Several hearing-impaired readers share their stories:
I read your thoughtful piece about transgender issues and Laverne Cox and then scrolled down and see “The Dilemma of Deafness.” I actually said out loud, “Nooo!”
The first part that made me say that: “Ellie could join their world, the hearing world, if she received cochlear implants.” The post does go on to say that “implants don’t work perfectly,” but that’s an understatement at best. They’re wildly variable. And that is frequently where the resistance comes in, rather than the common notion that deaf people would just prefer to be deaf.
For work, I keep an eye on any news related to deafness. So I see a whole lot of those cochlear implant activation and miracle hearing aid stories. They often have something like, “And he could hear the birds!” That sentence has an obvious translation; people who can hear read it and think that the deaf person can hear, you know, birds. The trilling and chirping, the lovely musicality and cheer that is birdsong. Wow, that’s awesome! Technology is the best.
But I’ve had a very active interest in this subject for a long time – I lost my hearing at age 13 – and whenever this comes up in a conversation I press further. What does that mean, exactly, to “hear the birds”?
For example, one person I talked to told me that she was laying in bed one morning, turned on her cochlear implant, and heard this horrible racket. She was alarmed and woke up her (hearing) husband, who listened and said he didn’t hear anything weird. Yet the racket persisted! Loud, annoying, like some sort of broken machinery … how could her husband not hear it? This went on for a while until they figured out she was hearing the birds outside.
She was thrilled – she could hear the birds! And that’s definitely a reliable use for cochlear implants: hearing noise, knowing when something is making a sound. They can be really good for knowing when a car is coming, for example.
But they are simply not the equivalent of glasses. When you have terrible vision, and you see a tree as a green undifferentiated mass, and then you put on your new glasses and suddenly you can see each individual leaf, it’s amazing and wonderful and what you’re seeing is equivalent to what someone with perfect vision can see.
With a cochlear implant, it’s activated and the green undifferentiated mass may stay a green undifferentiated mass. Or it may be a pulsing, neon-green mass that hurts your eyes. Or it may even have leaves – just about 50 times bigger than regular leaves, and black. Or it may be a pretty good approximation of an actual tree, but it just will not be the same tree that other people see. So when you see things like, “He could hear birds!” or “She could hear water!”, please keep that in mind.
Another sighs, “Why are some members of the Deaf community making this an either/or choice? (For that matter, why is the hearing community?)”:
I have experienced “hearingism” by this faction of the Deaf culture because I am late deafened and spent much of my life in the hearing world. Having experienced both worlds, I know for a fact that, as unfair as it is, the inability to hear and understand speech negatively impacts an individual’s ability to find and maintain gainful employment, get promotions, and receive critical information that affects one’s health and safety.
I love American Sign Language, but I have become hesitant to work on improving it because of I’ve experienced ASL snobbishness. We cochlear implant wearers can be the bridge group that strengthens the awareness of ASL in the hearing world, but this will not happen if the ASL Deaf extremists take an openly hostile stance.
The reality is this: the vast majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents. Most of these parents will, for the reasons I mentioned, choose to implant their children. They want their offspring to have every opportunity for success in the world. But here is the catch, which many in the Deaf community do not seem to grasp: Cochlear implant recipients are deaf! We will not, at least in the near future, be true “hearing people.” Reach out to us, Deaf community; embrace us; fully share your expressive and unique language and forgive us our often clumsy attempts at expressing ourselves when we do sign.
In my opinion, the hostile attitude towards cochlear implants and those who have them gains nothing and will pave the way for the extinction of ASL and Deaf culture.
Another takes a darker view:
I am completely deaf in one ear and a bit impaired in the other; nonetheless, I have always managed to function in the hearing world. My state has a combined deaf/hard-of-hearing state agency (woefully underfunded) on which I served as a volunteer board member for several years. I encountered this “deaf culture” thinking early and often, and it still perplexes me.
Sure, folks who are deaf have nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of, and their creation of a “deaf culture” is not only natural, but surely a source of happiness and community for so very many. But the truth is that deafness is a profound disability. We evolved hearing for vital reasons, as have nearly all animals. If we could cure all deafness tomorrow, would we not, even if “deaf culture” disappeared as a consequence?
The biggest tragedy that I encountered during my service was when a deaf couple would have a deaf baby because of a shared genetic defect, and then deliberately choose not to give the helpless baby a cochlear implant so that he or she could grow up deaf. I found it appalling. Language acquisition with a cochlear implant is like all language acquisition – easier for babies and small children than for adolescents or adults. So the parents who deny their babies this opportunity to live a hearing life are making an essentially irreversible decision. To deny that opportunity to one’s own child strikes me as the most foolish sort of pride, and perhaps even spite.
The Dish 