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BTW, I can understand where SkiDemon is coming from. I’ve got a cochlear implant, but it’s only a tool, and not a cure. It’s not pleasant at all. It’s a lot better at picking up background din than foreground voices. Multiple sound sources run together to be an unpleasant buzz. Sound perception is far from perfect; for example, I can’t tell the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a babbling brook very well. I can easily see why SkiDemon and others think the way that they do, if they were in a completely sheltered environment like Gallaudet or living on SSI in a Deaf community.
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It’s also the connotations that ‘disabled’ and its related terms have. It’s a loaded word, and small wonder. You see news articles about this person or that one being disabled and living at home on disability. (This is shorthand for SSI, I think, no?) Plus, disabilities cover a whole range and then some of issues. Physical, mental, and so on. Given the typical usage of the word as given in the above example, it’s no wonder that people get twitchy around it.
I should have clarified terminology in my earlier post, but I was too busy having a nerve struck by the ‘not needing to hear’ stance. Apologies to the gentlefolk of the Dope.
I can’t speak for others, but I can accept being labelled disabled in the legal/clinical senses, since if you look at the nub of the matter, it basically means that I’m missing a sense compared to other people, which I am. If I were missing an arm, I’d be called disabled as well.
However, on the other hand, recently I found myself having a severe kneejerk reaction to someone who asked me about other folks who might have severe disabilities like me. I was polite to them, but corrected them since my sense of ‘severe disabilities’ is that that particular label is for people who need a lot more help to function in the world than I do, and so my gut level reaction is to reject the label on that basis. I’m disabled, sure, and I’m deaf, but at the end of the day, I’m **lizardling **, whole and true.
I could very well be wrong about the connotation and its application to myself, since I personally have very little hearing left, but dammit, I do better than a lot of ablebodied folks. I own my own home (well, me and the bank 
), which I share with two cats, I have a great job, and I have friends.
So considering myself severely disabled isn’t something I do. However, I can and do consider myself covered in the **clinical sense ** by the broader and more general term ‘disabled’ which covers pretty much every deviation from the norm, ranging from slightly colorblind to near-vegetable-dom.
It’s the connotations that cause so much trouble. Ask ten people what they think of when you say ‘disabled’, and you’ll most likely get ten different responses, usually centering around the negative connotations.
Even in someone like me, ‘disabled’ evokes a lot of ambivalence as you can probably see from this post.
So given this background, it’s not that hard to understand why someone might have issues with the connotations of being called disabled as opposed to simply considering themselves deaf. The latter has fewer negative connotations and focuses on that particular sense, IMO. (Linguists, feel free to chime in)
However, going back to read SkiDemon’s specific post, he (?) doesn’t seem to be arguing against the term ‘disabled’ or ‘unabled’ so much as the concept that deaf people are missing something vital to their existence and thus need curing, because how can you really and truly miss something if you’ve never had it?
My answer to this still stands: Plenty.
Okay, this response is way too long, so I’ll stop now, but hopefully I’ve gotten it so that folks can see the outline of what I was driving at and why SkiDemon might not want to be labelled ‘disabled’.
> I am a she.