I’ve recently been experiencing this strange identity schism: I’m very not-privileged in some ways and I have experienced a decidedly non-privileged past, but now I am gaining way more privilege and the privileges that I have always had are becoming more important.
With regards to minorities, I’m deaf and queer. I’ve experienced so much crap with regards to both of those and I grew up decidedly differently than my hearing and straight peers did. But I am also white and have socioeconomic privilege.
I was born deaf – a fact that I’m cool with, because I wouldn’t change that aspect of myself in a million years. I was so difficult to understand as a kid that not even my parents could communicate with me sometimes, and I have had to deal with all sorts of crap like almost being barred from taking a required test to pass ninth grade because the proctor thought that I would be too dumb to take it. I still deal with crap in small ways – I can’t watch all the movies that I like, and some of my students (high school drop-outs, mind you) start thinking that they are so much smarter than me once they learn that I am deaf. But it’s not as bad as it used to be by any means.
My speech used to be pretty terrible – my speech therapist had to teach me basically every single sound in the English language from scratch, like so: “To make the sound ‘ee,’ you put your tongue here…” I learned all those sounds, then I had to learn how to say them clearly (like saying /j/ rather than /ch/), then I had to learn all this other stuff like where to put the stress in “OBject” versus “obJECT.” But, as my speech has improved, I’ve found that hearing people are so much nicer. They treat you so much better when your speech is clear. It disgusts me, to be honest, which may be why I don’t make speech therapy such a huge priority. I can be understood clearly, and that is enough for me – I don’t want to speak so well that people forget that I am deaf. I’m content speaking well enough that people think that I simply have an accent.
My hearing has also “improved,” thanks to technology, throughout my life. I was born almost completely deaf. When I got my cochlear implant at age eight, it dramatically changed how I interacted with hearing people. Throughout high school, I got used to hanging out with the hearing kids even though I said “what?” a lot. Then, last August, I got an upgrade to my CI. Boom, things changed way more. Now I can talk to people who are standing behind me(!!!), I can let the printer print 100 copies of the packet while I go do something else and then listen for the “print job done” beep, I can understand the lyrics of a rap song upon the first time ever hearing it… basically, I can do all this crazy crap that I could only imagine a year ago. It is like witchcraft.
So where does all that leave me? If I can interact with the hearing world so well, what am I? Am I Deaf or deaf? Can I even say that I am discriminated against anymore? What does my history of discrimination mean now that I am treated so well? Hell if I know!
As if things weren’t complicated enough, I am dealing with almost the exact same set of issues with regards to queerness.
I don’t even know what the hell I was born as – it’s never been a question that interested me, because I don’t care about the sexuality of children – but I definitely felt that something was going on right around the time that I started going through puberty and became aware that I was queer in some way when I was a teenager. I didn’t know what as, though, so I came out as the wrong thing. Not that it mattered – everyone identified me as ‘queer’ from a million miles away. They could see that I was queer when they looked at me, then they spoke to me and got to know me and my queerness became increasingly more and more obvious and readable.
And so that’s how I started socializing in the queer world – “Oh hi I can see that you are queer! Why, I am, too!” You know, all those little nods and winks and smiles that happen when you walk past another queer person on the street.
I’m not talking about sexuality here, by the way – I’m talking about gender presentation. I used to be very atypical in my gender presentation. Children would be like, “is that a boy or a girl?” and adult strangers would treat me like less than human because they couldn’t tell either. People took pictures of me and all that stuff. It wasn’t as horrible as some of the stuff that I’ve seen my trans woman friends go through (like random dudes hassling them) but it was not fun.
Now, however, my gender presentation is way more typical of my gender. I might act and look a little queer now and then, but if I didn’t tell you, you would (A) correctly assume that I identify as male and (B) probably not be able to tell what my sexuality was. Like, if I walked into a gay bar, I could smile at a dude and they’d smile back because it’s obvious in that context that I like dudes. But if you put me in the straight world? The majority of my kids seem to read me as straight. Which is just way weird beyond weird.
To be honest, sometimes I have difficulty with relating to my kids because I’m not used to looking so ‘straight.’ They look just like I did at their age – they look like strangers take pictures of them and ask them if they are boys or girls. I don’t think any of my coworkers, even the other queer ones, have had this experience. So when my kids go to the visibly queer coworkers, it makes me kind of sad because I do feel like I could help them out more. Like, my coworkers are all very knowledgable and empathetic and understanding people, but I do have that lived experience that my coworkers don’t.
I mean, when I see the kids walk in with all this amazing shit that I can’t even imagine – like feathers in their hair and eyeliner tears and shaved asymmetrical haircuts and clothes of the ‘opposite gender’ mixed with clothes of the ‘same gender’ – it just fills me with a kind of a happiness and hope to see that in the future generation. I don’t know. Like, I don’t have to surpress an immediate reaction of judgment like some of my coworkers do because my immediate reaction is approval. But the kids who walk in looking like that look at me and then assume that I’m gonna judge them because so many men who look like me have judged them in the past. In this profession, we talk about building rapport – well, how the hell do I build rapport with kids who have judged me for all the right reasons? Because, face it, men who look like me are usually the bad guys.
It’s all just so complicated. I do enjoy the privileges that come with looking and acting more ‘normal.’ And I do not miss being treated like less than human at all. But I also miss some of the feeling of belonging that came with being so far outside of the mainstream that I couldn’t hope to ever belong in it.
You know what this means? This means that we need to start truly valuing and celebrating diversity and leveling the playing field so that we live in a world where questions of ‘privilege’ and ‘oppressed’ are alien. We need to live in a world where everyone has access to a full life and the ability to be treated like a human being.
