's an entire part of my home's history that is just, extinct specifically because of that ableism.

we wish you only the best, thank you for your post