Ok, you're deaf, why be an asshole about it? (Gallaudet)

[Lemur866]

Couple things. First of all, cochlear implants don’t cure deafness. They are a very limited tool. I don’t have a problem with them, but a problem can arise when you get parents who think that they just need to get their kid a cochlear implant and that’s it. Trouble is, even with a cochlear implant the kid is always going to struggle with understanding spoken language.

Next thing, I disagree with Subway Prophet about learning two languages. Of course learning two languages in early development is beneficial! This is the tragedy of deaf education being played out again. The most pernicious idea in deaf education is that if you allow the kids to sign, you’ll ruin their ability to learn oral and written english. And this is complete balderdash and it has ruined lives and turned a lot of “Deaf Culture” people into unreasonable assholes. Learning both english and ASL is the best of both worlds, and unless your child is multiply handicapped it is the ideal. Deaf illiteracy isn’t caused by kids learning sign, it’s caused by them never learning english, and they never learned english because they couldn’t hear, and the methods used to try to teach them english were total failures.

See, the big problem with deaf education is that something like 95% of deaf kids are born to hearing parents. And the trouble is that hearing parents often have no clue what to do. So…they fall into some school of thought, from the first deaf educator they find who makes sense to them. Forbid signing? OK, now our kid will grow up normal! Yeah! Except it doesn’t work. The reason deaf education is so politicized is that deaf people almost never are allowed to make critical decisions about deaf education until too late. So you get people who were sent off to boarding schools as very young children, where their hands were literally tied so they could not sign, and those kids learned to sign to each other secretly, is it any wonder those kids grew up with an all-consuming identification of ASL and their community, plus an oversized chip on their shoulder about the decisions foisted on them?

And so the opposition to cochlear implants, which logically make no sense. But given the history of deaf education, there are a lot of deaf people with the fixed idea that all hearing educators of the deaf are idiots. And that until deaf people control deaf education the result will be disaster. But of course, this will never work, because the people who must ultimately make the decisions about deaf education are those hearing parents of deaf kids. The best deaf adults can do is offer guidance backed by evidence about what methods bring the best results. But there are very few deaf adults who are in a position, academically or emotionally, to do this.

And so it will always be a contentious issue that doesn’t apply to any other disability, because deafness creates a linguistic barrier between parents and children, and sign language inevitably creates a community. Seeing parents of blind kids might to understand all the issues a blind kid might face, but they can at least TALK to their blind kid, unlike many hearing parents of deaf kids.

[lizardling]

@Leviosaurus

Your Internet Search abilities exceed my own, but your coding abilities stink. Here’s the link to the bullet point list of grievances: http://news.gufssa.com/2006/10/18/letter-from-clerc-center-staff/

If even a small fraction of these are true, Fernandes should have been fired ages ago. I’m surprised no one has sued. Stripping teachers of tenure without proper oversight? Verbally abusing people who came to her for guidance? No wonder the school protested her so vehemently.

Thanks for the link, lizardling

My coding abilities suck? Oh yeah? Well, you suck too!

Seriously, thanks for fixing the link – I could’ve sworn it looked OK when I previewed. :smack:

I had a similar reaction when I read that list of grievances – if they’re valid, then why on earth is this woman still around, let alone advocated for president of anything?

[Leviosaurus]

@lizardling

My coding abilities suck? Oh yeah? Well, you suck too!

Seriously, thanks for fixing the link – I could’ve sworn it looked OK when I previewed. :smack:

I had a similar reaction when I read that list of grievances – if they’re valid, then why on earth is this woman still around, let alone advocated for president of anything?

Sorry if I was brusque. I am genuinely envious of your Internet Search abilities - I consider mine to be pretty advanced, yet I was unable to find that site. I bow to your search-fu.

[lizardling]

@Leviosaurus

Sorry if I was brusque. I am genuinely envious of your Internet Search abilities - I consider mine to be pretty advanced, yet I was unable to find that site. I bow to your search-fu.

No worries – this is the Pit after all.

[Miller]

@Jenny Haniver

Because deaf people who claim there is nothing wrong with them are deluded.

This is a pet peeve of mine. Deaf people who insist there’s nothing wrong with themselves are not deluded, unless they are convinced that they can actually hear. They are perfectly aware of their abilities and the extent of their sensory perceptions. They’re simply expressing a preference for the suite of sensory abilities they have, a preference with which you disagree. You’ve got some damn good reasons to disagree with them, no argument on that score from me. But the fact that they have different preferences than you does not make them delusional.

They have an organ which demonstrably does not work - the ear.

So do you - the appendix. It just happens that it doesn’t work for anybody. If someone figured out a way to make the appendix do whatever the hell it used to do, would you feel compelled to take the treatment to rejuvenate your appendix, or would you not see much need to get something you’ve been perfectly fine living without your entire life?

The penises and vaginas of gay people are still functional - rather, the gay community takes flack for what they do with their (functioning) genitals. It’s not the same at all - I can’t believe you are honestly having trouble distinguishing these concepts.

No, we take flack because a lot of people think homosexuality is a mental disability. Our genitals work fine, but a lot of homophobes are convinced our brains are disfunctional. col_10022’s analogy is remarkably apt. Much like the homosexual community, the deaf community is almost entirely defined by how they differ from the mainstream. This tends to lead people in those communities to build a large portion of their own self-image around that difference. When someone proposes a way to eliminate the difference between the mainstream and the minority group, this will be received by those who have built their identities around their difference as an attempt to eliminate them as individuals. Is this a strictly rational response? No, of course not. But it is real, and recognizing that will go a long way towards understanding why some members of the deaf community react the way they do to things like cochlear implants.

Maybe this will clear things up for you, it being October and all. Breast cancer survivors also have a culture that tends to be close knit, and take pride in their status as survivors. Would you object to a treatment that prevented breast cancer?

Now that’s a truly bad metaphor, because unlike untreated deafness, or untreated homosexuality, untreated breast cancer will kill you.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that we should not be researching ways to cure various forms of hearing impairment. I’m not arguing that hearing parents of deaf children should not take reasonable steps to cure or reduce their children’s hearing loss. I’m not arguing that it’s better to be deaf than it is to be hearing. I’m just arguing that comparing deaf culture to gay culture is an excellent way of understanding how many deaf people perceive their own circumstances.

[uglybeech]

@Subway Prophet

However, if you look at the illiteracy rates amongst deaf people, how can you suggest that learning not one but two languages during early development can be beneficial?

The idea that being bilingual dooms you to illiteracy in English is simply not borne out. Many children are fluent in multiple languages. It’s quite common, and is hardly a handicap. My cousins grew up speaking German at home and English outside the home and now speak like a native in both languages. All went to Ivy League Universities and have advanced degrees.

The reason so many deaf people are illiterate is more likely to be the the absence of ASL in the earliest periods of development. Many well-meaning hearing parents did not expose their children to ASL during that window, hoping to push them to learn English, which the kids couldn’t hear. These kids became guinea pigs for what happens to the mind when it isn’t exposed to language (or to a language it can readily understand). It turns out there’s a narrow developmental window where the mind is primed to learn language, without that exposure becoming fluent in any language after the window has closed is quite difficult - and perhaps impossible.

We plan on switching to ASL when she’s older, perhaps in middle school. We don’t intend on her being completely isolated from the deaf or Deaf communities.

Realistically she’ll be about as integrated into deaf cuture as I am into French culture (I started French in Junior High; I can communicate, but no Parisian would confuse me with anything but a tourist making an effort). That’s basically because Middle School is past the point at which the developmental window for language learning has closed.

My feeling has always been we should start kids on their second languages in nursery school. It’ll be a hundred times more successful with a tenth the effort.

@Subway Prophet

And so I feel that ASL, as a language and a basis of culture, need to develop more before I’ll take it seriously. I suspect I’m not alone in this opinion, either.

Whatever you feel about the culture, ASL is a fully fledged language, with as complex a grammar and syntax as any. SE certainly is not a language - it’s more what’s called a pidgin.

[Lemur866]

And again, the “deaf community” is a whole different thing than the “breast cancer community” or the “blind community” or the “gay community” or the “black community”, because deaf people are linguistically isolated from the main culture, but linguistically united with other deaf people. The old joke is that if you go to a college campus and find a table in the cafeteria that is racially integrated, you’ll probably find that it’s the deaf table. And the tragic part is that deafness often isolates kids from their families. So the community exists as an inevitable fact of life in ways that all other disabilty or other minority communities don’t.

And teaching deaf kids oral skills is great, but the fact is they’re never going to be fluent, it’s always going to be more or less of a struggle. Yeah, you’ve got to learn to deal with the hearing world. But preventing deaf kids from learning to sign is just cruel, it’s like the fathers who beat the crap out of their kids so they’ll learn how tough “the real world” is. If kids are able to sign it will HELP them learn English.

[lizardling]

@Lemur866

Couple things. First of all, cochlear implants don’t cure deafness. They are a very limited tool. I don’t have a problem with them, but a problem can arise when you get parents who think that they just need to get their kid a cochlear implant and that’s it. Trouble is, even with a cochlear implant the kid is always going to struggle with understanding spoken language.

To add to Lemur866’s most excellent post… ISTR the general line of thought is that CIs work best for children who were deafened *after * learning spoken language.

However, one still gets well-meaning people like an audiologist who wanted me to get one – I’m almost 30 and profoundly deaf from birth. Never got to the point of hearing spoken language. So I’d be a really lousy candidate for a CI, unless technology has gotten way better than I’m aware of. She refused to get a clue from my extremely lukewarm reception of the idea that she was proposing. :dubious:

[Jenny_Haniver]

@Miller

This is a pet peeve of mine. Deaf people who insist there’s nothing wrong with themselves are not deluded, unless they are convinced that they can actually hear. They are perfectly aware of their abilities and the extent of their sensory perceptions. They’re simply expressing a preference for the suite of sensory abilities they have, a preference with which you disagree. You’ve got some damn good reasons to disagree with them, no argument on that score from me. But the fact that they have different preferences than you does not make them delusional.

I’m not arguing it isn’t possible to have a fulfilling life without being able to hear, but to paint deafness as a preferance rather than a condition is just silly. Hearing is a function people are supposed to have, and there’s not nearly so much gray area there as with homosexuality (or the appendix). Nobody’s arguing about whether deafness occurs in other animals, or what purpose it serves, population wise. There are no camps run by religious zealots to convince deaf people that they can actually hear.

…I’m just arguing that comparing deaf culture to gay culture is an excellent way of understanding how many deaf people perceive their own circumstances.

And I’m saying that this misapprehension is exactly what is wrong with the culture. I’m not arguing in favor of trying to reprogram ASL users by forcing CIs on them; I’m saying if a child has a chance to hear, the parents shouldn’t get in the way just to make themselves feel better. Same thing goes for hearing parents who get their children CIs and then don’t let them learn sign - either reaction is illogical. It’s all about giving the child as many communication options as they can absorb during the brief years when they are most able to learn them.

[Frylock]

@carterba

I’ll let someone more versed in linguistics than me handle this in greater detail (hopefully), but in the meantime I’ll point out that this is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. To say she’s right is a big, big stretch—I’m pretty sure this is no longer widely accepted by linguists and philosophers of language.

Damn straight. Sapir-Whorf isn’t even controversial. It’s just wrong.

The example Leviosaurus cited, btw, makes no sense to me. S/he cited the following two sentences:

“I’m going to a movie”

and

*“Movie me go”

and said that since ASL, when translated literally and word for word, yields the latter, we can see that a speaker of ASL has a fundamentally different way of thinking than a speaker of English. I simply don’t see that at all. Both sentences contain all and exactly the same information as far as I can tell: That the speaker is the subject, that the action involved is going to a movie, that the time of the action is in the immediate future, such that present actions should be conceptualized as being part of what leads up to the act of movie-going, and so on and so on. The two languages indcicate all these facts by different means, but the same facts are indicated in either case. Anyway, I don’t understand why you would present a literal word for word “translation” like this. What the ASL signs mean together isn’t “movie me go” but rather “I’m going to a movie.” To present them as meaning “movie me go” is just a technique for making ASL appear more alien than is supported by the facts.

I am hoping someone more knowledgable can come by and say some more about why Leviasaurus’s post was based on some bad presuppositions. Sorry, I know you didn’t expect that much and that kind of attention to be paid to your post. No hard feelings I hope.

-FrL-

[Frylock]

@Jenny Haniver

I’m not arguing it isn’t possible to have a fulfilling life without being able to hear, but to paint deafness as a preferance rather than a condition is just silly. Hearing is a function people are supposed to have, and there’s not nearly so much gray area there as with homosexuality (or the appendix). Nobody’s arguing about whether deafness occurs in other animals, or what purpose it serves, population wise. There are no camps run by religious zealots to convince deaf people that they can actually hear.
And I’m saying that this misapprehension is exactly what is wrong with the culture. I’m not arguing in favor of trying to reprogram ASL users by forcing CIs on them; I’m saying if a child has a chance to hear, the parents shouldn’t get in the way just to make themselves feel better. Same thing goes for hearing parents who get their children CIs and then don’t let them learn sign - either reaction is illogical. It’s all about giving the child as many communication options as they can absorb during the brief years when they are most able to learn them.

Say Jane is deaf.

What is the use in saying “There is something Jane should be able to do that Jane is unable to do?”

The only plausible answer I can think of is “Saying that helps motivate the finding of a cure for Jane.”

But what if Jane says “You can only say that latter sentence because you already assume there is something I should be able to do that I am not able to do. But I disagree with that presupposition. Hearing is not something I am supposed to be able to do. I do not allow for your claim that there is something deficient about me by virtue of my being unable to hear. I reject the notion that I should be able to hear, and so I reject the notion that causing me to hear would be a ‘cure’ for me. Rather it would be an imposition.”

There are at least two questions I can imagine asknig about what Jane has just said. First of all, is it internally coherent and does it allow for a robust, healthy, interesting human life? Second, why would a human being want to say something like that?

I can’t see a reason to answer the first question in the negative.

As to the second question, if thinking of deafness as a deficiency has several negative consequences, and the only positive consequence it has is that it spurs on a search for a cure for deafness,* then it seems quite a viable and healthy strategy for a deaf person to reject the notion of deafness as a deficiency. Furthermore, if a person’s being non-hearing has had very much to do with the shaping of their very way of life, then to ask or demand of them that they ought to aspire to hear is to ask or demand of them that they ought to remove themselves from the basis of their way of life. That is a serious demand, and it is rare that anyone has the right to demand it of anyone else.

Anyhow, this is how I imagine one of these guys would argue, and the more I think about it, the more sympathetic I become with the view.

-FrL-

*There are probably other positive consequences, but I don’t know what they are. The view expressed in this paragraph relies for its force on the notion that thinking of deafness as a deficiency has several negative consequences for the deaf and few if any positive consequences. The merits of that claim could easily be brought up for discussion.

[SkiDemon]

Whoops Lev…sorry I thought you were someone else. My bad.
Thank you Lizardling! I really have no idear why many mainstream media are pushing the idear that this shit at Gally is about Fernandes not being Deaf enough.
Also uglybeech, you rock. The reason why a lot of deaf people have poor educational skills isn’t b/c of ASL per se. It’s b/c ASLers approach English as a SECOND language. Like the mistakes that you see ASLers making, are pretty much the ones you’d see an Spanish speaker making when they’d try to express themselves in English. Or like the mistakes that I would make if I tried to write in French.

Well, bilingual is an option, in fact we (her parents) have been learning sign (Signed English) since she was born. She is learning SE now (for when her implants are turned off), because that’s pretty damn close to the language we speak natively at home. We plan on switching to ASL when she’s older, perhaps in middle school. We don’t intend on her being completely isolated from the deaf or Deaf communities.

YAY!!! Actually, I have noticed that Deaf people tend to be more open to implants if the parents ALSO sign. And trust me…the opposition to implants is going down pretty fast. I can remember when EVERYONE was against implants…Now, more and more Deafies are getting implants. They still aren’t as accepted as hearing aids, but back when aids were first introduced, the Deaf community was completely and totally against them! Glad you’re not one of those AG Bell types who just wants a perfect child, and can’t bear the idear that their precious wittle Smashlie might need something that’s speshal needs
But yeah…I do think that some Deaf extremists really need to get it through their skulls that you CAN be culturally Deaf without being Sign monolingal, from a family that has been Deaf since Bob knows when, and without being anti-hearing.
As someone who IS hoh themselves, I would encourage you to start exposure to ASL a little sooner. She may need to make use of an interpreter in group situtions…I do know off the top of my head, that there are kids who while not oral failures, still need Sign in beyond one on one situtions. Plus it’s always easier to learn a second language when you’re younger. Don’t wait til middle school. Also that way your daughter will have a full toolbox of communication tools. It really is important for your daughter to have a full toolbox early on. She may be doing decently with speech…but that doesn’t mean that other tools might not help her REALLY achieve. Most hoh (and quite a few CId kids are functionally hoh, when it works well) tend to be really pushed towards the hearing world and the mainstream. There is actually an anthology that is coming out soon, called " On the Fence the Hidden World of the Hard of Hearing"…I have a piece in it.
You might also want to check out the American Society for Deaf Children as well as alldeaf (linked before)

[Leviosaurus]

@Frylock

I am hoping someone more knowledgable can come by and say some more about why Leviasaurus’s post was based on some bad presuppositions. Sorry, I know you didn’t expect that much and that kind of attention to be paid to your post. No hard feelings I hope.

-FrL-

No hard feelings at all. Two points:

1. My post reported the opinions of a deaf lecturer I listened to, not my own opinions, so your beef is with the suppositions that person asserted. My function was simply to report them to the conversation.

2. Your analysis of the difference in phrasing misses a lot of basic underlying facts about the way people communicate. The idea that the two methods are fundamentally the same since they contain the same raw information misses an entire world of communication outside of the information itself. Don’t believe me? Shut off the computer, walk into your living room and watch TV for a few hours. You will see many campaign commercials from both the Republicans and Democrats that contain the exact same raw information, but framed differently. See if the messages they communicate differ at all despite the fact that the raw information is the same.

If that doesn’t convince you, translate all the basic phrases you use in a typical day into ASL and then back into English again as literal translations. Spend a day using only these retranslated phrases - after all, they contain the same information, so people will understand you just fine, right? - then come back and tell us what you’ve learned.

And free advice - unless you like having BS called on you, I suggest dropping the tactic of entering a discussion and saying “I think this person is wrong, I just hope someone smarter than me comes along to prove it.” It doesn’t hold water with a lot of us.

[Leviosaurus]

@SkiDemon

Whoops Lev…sorry I thought you were someone else. My bad.

No worries! I’ve thought I was someone else before, too. Turns out I’m just me, all the time

[Frylock]

@Leviosaurus

2. Your analysis of the difference in phrasing misses a lot of basic underlying facts about the way people communicate. The idea that the two methods are fundamentally the same since they contain the same raw information misses an entire world of communication outside of the information itself. Don’t believe me? Shut off the computer, walk into your living room and watch TV for a few hours. You will see many campaign commercials from both the Republicans and Democrats that contain the exact same raw information, but framed differently. See if the messages they communicate differ at all despite the fact that the raw information is the same.

Differently framed messages contain, by virtue of their difference in framing, different information.

If you provide an example, I can explain more clearly.

If that doesn’t convince you, translate all the basic phrases you use in a typical day into ASL and then back into English again as literal translations. Spend a day using only these retranslated phrases - after all, they contain the same information, so people will understand you just fine, right?

No. A message and a coded message can contain the same information, yet can be such that someone can easily understand the one and be unable to understand the other.

(That aside, still, I would expect that people wouldn’t have that hard a time understanding me. If you asked me why I’m getting up off the couch, and I said “Movie me go” or whatever, would you really have to think about it that much?

Also, by the way, something I forgot to mention in my previous post: “Movie me go” is a deceptive way to phrase the ASL for another reason. “Me” is, in english, the word used when the speaker refers to himself as the recipient of an action. But in the ASL sentence we’re talking about, the speaker is the actor, not the recipient of the action. So a “better” literal word-for-word translation would be “Movie I go.” This already seems far less alien than “Movie me go,” doesn’t it? The lecturer you were listening to seems to have used the word “me” just because of the sort of aura of alienness or incomprehensibility we already attach to ungrammatical usage of the word “me.” “Me” is used in this way to denote the foreign and strange. It was dishonest of your lecturer to use the word in this way and then claim she had thereby provided evidence that there is something alien or particularly different about the way speakers of different languages think.)

And free advice - unless you like having BS called on you, I suggest dropping the tactic of entering a discussion and saying “I think this person is wrong, I just hope someone smarter than me comes along to prove it.” It doesn’t hold water with a lot of us.

Huh? I offered logical arguments that your conclusions do not follow from your premises. I also added that there are, as well as logical arguments, actual facts to be adduced against your claims. I am not in immediate posession of those facts, but I am in immediate posession of the logical arguments. I provided what I had, and expressed a hope that someone else could contribute what I was missing.

-FrL-

[Leviosaurus]

@Frylock

Differently framed messages contain, by virtue of their difference in framing, different information.

If you provide an example, I can explain more clearly.

How about you go and do it yourself.

@Frylock

No. A message and a coded message can contain the same information, yet can be such that someone can easily understand the one and be unable to understand the other.

So you concede the point. Good.

@Frylock

(That aside, still, I would expect that people wouldn’t have that hard a time understanding me. If you asked me why I’m getting up off the couch, and I said “Movie me go” or whatever, would you really have to think about it that much?

Try it and find out.

@Frylock

Also, by the way, something I forgot to mention in my previous post: “Movie me go” is a deceptive way to phrase the ASL for another reason. “Me” is, in english, the word used when the speaker refers to himself as the recipient of an action. But in the ASL sentence we’re talking about, the speaker is the actor, not the recipient of the action. So a “better” literal word-for-word translation would be “Movie I go.” This already seems far less alien than “Movie me go,” doesn’t it? The lecturer you were listening to seems to have used the word “me” just because of the sort of aura of alienness or incomprehensibility we already attach to ungrammatical usage of the word “me.” “Me” is used in this way to denote the foreign and strange. It was dishonest of your lecturer to use the word in this way and then claim she had thereby provided evidence that there is something alien or particularly different about the way speakers of different languages think.)

So now you not only think the lecturer was wrong, but dishonest as well. Hmm. Well, I was there, you were not. I thought the lecturer was brilliant - to the point where I clearly remember the lecture twenty years later.

@Frylock

Huh? I offered logical arguments that your conclusions do not follow from your premises. I also added that there are, as well as logical arguments, actual facts to be adduced against your claims. I am not in immediate posession of those facts, but I am in immediate posession of the logical arguments. I provided what I had, and expressed a hope that someone else could contribute what I was missing.

-FrL-

Actually, what you said was:

@Frylock

…since ASL, when translated literally and word for word, yields the latter, we can see that a speaker of ASL has a fundamentally different way of thinking than a speaker of English. I simply don’t see that at all.

Which isn’t a refutation of anything I’ve quoted, it’s simply a statement that you don’t understand. I realize that you don’t understand, but your lack of understanding does not in any way represent a logical argument that the conclusions I quoted don’t follow the premise. They only demonstrate that you don’t understand.

It’s unfortunate that I’m not communicating the point better to you. I’m extremely glad that others in this thread have not experienced the same problem.

Anyway, you then went on to say:

@Frylock

I am hoping someone more knowledgable can come by and say some more about why Leviasaurus’s post was based on some bad presuppositions.

Or in other words, you don’t like what’s being said, and you hope someone smarter than you will come along and refute it for you.

I have to admit, it’s been a long time since someone jumped into a thread I was in and instantly rubbed me the wrong way the way you have, Frylock. How about you ramp it down and start over?

[Boggette]

@Blue Willow Plate

If I’m understanding the argument correctly, it’s a lot like a white guy becoming president of an historically black university. Or, perhaps, someone who learned Spanish at college becoming president of a historically Latino university.

Or a Veterinarian being put in charge of women’s health?

[Frylock]

So you concede the point. Good.

What I said was that two messages can contain the same information, yet be such that one is more difficult to understand than the other. This was in response to your claim that if two messages contain the same information, then they will be equally easy or difficult to understand. What point are you saying I’ve conceded?

Actually, what you said was:

–Originally Posted by Frylock–
…since ASL, when translated literally and word for word, yields the latter, we can see that a speaker of ASL has a fundamentally different way of thinking than a speaker of English. I simply don’t see that at all.
–End of Comment by Frylock—

Which isn’t a refutation of anything I’ve quoted,

The quoted comment is, as I said, part of an argument (the body of which you’ve snipped away, of course) that your conclusion does not reasonably follow from your premises. You (or the lecturer you are referring to in any case) claimed that the pair of sentences provide evidence that speakers of one language think in some way fundamentally differently than speakers of the other language. I am pointing out that this does not reasonably follow. I point it out by saying “I don’t see it” as I intend to allow for the real possibility that there is something I’m not seeing in your illustration. But the more I think about it, the slimmer that possibility seems to be.

-FrL-

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Jenny Haniver

Because deaf people who claim there is nothing wrong with them are deluded. They have an organ which demonstrably does not work - the ear. The penises and vaginas of gay people are still functional - rather, the gay community takes flack for what they do with their (functioning) genitals. It’s not the same at all - I can’t believe you are honestly having trouble distinguishing these concepts.

Maybe this will clear things up for you, it being October and all. Breast cancer survivors also have a culture that tends to be close knit, and take pride in their status as survivors. Would you object to a treatment that prevented breast cancer?

Breast cancer survivors don’t see breast cancer as being OK. They generally don’t like breast cancer. These people think that deafness is some sort of new normative state not a disability. You can say that deaf people have malfunctioning ears, it wasn’t that long ago that people (doctors and psychiatrists) thought homosexuals had malfunctioning brains. Listen, its not that I can’t see a difference between the two but I can see where they are coming from (I don’t think its a very good argument, but I can see what their argument is).

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Miller

This is a pet peeve of mine. Deaf people who insist there’s nothing wrong with themselves are not deluded, unless they are convinced that they can actually hear. They are perfectly aware of their abilities and the extent of their sensory perceptions…
No, we take flack because a lot of people think homosexuality is a mental disability. Our genitals work fine, but a lot of homophobes are convinced our brains are disfunctional. col_10022’s analogy is remarkably apt. Much like the homosexual community, the deaf community is almost entirely defined by how they differ from the mainstream. This tends to lead people in those communities to build a large portion of their own self-image around that difference. When someone proposes a way to eliminate the difference between the mainstream and the minority group, this will be received by those who have built their identities around their difference as an attempt to eliminate them as individuals. Is this a strictly rational response? No, of course not. But it is real, and recognizing that will go a long way towards understanding why some members of the deaf community react the way they do to things like cochlear implants…
To be clear, I’m not arguing that we should not be researching ways to cure various forms of hearing impairment. I’m not arguing that hearing parents of deaf children should not take reasonable steps to cure or reduce their children’s hearing loss. I’m not arguing that it’s better to be deaf than it is to be hearing. I’m just arguing that comparing deaf culture to gay culture is an excellent way of understanding how many deaf people perceive their own circumstances.

That’s what I was trying to say, you seem to be able to say things more eloquently but that’s what I would have said if I knew how. Much of the resistance on this point (I suspect) is because homosexuals don’t want homosexuality to be analogized in any way shape or form to what is commonly percived as a disability. Most of the gays and lesbians I know had at least one point in their life when they wished they were straight and now that they have finally come to terms with who they are and learned not to be ashamed of it (at long long last), they bristle when anyone derogates homosexuality, they are offended when anyone implies that there is anything wrong with homosexuality.