… maybe you shouldn’t have ascribed to society’s deaf stereotypes.

Dear Optometrist,

I am a deaf mother. That was probably the first thing you noticed about me when you walked in there. I sat there while you promptly set about explaining to your trainee the ins and outs of how to communicate properly with deaf people.

While I did appreciate the consideration, what I did not appreciate was the condescending manner in which this was delivered. I may be deaf, but I can still lipread and see your body language. It reeked of arrogance and of the hearing superiority that I have come to know of as audism.

I suffered through the session I had scheduled for my daughter, hoping that she would not pay for me being deaf and her mum.

When my daughter started to have difficulty accomplishing the tasks you set her, I felt that familiar dread building. The one where we aren’t able to achieve seemingly simple tasks in a society who can do these things effortlessly, without even needing to engage their brain or amass all of their concentration and energy.

Sure, we were there to obtain your optometrist knowledge and expertise, to help my daughter with her reading problems which were frustrating her to no end. This was step two – diagnosis of the difficulties. Step one was a regular optometrist who listened to my concerns and did a simple basic eye test and found my daughter to have excellent vision; but did not bother referring us onto a behavioural optometrist. I had to get my daughter’s paediatrician to do that because clearly, there was a problem!

But, did you really have to be so condescending? Thankfully due to my daughter’s autism, she didn’t notice this. She only noticed the veneer of niceness emanating from you, not the poison that dwelt underneath all that.

While I don’t really blame you personally for this poison, as it is society’s attitudes towards deaf people which are at the root of this problem; the impact is still the same. It majorly sucks.

I don’t want to hear how you were only trying to… (insert wanky platitudes here), I want you to shut up. Stop defending yourself, stop explaining yourself. I know you probably meant well. I know you probably don’t have a lot of experience with treating deaf people like they are human. I know all this, you don’t need to tell me that. What I need is for you to shut up and listen.

When you told my daughter “Didn’t anybody teach you how to hold a pencil?” when my daughter was using her quadrupod grasp, you overstepped.

If I was hearing, I would have responded promptly. Woman, are you kidding me!? My daughter is sixteen years old! Of course she has been shown many times the socially acceptable way to hold a fucken pencil. She has a disability which impacts her fine motor skills. This is how she holds a pencil. It is how she has adapted to her disability, so she can still accomplish the task of writing. We all can’t have fucking perfect politically correct, socially acceptable writing grasps! What matters here is her grasp is FUNCTIONAL. What matters here that it has already been assessed by an occupational therapist and it was determined there was no need to change something that was working for her.

When you ignored my daughter’s explanations that yes, she had been shown but it didn’t work well for her and this was what worked… you overstepped again! You immediately set about showing her the proper and right way to hold a pencil.

If I was hearing, I would have exploded. Woman, what the actual fuck!? You are an optometrist, not an occupational therapist. You are an optometrist who is grossly OVERstepping your professional role here. Back the fuck off.

But, I am not hearing. I am a deaf woman, in a hearing society.

Even though I can speak, I could not speak. I was silenced by your stupidity, your arrogance, your ignorance, your superiority… but most of all, I was silenced by the inability to communicate with you. Remember the beginning of the appointment, when I asked for pen and paper? Remember that? Remember how you proceeded to act as if you knew how to communicate with me as a deaf person essentially ignoring my request for a pen and paper? Thanks for that.

I could have done more. I could have kicked up a fuss. But this wasn’t about me. I was there for my daughter, who was already highly anxious and stressed about confronting the real reasons behind why she was struggling so much with reading. I didn’t need to cause a scene. I can tell you why this was.

It is because in my society, in my world, it is NORMAL to be treated like this. It happens all the goddess damn it time. It happens so much to me that I can take it in my stride and get through it and the fuck outta there.

Is it fair. Nope. But then again we are all raised with this fucking bar lowering motto that Life Is Not Fair. This is a patriarchy. This is a kyraiarchy. This is how society operates – on a superiority, hierarchial, power dominated basis. Women are down on the bottom rungs there. Deaf people are even lower. I guess that puts me as a deaf woman, a deaf mother, as even lower down there. I know the box society has put me in very well. I’ve learned to survive that and keep my sense of self intact.

So yeah. Thank you for your service and attitude. Most of all, thank you for treating my hearing partner the same way when he walked into the room. It was epic. Let me tell you about this before I end this letter.

My partner is NOT deaf. He can HEAR you. He can hear THAT tone. By society’s standards, he is above YOU. He is a white man. You are an asian woman. That is just how fucked up our society is, but I disgress. You treated him like he was lacking intelligence. You totally bought into the stereotype that deaf people have difficulty understanding the language of the society they live in. You bought into the stereotype that it is deaf-inclusive to dumb down your communication.

You taught him an invaluable lesson that day. You taught him WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE TREATED LIKE THAT. No need to apologise to him either. It was a lesson he needed to learn.

I sat there laughing hysterically inside the hallowed halls of my mind. I literally rolled around on the floor howling with laughter at the body language my partner was showing. I was waiting with great eagerness for him to open his mouth. He is really terrible with being polite and appropriate. I wanted to see this.

Unfortunately for me, I think he was too fucking gobsmacked at how you were dumbing down and oversimplifying your language and explanations to the extent that you actually didn’t make sense. It was just… what!???

To be clear, what you did wasn’t employing some laywoman’s speak for the non-optometrist. It went waaaaaaaay beyond that. Right out into the stratosphere and probably all the way to land up Uranus way. Just gobsmacking. I got no more words, so on that note I’m going to end this letter.

Yours sincerely,

– deaf in society

P.S. The Code of Conduct for Optometrists is here and you best read it seeing as you’ve violated many of these principles.