Just because YOU don’t see the pervasive discrimination we experience, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!
Just because WE can’t hear, doesn’t make us any less capable. You don’t get to decide what is in OUR best interest!
Just because many of us are disempowered into silence, doesn’t mean you can discriminate against us freely!
Check out this video of my little one using baby sign 🙂 He has been signing for booby since about 5 months old. It started with squeezing my finger or boob and progressed to making fists, and then finally to the opening and closing repeatedly of his fist to...
So my sister in law came across a deaf blog ranting about some dude from The Voice, Andy Dexterity doing Auslan when he is not deaf. There was a lot of anger about cultural appropriation and comments about Andy signing badly. It prompted my interest because obvious...
https://youtu.be/qFcFpWzIQNk First, this is an excellent and well done video, everybody needs to watch it! I'd like to touch on my first experience of this video as it completely slammed me. It was used as an educational tool in a support coordination course I was...
People keep calling my phone and I've finally worked it out! Deaf people can't possibly own phones, and this must be common knowledge! Of course!! This totally explains why there will be difficulty explaining to a caller why the deaf phone owner cannot come to the...
No really. I've removed names for privacy as this isn't about any of these individuals personally, but rather the social/cultural context of this discourse. Here are the highlights for those of you without the ability to see the image posted below: "I wonder how...
A question for everyone who can hear… Do you always carry a pen and paper on your person?
This is the dilemma of a deaf person who is used to assimilation into hearing society. I find myself exercising hearing privilege for instance the privilege of not needing to remember to bring a pen and paper with me or keep them on my person at all times.
It isn’t a conscious or deliberate choice to do this. It comes about because I simply do not think about it in the same way most of you probably don’t. This problem just doesn’t enter my mind at all… Until it comes down to the oh shit! I gotta discuss this and I didn’t bring a pen and paper with me!
I have thought about this previously and attempted to plan ahead to cover these eventualities in a way that doesn’t require me to let go of that particular hearing privilege. I have enough things to keep track of these days that I don’t need to go adding more to the melting pot!
So this is what I came up with. Keep a pen and some spare paper in the car. Good plan right? That way when I am out and about and realise I may need them, I can grab them from the car. Also I won’t need to remember to grab some on my way out the door because that is just irritating and I guarantee you I will forget that one requirement regularly because it’s not like I walk around each day with my deafness at the forefront of my mind. I think I would go crazy if I did!
Despite that well laid plan… Here I am on my way to a new optometrist with no sign of a pen in the car. There however is plenty of doodles and scribbles all over paper on the floor in the car. I totally love my children said without any sarcasm at all! 😂
So plan B hey? I’m going to ask the receptionist for a pen/pad so I can let them know I am really not happy with the optometrist we saw in Cairns and that they better not screw up like the other one did by ignoring my requests for pen and paper to communicate. Said in the nicest way possible of course. Let’s see how this goes!
– deaf in Society
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