I’ve been thinking recently about my experiences with educating others when growing up. As some people have pointed out, if somebody says, “Educate me, please,” it’s packed with several privileged assumptions. A particularly good example I recently read was “Marginalization as Labor On Demand and the Tone Argument” by Lisa Harney at Questioning Transphobia.
Throughout my life, people have definitely asked me to educate them about queer issues, but more people have asked me to educate them about deaf issues. This led me to ask: why did I experience this discrepancy?
Part of it is simple arithmetic – I’ve been deaf since birth but I’ve only been visibly queer & out for approximately 7 years. But a far more important component is the fact that I was encouraged to stay quiet about being queer (“don’t flaunt it”) whereas I was encouraged to speak up about being deaf. Where I grew up, being queer was seen as somehow “wrong,” whereas being deaf was just one of those mysterious “God’s will” events.
It’s really interesting to look back on my life and realize just how much educating I’ve done, though. For example, I began lecturing classmates about the anatomy of the inner ear when I was in third or fourth grade. (That is, eight or nine years old.) My usual method was to print out a transparent diagram of the inner ear and project the diagram onto the wall. Then I’d sketch out the path that the sound waves took. Then I would explain how the cochlear implant works by sketching in the magnet and so forth. I lectured to students as young as four years old and as old as thirteen years old. Imagine that – an eight year old child lecturing a classroom of thirteen-year-old children.
I guess I’m lucky in that I enjoy talking about myself and I enjoy teaching others, so I didn’t entirely resent having to educate others. However, at times, I did get tired of educating others. I couldn’t really articulate it as a kid, but sometimes I got fed up with how stupid adults could be, asking the same old questions about how such a young child could have possibly become deaf. Why couldn’t they all be as smart as my parents, who had researched deafness themselves? This was before the advent of search engines, but books and encyclopedias existed! Also, sometimes people would ask me questions about my personal experience that I thought were absolutely ridiculous like, “Do you ever wish that you were born hearing?”
As a result, I came up with a strategy: I would ask hearing people questions… About everything! And I do mean everything. I figured, “Everybody asks me so many stupid questions, why not ask them questions?” …Yeah, I was a smartass kid. End result: Some adults would become absolutely exasperated when I continued to pester them with far more questions than even the average child. (Which is saying a lot – have you ever been on the receiving end of a child’s questions? They ask a lot of questions.) This helped me feel like I was getting some sort of revenge for having to put up with so many annoying questions.
Most of the people closest to me quickly saw through this tactic and figured out how to turn this tendency to their advantage. They developed the habit of asking me, “Do you know the answer to this already?” So, for example, let’s say that I asked, “What are black holes?” They would ask me if I really wanted to know the answer to that, or if I already knew it. I would say, “Oh! Black holes are highly dense spots in space with strong gravitational pulls, blah blah blah.”
Later I learned that this wasn’t always a reliable tactic – if it backfired, it played into the stereotype that deaf people lack the same intellectual capacity as hearing people and/or are less educated. So I began to ask more elaborate questions. To this day, sometimes I have to fight to keep from asking people really basic things that I already know the answer to.
Over time I’ve discovered that what makes me happiest is an equal exchange of ideas. I’m fine with talking about myself if it’s respectful. You ask me stuff, I ask you stuff. You ask me something, I don’t want to answer – leave it there. I’ll extend the same courtesy to you.
I do want to note that most of the people I’ve encountered are very apologetic when they ask a question about deaf issues, but this isn’t really my experience with queer issues. For example: “I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but… Do you like music?” versus simply blurting out, “How do you have sex?” I think that this difference is pretty important to note.
