Monthly Archives: November 2011

A Little Mermaid: Retold

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Posted by maxporter on November 30, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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OK, so, since I’ve been posting some heavy shit on this blog lately, I figure I’ll tell you a little story to lighten things up a little around here.

So, I’m three years old and my family has taken me to see a Disney Little Mermaid play. At that point in time, the movie was so new that my parents hadn’t seen it yet & they didn’t know what it was about. They did, however, know that I was deaf and had learned how to communicate with me. So my dad translated the play.

As the play proceeded, my dad listened to it and realized that it was really quite screwed up. Wait a minute, he thought, So this play is about a girl who sells her soul to the devil and gives up her home/tail/voice for a man???

He continued to translate the play, hoping that it would get better and have some ultimate redeeming moral message – perhaps Ariel has a change of heart and decides that she values herself, for example?

But, nope. The play freakin’ ended with her exchanging wedding vows with that idiot of a landlubber. At this moment, my dad couldn’t hold back any longer – instead of translating the wedding vows, he told complicated story about Ariel dumping her husband and then getting a PhD in Marine Biology.

At the time, I could tell that he was just making it up – but I loved the story anyway.

To this day, I smile when I think about it. He didn’t stick to the Code of Conduct – but, hey, it was worth it.

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More on LGBTQ youth and boundaries

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Posted by maxporter on November 29, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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In this post that I wrote approximately a week ago, I discussed LGBTQ youth with poor boundaries and came up with a few reasons why the LGBTQ community in general has poor boundaries.

Well, I came up with another theory: trust issues.

My reasoning is this: When LGBTQ youth are coming to terms with their identity and are preparing to come out, many enter a period where they don’t trust anybody. This is especially true of LGBTQ youth from unaccepting climates where it is quite certain that people would reject them.

Most people have at least one friend who they can confide in. People place more trust in people who belong to their support network than in random strangers. So a typical teenager can look around his or her classroom and see a few really good friends that they can tell everything, a few people that they avoid as much as possible, some acquaintances that they get along with but don’t trust as much as their close friends, and a lot of people who are neutral unknown territory.

What happens if LGBTQ youth don’t have this support network and trust nobody? Many end up telling nobody and hiding every aspect of their personality that could possibly relate to being LGBTQ. They bottle up their emotions, building a lot of pressure deep down inside. I think that, when LGBTQ youth come out of this closeted situation, all of the emotions that they have spent years trying to bottle up suddenly come out all at once.

Alternatively, if someone trusts nobody, it can lead to the same behavior as if he trusted everybody. The logic is: Who cares who I tell about my private issues? I don’t have anybody to confide in anyway, so I might as well as confide in the girl who sits next to me in math or a random teacher or something.

I have noticed that newly-out LGBTQ youth sometimes read me as one of them and begin telling me all of their deepest secrets until I am just like, “Thank you for sharing, but I’m sorry – I’m just on my way to the bathroom” or something. I try to provide emotional support whenever I can, but I also say to youth, “Thank you for trusting me, but I am a stranger that you just met – how do you know that you can trust me?”

I mean – it is wonderful that they trust me already, but they have to learn that not all adults will be understanding or supportive, even if the adult in question is also LGBTQ. In fact, sometimes a negative reaction from other LGBTQ people can be more painful than from straight people. For example: I knew a therapist who was a gay man; he told trans youth that they were suffering from internalized homophobia and that they were really gay. He was transphobic in general, even towards adults. It sucked.

Anyway, I think that one reason that youth start sharing every single aspect of their stories with social workers is because the youth have just gotten out of their unsafe environments into a new environment with completely new dangers and safeties. It’s dangerous to sleep on the streets, but at least you have a new network of friends who completely accept and support the LGBTQ aspect of your identity. It’s like shaking a bottle of soda and then opening it: after all that pressure builds up, you remove the cap and it all comes out with no control.

Another factor is that some LGBTQ youth may find that people who they have just met five minutes ago are much more accepting than people that they have known their whole lives. I imagine that this causes even more confusion – if you can’t use the length of a relationship to gauge the level of trust that you can place in a person, how do you determine to what extent that you can trust others?

And I think that another factor is whether being LGBTQ is the first minority/hardship that a youth has experienced. For instance, if a youth grew up in a poor family that received a lot of social services, she understands her relationship to a social worker much better than a youth that was kicked out of his affluent family’s house last week and has never received social services in his life.

Also, I’m not sure if LGBTQ individuals who don’t belong to any other minority are really well-equipped to understand the realities of being a minority in this country. I grew up deaf, so I knew from an early age that we do not live in an equal society free from prejudice. I imagine that some LGBTQ youth grew up under the illusion that they would be treated equally – and received a shock when they learned otherwise. That’s material for a whole other post, though.

So, yeah. I am not sure why some LGBTQ youth immediately attach themselves to authority figures that they read as LGBTQ and why some LGBTQ youth have poor boundaries in general, but I’m gonna continue thinking about it. Anybody have any ideas?

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LGBTQ youth with poor boundaries

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Posted by maxporter on November 23, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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After a few weeks of spending the majority of my waking hours with youth, approximately 1/4 of whom are LGBTQ, I have noticed something: many LGBTQ youth have poor boundaries. Also, some of them attach themselves to the visibly LGBTQ staff very quickly. I talked about this with my coworkers, and they’ve noticed the same thing.

I can remember this behavior in high school – I had one other openly LGBTQ friend who would hug everybody, for example, and cuddle people in class. And, although there were no visibly LGBT faculty members who we were in contact with, we definitely attached ourselves to the liberal members of the faculty.

That behavior continued in college – lord knows that I’ve had to struggle with my own poor boundaries. In fact, one of the best aspects of this job is that I’m finally learning good boundaries, and it’s definitely affecting my personal life positively.

So, I have to ask: why do LGBT youth have such poor boundaries?

I have a theory: I propose that it’s an overreaction to society’s restrictive norms.

One thing I’ve noticed is that gay men tend to have poorer boundaries than lesbians. Well, when I think about the societal ‘rules’ that are in place for men in modern US society, there’s definitely a taboo on any form of contact: men can’t hug unless it’s a bro-hug, men can’t look at other men too directly or for too long, and holding hands is unthinkable.

So, when I see my male youth hugging every single person in the room, I definitely think it’s an overreaction to society’s norms that say that men cannot be affectionate towards each other in a platonic manner.

Another societal norm that many youth have internalized is that their sexual orientation is disgusting/immoral/sinful/evil/shameful.

Imagine being told that many important aspects of your life – who you are attracted to, who you plan on spending the rest of your life with, who you socialize with, etc – are disgusting. What kind of burden is that? Society is basically saying, “Don’t love who you love because your love is disgusting.”

So I definitely think that, in the face of being told that their love for others is disgusting, some youth overreact and become overly affectionate towards their peers, even when it is not appropriate. After all, we have basically taught LGBT youth that their love can be a weapon – it can be a tool to make other people react. That’s a pretty shitty message to send, honestly.

I think it is fine and natural to go through a stage of questioning society’s norms – in fact, I think people should continue to question society’s norms for a long time, even after they have learned to ‘play the game,’ because society is inherently untrustworthy. However, there is a point at which poor boundaries can be damaging to the LGBTQ community. In particular, it can create codependence – I have seen LGBTQ people become attached to other LGBTQ people and do everything with them, becoming dependent on them for all emotional support, even though they are not dating.

And then there’s the fact that some LGBTQ people find it acceptable to act in inappropriate ways – I’m thinking, in particular, of gay men who think it is okay to grope women’s boobs just because they are not attracted to women. That is so far from being okay that it’s not even funny. If these gay men had learned the importance of boundaries and respecting others in the first place, everyone would have been better off.

It’s true that I have some issues with where American culture has placed boundaries as a deaf bi man – why can’t men hug each other? Why is it unacceptable in Hearing society to explain the full story behind your late arrival to work? But when it comes down to it, boundaries are ultimately about respect – it shows that you respect the other person’s preferences. And, if someone has a more restrictive culture than yours, you should respect their boundaries.

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The changing composition of Deaf schools

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Posted by maxporter on November 22, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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In the past, Deaf schools were a breeding ground for Deaf culture. Everyone who was deaf went there, and even when they tried to ban ASL during the era of oralism, kids still found a way to talk to each other. Because it was easier to communicate with peers, a lot of kids came to identify more with the Deaf school than with their Hearing families.

I remember meeting kids from Deaf schools as a child – they were very skilled at socializing with other Deaf people and seemed to intuit the rules of societies much better than I could. They were just like the Hearing kids at my school in terms of how good they were at socializing; the difference is that they mostly hung out with other Deaf people whereas Hearing kids hung out with other Hearing kids.

Because I’m in the social services profession now, I have a tendency to talk to my teacher friends about their jobs. A lot of my Deaf friends who are teachers teach d/Deaf kids, and they have reported that Deaf schools are changing.

According to them, because everyone mainstreams their children now, the kids who end up at Deaf schools tend to be the ones who would have had issues regardless of hearing ability. They have emotional stability issues, they’re on the autistic/aspergers spectrum, they have other physical disabilities, etc. Or they are “oral failures” (the school’s term, not mine), which is an idea that fills me with enough disgust that it could be a whole other post by itself. It definitely is an unintended consequence of mainstreaming.

In and of itself, I don’t think the changing composition of Deaf schools is worrying – If the Deaf guy in the wheelchair considers himself to be part of Deaf culture, he’s part of Deaf culture. If he doesn’t, well, he is still deaf, so we still share some accessibility issues (like captioning movies) so it makes sense to count him into our group if we want more political power.

What concerns me is that the people who come to teach at Deaf schools may end up lumping ‘deaf’ in with other disabilities and completely ignore the cultural part of it. I do think that Deafness is a unique disability in that it can also be a minority culture with its own language; it’s only a disability because society is structured around auditory input. If everyone signed, I don’t think it’d be a disability. It’s okay to treat people differently according to their needs – and one of the needs of deaf people, I believe, is to know that there are not only other people out there like them, there are even large groups of other people like them who gather together and create a cohesive culture.

The second concern that I have is that teachers will see the kids as irreparably broken. And, unfortunately, this is what one of my teacher friends says that she sees in her workplace – there’s one teacher, for example, who says “these kids will never learn” in front of the kids. Which is horrible because, even if the kids don’t understand her words, they probably understand her facial expression and her low standards.

And I think there are faculty issues – Burned-out teachers will not help anybody at all, so it is important to have a large staff who knows what they are doing. That’s a concern I see in other schools, though; it’s not unique to Deaf schools.

Another issue is the parents – if they don’t know how to raise a Deaf child, there’s only so much a school can do. Again, this is an issue that is not unique to Deaf schools; public schools all over the country have to deal with incompetent parents. But I do think that Deafness magnifies the problems – many people who would otherwise have been good parents give up because they think they’ll never be able to relate to their child. It’s sad.

I think that, with careful thinking, the changing composition of Deaf schools could be taken into stride – how can we empower everyone so that they are a productive citizen of society and have equal opportunities to their hearing able-bodied neurotypical peers? I definitely see a lot of potential for creating thinkers who can give back to their own communities and create positive alternatives to the oppressive environment of mainstream society. Or they can grow up and change mainstream society’s norms.

That’s not what I see happening, unfortunately – I see these kids being sent there as a last resort and then being treated as if they are stupid. Of course they’re going to internalize that; even if they aren’t actually stupid, they may well believe it and lose faith in themselves.

All in all, it makes me kind of sad.

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Positive Stereotypes

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Posted by maxporter on November 21, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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A comment that I frequently hear in my new job is, “You are so intuitive.” Apparently, I notice things about clients that my coworkers don’t notice – in a few cases, it’s dramatically affected the direction that the client’s case management went into.

Some people ask me if my deafness is a factor – since I had to observe people very closely while growing up in order to understand their foreign tongue and manner of communication, did I learn how to read body language especially well? A variant: Since I know sign language, is that why I learned to read body language?

I am sure deafness helped a lot. This particular personality trait feels natural to me, so I’m pretty sure I would’ve been this way even if I were hearing, but being deaf – and queer – meant that I had to pay extra-close attention to what was going on in the heads of people around me if I wanted to communicate and stay safe. So I think that it definitely amplified my pre-existing tendencies.

That being said, I feel kind of uncomfortable when people ask me if my deafness relates to my intuition. I don’t know, maybe it’s just overthinking things, but I do feel kind of weird when hearing people attribute super-powers to me just because I’m deaf – I’ve gotten questions like, “Do you have faster visual reflexes than hearing people?” that make me just go, “Wait, wtf, where the hell did you get that idea?”

I mean… it is flattering at times to have people think that my deafness somehow gives me superpowers or whatever. But I feel like that that enables them to ignore the difficulties that I go through – in some extreme examples, I’ve had people tell me that they wish they could be deaf so that they could sign better or whatever. I’m sorry, but that’s absolutely ridiculous.

Also, the implication is that my “special ability” is just from being deaf – as if a hearing person could wake up tomorrow totally deaf and suddenly gain the ability. That’s kind of insulting – I like to think that I am intuitive, for example, because I worked hard to learn how society works; not simply because the Deaf fairy made me deaf.

Another thing is that the Deaf community is quite diverse. I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of Deaf kids who are on the autistic/asperger’s spectrum who don’t understand the hidden signals of society as easily as most people, for example. So when someone is like, “Yo, can deaf people see better / concentrate more / be happier than hearing people,” I pull up a mental file of all the hundreds of d/Deaf people I have met in my life and am like, “Um, well, actually, not always…”

At the end of the day, though, I’d rather hear positive stereotypes (Deaf people are more awesome) than negative stereotypes (Deaf people can’t drive/read/write/think/function). They are annoying, but that’s all, which is a good thing.

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Thank god for rechargable batteries

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Posted by maxporter on November 18, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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Recently, after people asked me what music is like for me as a deaf person, I gave them this blog’s URL. So I was skimming the music tags to see what kind of stuff they’d be reading about. And I came across this post named ‘How Battery Life Affects My Music Taste.’

As a refresher for those who are too lazy to click through, that post describes how fucking many batteries I would go through and how absurdly expensive it was. We are talking crazy numbers here – but not as crazy as if I’d actually changed the batteries every day per the manufacturers’ recommendation.1 And I did try to get rechargeable batteries – but they were so weak that they’d die within, like, an hour. God, they were worse than Sega Game Gear.

I was fucking blown away to remember that – one of the best things about my recent CI upgrade is the fact that I can now use rechargeable batteries! It truly is a miracle.

True, the initial cost is a bit high – the batteries themselves are quite expensive. But they more than pay for themselves. I’m about 2-3 months into owning them, and I’ve already ended up spending less on them than I would spend on a 2-3 months’ supply of disposable batteries. Which is really great.

Another awesome thing is that now I don’t have to worry about filling up landfills with batteries. When I was younger, I used to get quite concerned about the rate at which I was tossing out little mercury-filled zinc capsules – that shit ain’t good for groundwater. I usually ended up collecting huge amounts of batteries (hence this image) and then taking them to the recycle facility. I knew that even that wasn’t the perfect option, but it was definitely better than simply throwing them out with the trash.

Now I can just walk around all day long with my more eco-friendly and economically sensible batteries. It is awesome.

Postnote: You may be wondering, “What about camping and other situations where you won’t be near a charger at all times?”
Well, good question. The answer is that I kept my old batteries on hand and that the CI upgrade originally came powered by the disposable batteries. So when I ordered the rechargeable batteries, I kept that in a safe place. If I ever go camping, I can grab it and use disposable batteries. (I’d pack out any used batteries, of course.)

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  1. Cheap capitalist trick to move more products off the shelves – tell people to use more than they need so that they have to replace the product faster, thus boosting sales. [↩]
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Interpreter roles

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Posted by maxporter on November 17, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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In a recent comment on a post about interpreters, Sean talked about the fact that schools are beginning to think about new ways that interpreters can best serve their Deaf clients. They are quite concerned about ethics.

This made me think about a tricky situation that one of my interpreters had to face – and how much it must have hurt for him to have to deal with it.

Long story short, I had a twisted teacher in late elementary / middle school who then became the headmaster.1 We were 10-year-old kids and he would outright tease us. Not even in a sarcastic/cutting manner – in a cruel manner. Things like, “So I heard you only have one testicle.” I believe the rumors that he tried to touch some of the boys, if you catch my drift.

He had this really bad grudge against me for whatever reason – he’d claim I was rolling my eyes at him constantly, which is complete bullshit. So I spent a lot of time out in the hallway as punishment for whatever imagined deeds I had done.

You know, the list goes on, and I don’t really feel like going into it. Suffice it to say that this dude was fucked-up, and he told us not to tell our parents. He was really good at hiding his fucked-up-ness around adults.

The other staff members were quite dysfunctional adults. Basically, the most important prerequisite on a job interview at this “non-denominational Christian”2 school was, “Do you love and believe in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior and promise to spread the Gospel?” So a lot of teachers were codependent Christians – not the benign Christians who go to church and contribute to the community in a healthy way, but the Jesus freaks who rely upon Christ like a drug and use God to explain every single event that occurs in their lives.3

My transliterator at the time was an intelligent college student who genuinely cared about the state of the world. He had quite progressive politics – when I parroted whatever bigoted thing I had heard out of my parents’ and their friends’ mouths, he would correct me: “That’s racist.” “People come in all shapes and sizes.” He even talked about his science classes (which taught evolution) a few times.4 He was also quite sensitive – he knew what people (including children) were feeling and treated them kindly. And he was funny. He truly was a wonderful addition to my life.

So I imagine it must have been painful for him to watch all of this stuff going on – to have to translate all this bullshit about how everything was created by God in seven days and how Christians are the most persecuted minority in all of the world’s history and so forth. Not to mention the taunts by the aforementioned sadistic teacher, like when he’d call me an insulting version of my name. And then he’d be the only one who could even try to comfort me, and he didn’t even really know where to begin.

He actually tried to bring it up to me several times in very veiled ways – “What kind of situations can you think of that would require a transliterator to break his code of conduct?” “My code of conduct states I have to report abuse – what do you consider abuse?” “What if someone had to translate something that went against his personal values?” etc. OK, maybe they weren’t that veiled – but I was just a kid and didn’t really understand his efforts to get me to give him permission to tell authorities.

I think one thing that really tripped him up was – it’s impossible to prove just how dysfunctional an emotionally abusive system is. With physical stuff, there’s evidence at least – bruises, cuts, whatever. With this kind of fucked up-ness, it’s difficult to tell cops about it. Especially in the homestate where I grew up, where the cops are very inclined to ignore things like that.5

So, I can definitely sympathize with my transliterator’s dilemma. I may not agree with his choice to keep it silent, but I can see why he’d feel frozen in that situation. If I could go back and talk to him, I’d say that emotional abuse can be really harmful and that police should be contacted. And to try to get that dysfunctional Christian school shut down.

As an epilogue – Thankfully, that sadistic teacher was fired when a new headmaster was hired and a bunch of teachers – whose classrooms were laid out in such a way that they could hear what kind of fucked up shit he was saying at all times – told the new headmaster about how horrible he was. Then I graduated from Christian school and entered my public school. So time has helped somewhat. But I still need to end this post here.

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  1. Yes, same guy throughout that entire period – small school. [↩]
  2. This phrase has been used by some organizations to cover their tracks – they may espouse radical fundamentalist values but be able to hide it under the veil of ‘non-denominational.’ [↩]
  3. I want to make it clear I am not trying to be anti-religion. I think it can be very beneficial for people who genuinely feel spiritual and find solace in religion. But the fact is, Christianity can be used as a tool of abuse and domination, and many people develop a codependent sort of relationship with it. [↩]
  4. Actually, I would definitely say that he planted a lot of seeds in my mind that grew when I became interested in anti-oppression work. [↩]
  5. My homestate has the second highest rate of rape in the nation. [↩]
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