Author Archives: maxporter

A queer deaf guy who likes movies a lot.

Thoughts on the Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting

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Posted by maxporter on February 21, 2012 – 4:20 AM
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One thing that I learned within the last six months is that there are many different conceptual approaches to ASL interpretation. For example, there’s a theory that thinks of the interpreter as a ‘conduit’ who provides no cultural translation – so an interpreter would translate an English idiom literally to a native ASL speaker instead of translating the concept to ASL. You can read more about the different models here.

Recently, I was reading an article, A Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting. It was super-interesting. I encourage you to read it if you have the time.

Let’s start by defining the words ‘feminist’ and ‘relational’: in this context, ‘feminist’ is a set of related philosophies and approaches related to things like empowerment and consensus-building that don’t apply only to women or sexual/gender minorities. A ‘relational’ approach “examines individuals in context (Ulrich, 1996). It notes that each interaction is a unique mix of participants, place, time and social conditions.”1 With this perspective, the goal of the feminist-relational interpretation is to avoid oppressing the Deaf participant and to not inadvertently act as the oppressor. The interpreter is aware of their role as a bilingual individual who mediates the power balance between the minority language speaker and the majority language speaker.

At first, I was a bit dubious. What if the well-meaning interpreter ends up being condescending towards me because he or she knows The Answer to saving Deaf people from oppression? What if the interpreter’s hidden agenda interfered with my services?

But, as I kept reading, I began to grasp just how empowering it would be to have an interpreter who took a feminist-relational approach to interpreting because it puts an emphasis on the idea that “experience is linked to respecting individuals and valuing their stories. It takes into account the unique perceptions of people who, although sharing an event, experience it differently.”2 So, instead of pretending that I grew up Hearing and that I understand every single rule of Hearing social etiquette, an interpreter would treat me like I truly am, a deaf person.

Let’s get honest here – even though I grew up among mostly Hearing people, I still don’t understand all of Hearing culture’s inner workings to this day. When I was younger, having a personal connection to interpreters was quite important to helping me navigate a mainstreamed school – For instance, A Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting talks about how interpreters can help their student determine culturally appropriate times to ask questions. My interpreter in primary school did things like this, and I really appreciated having her around to teach me about Hearing culture. Before she began doing this, I would get sent to the office for “speaking out of turn.”

When the interpreter-client relationship is deeper than a simple professional relationship, I definitely feel more connected to my surroundings. For instance, in high school, I definitely appreciated having an interpreter who stood in quiet support of me when I had a homophobic teacher who would yell at my then-sweetie and I whenever we held hands outside of class. He didn’t do much – he simply let me know that, although he was Mormon like our teacher, he stood in full support of LGBTQ rights and saw absolutely no reason whatsoever, religious or otherwise, to act/think like our teacher did. Having that support helped me keep going to that class and I learned a lot about the subject matter in spite of that teacher, who was an asshole for many many reasons beyond the scope of this post.

When the interpreter treats it simply as if it is a job, I feel very disconnected and even exploited. And when the interpreter acts as if he or she possesses no understanding of the Deaf experience whatsoever, I feel uncomfortable. For instance, I had an interpreter who talked about how she had encountered one of her clients at the local Deaf and Hearing Professionals Happy Hour and how awkward that was because she interpreted for that client’s therapy sessions. As somebody with very strong feelings about the stigmatization of mental illness, I was completely appalled. Also, we place a large amount of trust in our interpreters, mostly by necessity, and to have that trust violated is horrible.

Looking back, her behavior was utterly unprofessional even by standard interpreting guidelines – I should have requested to switch an interpreter. But at the time, it didn’t even occur to me as an option – I had been told so many times that the hired interpreters were set in stone that I had forgotten all about my rights.3 It definitely made me feel much more uncomfortable in that class to voice my opinion because I knew that that interpreter was sitting there in judgment of her clients. What if she didn’t like my opinion about the political system of Mexico or something?

So, having an interpreter who came from a more feminist-relational context and was in a position where he or she truly understood all the intricacies and power dynamics inherent in the Deaf/Hearing relationship would be very empowering, I think. Especially if that interpreter was also able to expand their understanding of power dynamics to other minority relations – I am also a queer man, so having an interpreter who is able to support me in that aspect too is very empowering. Like in my aforementioned example of the Mormon interpreter who stood by my side – or, in another example, when I had two gay interpreters (one male, one female) and they would sometimes just so happen to discuss their partners in our conversations during break times. Nothing too personal, just older adults talking about their domestic gay lives. It made me feel more welcome in the sometimes-homophobic classroom.

As A Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting discusses, it’s not just empowering for me, but for the interpreter, too. When I worked with interpreters a lot in a job where I was responsible for determining the feasibility of remote ASL interpretation in the university, I talked to them a lot. And I learned that a lot more interpreters genuinely care about us than I had realized. For example, I had the opportunity of talking to a woman who had been interpreting for the university for about 20 years, and just hearing about her passion for Deaf people and the community as a whole was pretty awesome.

And, when I think back to the aforementioned interpreter who is one of the most ethically-concerned interpreters I’ve had from an adult perspective, I can see that he felt very powerless in that situation. He could see no way out of the iron suit of the code of conduct. If he had been aware of alternatives, I think that he would have felt more empowered to act out against the dysfunctional situation that he saw every day – for instance, here is one scenario in which an interpreter was able to retain rights to file a complaint:

An interpreter visited a Deaf friend who had recently been released from a hospital that had not provided appropriate accommodation. During the visit, nurses came to teach self-care. The interpreter refused to interpret the session. This would have meant accepting an obligation to hold confidential all information. Instead the interpreter allowed the interaction to occur at a ponderously slow and frustrating pace, fre-quently stopping to check that his Deaf friend understood the instructions. In doing this, the interpreter retained the right to file a complaint against the visiting nurse ser-vice with the Office on Civil Rights.

-Source

I think that having that option would have been incredibly empowering for both my interpreter and I.

However, I think that people have to be very careful about how this plays out. What is key is how the interpreter goes about all of this. They can’t just rush in and save their Deaf client all the time. They have to take their Deaf client’s perspective into consideration.

One thing that has helped me with my interpreter/client relations in general – and they go into this a little bit in A Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting, too – is having contact with interpreters outside of a classroom setting. For instance, one of my interpreters would take me out to lunch to discuss the dynamics of what was going on inside the classroom and ask for opinions from me about how he could better serve me. I think that having that kind of open, regular discussion would be very valuable and empowering for everyone involved.

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  1. Source [↩]
  2. Source [↩]
  3. This was a team-interpreting situation – interpreter B seemed just as appalled as I did when interpreter A began talking about her client… so I think that one of the best things that interpreter B could have done would have been to say, “Hey, how did that comment make you feel?” after class. But, on the other hand, I can see where she might have been unsure about the possibility creating a rift in the team solidarity. [↩]
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Black Deaf History

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Posted by maxporter on February 20, 2012 – 11:16 AM
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So I co-moderate fydeafies on tumblr and I posted this video to that blog but it occurred to me that I should post it here too. It is in ASL but has subtitles for those who don’t know ASL.

Transcript:

Hello, my name is Opeoluwa Sotonwa and I work at the Kentucky Commission on the Deaf and Hard of Hearing as the information program coordinator. I’d like to talk to you a little bit today about back deaf history.

As you already know, every February in America we celebrate Black History Month. Well, we also celebrate Black Deaf History at the same time. I, myself, am from Africa, but Black History month impacts me and reminds me about something that has happened in the past. I am talking about a man named Dr. Andrew Foster. He was a black American man who happened to be the first deaf black person to graduate from Gallaudet University. Then he also obtained a Masters degree from Eastern Michigan University.

After Dr. Foster finished his schooling, he went to Africa. You see, up until that time many missionaries went to Africa and they claimed that they never saw any deaf people. Really, there were many deaf people, but they were hidden from view by their parents because the culture there is different and they oppressed and discriminated against deaf people. Deaf people were never given the opportunity to go to school or do anything else.

When Dr. Foster came to Africa, he first went to Liberia in West Africa and established the first deaf school in Africa. At first when they established school, they thought that no one would show up, but they were shocked to see that many deaf people showed up, filling the school to its capacity and resulting in a waiting list.

Then Dr. Foster decided to move to various countries within Africa to set up deaf schools as well as church programs and vocational training centers all over, altogether about 30 centers. Finally, he set up a headquarters in Nigeria.

I’m standing here today because I benefited from what Dr. Foster started in Africa. If Dr. Foster had never gone to Africa, deaf people would never have gotten their educational opportunities, they would never have gotten their right to go to school. Due to Dr. Foster’s efforts, I am able to stand here as I am standing here today. I was able to obtain an education in Africa and then I was able to go to America on a scholarship and then I was able to live an independent life.

Today, in Africa, we remember him and honor him for all he has done for the deaf communities in Africa. Recently, we have established a higher education school and we named it Andrew Foster Memorial College. We hope that one day that school will become a University as well. Also, at Gallaudet University, they honored Dr. Foster by dedicating a hall to him. Really, we in Africa owe a lot to Dr. Foster and he should never be forgotten.

We, at KCDHH, recognize and honor Dr. Foster for his role in establishing deaf schools in African countries. Every February, when we celebrate Black History Month, we remember him and praise all he had done. Thank you.

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Hearing people and Deaf culture

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Posted by maxporter on February 19, 2012 – 11:09 AM
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To be honest, I have mixed feelings when I see Hearing people doing things like being Good People for learning ASL, becoming the absolute experts in the cochlear implant debate, and telling deaf people that ASL is their natural language.

My problem with some Hearing people is that they come to ASL with a touch of exoticism in their outlook – “OH MY GOD I CAN LEARN ASL TO TALK TO THESE AWESOME PEOPLE!” Or they have pity for us (and might even want to save our souls). But they do have this tendency to think of Deaf people as wonderful, innocent little creatures.

The thing is, there’s a harmful stereotype out there: the stereotype of the Deaf adult as a dependent child who knows nothing and relates to Hearing people as a child would relate to adults. This stereotype is completely false. But I do feel that there is a paternalistic attitude in the approach of some Hearing people to ASL, and when you combine that attitude with this stereotype, it’s not good.

Another thing is that Deaf culture and deaf issues are extremely complicated. I grew up in this world and I still don’t have a good answer for, say, the education issues that we face – so it strikes me as arrogant when a Hearing person immediately gains an opinion on every aspect of Deaf culture after one semester of ASL class.

I have been in situations where I was in a conversation with a Hearing ASL Student who then got very aggressive about their opinion of cochlear implants – “They are destroying Deaf culture,” that kind of thing – without even asking me if I had one, let alone what I thought of them. In their head, they are leveling the Hearing/Deaf playing field by being “good allies”, but really, they are replaying the common Hearing/Deaf power imbalance of the Hearing person informing the Deaf person of his/her opinion without taking the Deaf person’s opinion into consideration.

And then Hearing ASL students sometimes assume that I am The World Expert on Deaf culture. It doesn’t matter how many times I try to explain that I grew up very isolated from other Deaf people and that I therefore am not a very good representative of Strong-Deaf culture – all deaf people are automatically culturally Deaf from their viewpoint. It makes me wonder if they actually listened to their teacher when she/he said, “90% of all deaf children have hearing parents” and if the class actually discussed the implications of that – Deaf culture is primarily a peer culture, and if you are isolated from your Deaf peers, it’s hard to get a foothold in Deaf culture.

The thing is, not all deaf people know ASL. But not all non-ASL speaking deaf people are puppets of the Hearing society. Shades of grey exist! It is not a black and white issue.

But I’m usually too afraid to tell Hearing students that I’m not really well-versed on Deaf culture – because then they sometimes start parroting Deaf separatist sentiments that they might have picked up from their books or from their teachers. I don’t like that. It’s more bearable if if it’s put in a benign way, like, “Hey man, I think you should hang out with more Deaf people” – but it’s still none of their business. It is up to me, the deaf person, to decide how and when and with whom to socialize; the Hearing person has no place in that conversation.

And, let’s get real – separatist talk sounds very very different when it comes from somebody outside your minority versus when it comes from someone within your minority. If I hear Deaf separatist talk from hearing people, it sounds to me like, “You people should just interact with yourselves; it doesn’t even matter that you don’t have all of your rights in this world – you can give each other community.” That’s super-condescending, really, and it ignores the systematic change that needs to happen in order to ensure equal rights for d/Deaf people.

It’s all pretty complicated.

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Classism in a public high school

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Posted by maxporter on February 18, 2012 – 5:43 PM
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I recently gained access to Teaching Tolerance, which is a very exciting thing. Today, while submersing myself in article after article about how our school system hurts low-income students, I began to reflect upon how classist my high school was despite the fact that it was a public school – and it angered me.

I grew up in a fairly prosperous community supported by a strong tourism industry. So, although I went to the local public high school, it was a different experience compared to many of the public schools that I hear and read about. Most notably, my high school had a ton of resources, like a TV studio. In and of itself, it isn’t so bad that there were a ton of resources – what makes me angry today is the fact that some teachers created unequal access to those resources.

For instance – our school had an AP program, and one teacher who taught nearly all of the AP social studies courses that our school offered would charge students for their textbooks. His logic was that it was like a college class, therefore, we would pay for our own supplies just like a college student. Looking back, that’s unfair – it’s already unfair that students have to pay to take the AP test, so adding another cost on top of that is not fair to those who can’t afford it.

See, the thing is – my community wasn’t just composed of upper-class people. There was a huge rich/poor gap – few people were middle-class – due to the fact that the tourism industry relied on a lot of service workers. But the thing is, they rarely interacted with one another. Whenever I go back to my hometown, I can’t help but notice how there are almost two completely different societies in it. Reflecting this huge divide, very few of my teachers, especially those from the AP programs, made any effort to integrate students and instead accepted the status quo.

When I think about some of the teachers that I admired in high school and the issues that I’m now facing as a person involved in education, I have more admiration for the good teachers who spoke about the class divide.

For instance, I had an English teacher whose goal was to teach us not just how to read literature but how to build a conceptual framework in which to think about literature. He taught us how to think. He would frequently point out the class divide – how the teachers had crappier cars than the students, how many of the teachers lived in a nearby farming town because the tourism industry had jacked up housing prices too much, that kind of thing. But the thing is, he did it in a subtle manner – for instance, he cracked a joke about the local farming town that was circulating around the school, which made the students laugh. Then he was like, “Guys, did you know that I live there?” He also spoke about how the tourism industry, which had come to prominence right around the time that we were born, had changed the town – for instance, homeless-by-choice people (usually hippies) used to be an accepted part of the town, but then they were shipped off to the nearest city shelter after the tourism industry changed things.

It wasn’t enough to talk about class, though – looking back, in the community where I grew up, it would have made sense to do systematic change. For instance, it would be more equal if we took funds from the wealthier people and used those funds to create scholarships to provide access to things like the AP exams. But, in a town where people get upset at teachers who do nothing more than provide access to Spanish-language materials, I don’t think it will happen anytime soon – in my head, providing equal language access for all the people of the town is just such a fundamental courtesy that I can’t imagine how the people in charge would receive talk of class equality.

It’s not fair. Such a wealthy country as the United States should be able to have the resources to spend on education and the support of human beings, but we’re throwing all of our money into anti-human things like the military-industry complex and global corporations.

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Educating d/Deaf children: A deeper conversation

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Posted by maxporter on February 14, 2012 – 10:10 PM
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The other day on Tumblr, I had the chance to participate in a very insightful reblog conversation about education & deafness – you can read it here (I’m maxmovinghands).1

One of the things that we began talking about is that experience that nearly every child with some form of deafness significant enough to miss “normal” spoken conversation has experienced: walking up to adults who are talking and asking, “What are you saying?” Just – literally – I physically cannot understand you due to the language barrier because you are communicating in the audio channel that you exist in rather than in the visual channel where I reside; can you please fill me in because I have absolutely no access to the auditory realm whereas you have access to the visual world? In my head, this has always been a simple enough request, but Hearing people would become resentful or even angry when I was a child and say, “It’s not important,” and I didn’t understand why. I was simply asking for the same access to a conversation that every other human being in the room has.

As arfism pointed out:

I do feel that if you’re told over and over that it’s not important or I’ll tell you later and so on. It’s almost like they’re saying you don’t matter enough for me to take the time to explain this to you. It has to affect you psychologically somehow. Especially if you’re told that over and over from freaking day one pretty much.

I agree that it can have a negative psychological effect. My “friends” have done this to me in the past – heck, my parents have done it to me occasionally. Personally, I don’t really internalize things like that, so I just said, “fuck society,” but it is a painful experience to go through all the same and I can only imagine how much worse an internalizer would feel.

Really – it’s not fair. Since getting my CI and integrating more into Hearing society, I’ve discovered that people enter and leave conversations all the time. Yet when we deaf people try to do the exact same thing, it’s suddenly an inconvenience. Discovering this double-standard makes me even angrier at the hearing people who excluded me from conversation in the past.

And I do get pissed off at hearing parents/teachers sometimes for being so self-centered and not taking a moment to think, “Boy, this child is deaf; what does that really mean?” Like – I don’t care how big of an inconvenience it is have to put down the knife while cooking for two seconds to sign something to your deaf child – just goddamn suck it up and play by the rules of deafness because the child cannot play by the rules of Hearing society. And if deaf children simply cannot play by the same rules that Hearing society functions upon, so what? Their psychological well-being is so much more important than the *huge* inconvenience of having to take two seconds to translate your audio-based speech into a visual format.

Personally, I think that this prejudice from audist society is one of the reasons that some deaf children don’t do well in school. From day one, deaf people are told, “Don’t seek out information. Nothing is of importance.” Contrast this with the message that hearing children get from the world: they eavesdrop on their parents’ conversation about how to pay taxes, and although they may not understand all the words, it gives them more tools to put in their toolbox that they use to figure out the world. Well, what happens if deaf children don’t have the tools – worse, if the parents say, “No, these tools aren’t important”… which the child then reads as, “because you’re not important enough to repeat stuff to”?

When you combine this message of an active resistance to learning that deaf people get from society with some teachers’ tendencies to assume audist things – for instance, that deafness automatically equals mental retardation – you get a losing combination.

Like – when you read about educators who talk about deaf children, sometimes they focus on all our shortcomings and lacks and deficiencies. Well, what about focusing on society’s problems instead?

Personally, all the resistance from society sparked my super-stubborn nature and put me into overdrive to start learning everything about the world. And I know some other deaf bookworms/academics – I think that we tend to be more intense about intellectual topics than our hearing counterparts because we are constantly fighting that message of, “You don’t matter enough to share information with.” My reaction to that message was, “Well, fuck you, I’m gonna learn all the information in the world and then school you,” but I can definitely see how somebody with a more easygoing personality would be like, “Hmm, you know, maybe they have a point…”

I don’t know. Just thinking off the cuff. No real in-depth theory or research here. Just some ideas to start a discussion.

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  1. Edit: thatdeafdude, who created the original post, clarified that he was talking about his friends rather than deaf people in general and apologized for the confusion. Still, it generated an insightful conversation imo. [↩]
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Why I’m not a separatist

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Posted by maxporter on February 6, 2012 – 3:50 PM
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So I have a ton to say, it’s just that I haven’t had the time to get these things down. Also, I tend to think at a very abstract generalized level, which can be kind of hard to translate to day-to-day life sometimes.

I’ve been tentatively getting more involved with various sects of the d/Deaf community – some of my friends are strong advocates for Cued Speech; others are strong advocates for ASL. Honestly, though, it’s more difficult for me to gain a foothold in the Strong-ASL Deaf community due to the negative perceptions of other people.

In the past, I’ve been asked, “Are you Hearing?” What, just because I have a good grasp of English, I’m Hearing all of a sudden? The worst part is when I say, “No, I’m deaf” (this is all in ASL of course) and then the other Deaf person just flat-out refuses to believe me and stops talking to me. Obviously I’m a Hearing person who is lying to them.1

Now, in the past, I’ve said that separatism is a valid solution for some minority individuals and communities. If someone truly is hurt by the day-to-day grind of living in a Hearing, white, straight, whatever, world and just wants to be among other people who will love and respect him or her because they are going through the same thing – well, that is valid.

Where separatism becomes a problem, in my eyes, is when minority people start excluding other minority people on the basis of not being “enough” of a minority. In my case, I speak and write too well. Other ways that I have seen this play out in other communities is:

  • You weren’t raised as x gender, therefore, you cannot participate in a group of x gender because your perceptions are that of y gender. (See also: Michigan’s Womyn’s Fest, which has decided to ban trans women because they’re not “woman enough.”)2
  • You are bisexual, therefore, you are not allowed in the gay bar/community because you are not gay enough. Or the straight world – it depends on how others read you.
  • You weren’t born in Mexico, therefore, you are not really Mexican-American. (I’ve seen my Mexican-American students argue with each other about who is more “Mexican” – some say that you have to be born in Mexico; others say that your parents had to be born in Mexico…)

And so on and so forth. It leads to a lot of circular arguments. The problem with separatism is, it still focuses upon an essentialist, binary notion of identity – for instance: you are deaf, therefore, you are not hearing. Therefore, you must be placed into the separatist Deaf community. It also attaches binary notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to entire communities – Deaf people are good; Hearing people are bad.

But, really, real life is more complicated than that. You can’t simply invert the paradigm and expect it to be progressive. For instance, insisting upon female superiority rather than the equality of sexes misses the point – in this example, the point is not to reinscribe the dominant notions of male/female by inverting them; the point is to imagine a completely new world where the notion of ‘dominance’ is foreign. In this new post-patriarchial world, there would be no male or female superiority – just human beings who don’t control or subjugate one another.

And somebody is not inherently better / more progressive simply because he or she is in the same minority community as you are. For instance, I certainly have been hurt by straight people in the past, but some of the worst damage that I’ve experienced came from others in the queer community. So I have experienced firsthand that the idea that “queer = good; straight = bad” is absolute bullshit. And that goes for any minority community, I think – just because someone looks like you doesn’t mean that they are a good person. That’s another leftover prejudice from mainstream society, which seeks out similarities and devalues differences.

Now, I can see where a separatist would feel threatened by, say, me. I think that, in part, separatism is an effort to control the world and make it more manageable. It’s a way of taking back power in a society that does not confer power upon minorities. I’ve done it – I went through a separatist Deaf stage to take back some of the power that I felt had been taken away from me as a visibly queer man who had his photos snapped by strangers.

So when I show up, able to transverse borders and boundaries and live as if there was no distinction between Deaf and Hearing – because, for me, the distinction is not as large – well, I can see where somebody who is a separatist would become uncomfortable. Especially if they can’t transverse boundaries as easily as I can. I can see why they would feel as if I am belittling the power that they have managed to take back.

One thing that I struggle with, honestly, is how to be respectful to separatist people, especially in my Deaf culture, while also having space for my own opinions to exist. What on Earth do I say, for example, to a bigoted old woman who tries to tell me that cochlear implants are against God’s will? We need to discuss these fears and come up with actual solutions, but her emotions about becoming powerless didn’t allow room for my thoughts about the relationship between Deaf and Hearing culture. Speaking to her, therefore, wasn’t very productive.

But if I had a chance to talk to an open-minded Deaf separatist who was willing to at least listen to my perspective before completely and utterly rejecting it – that’d be awesome.

I think the key here is to treat each other like individuals who have decided to have a specific relationship with the community – not as representatives of particular political agendas, which is a dynamic that I have seen a lot. For instance I’m not a representative of the cochlear implant industry, and having a cochlear implant does not mean that I have this set of ideas or that set of ideas – I am simply an individual who just so happens to have received a cochlear implant when I was eight. I formed my own opinions; you can’t assume what my opinions are until you actually talk to me and find out.

I don’t know, though- I just see a lot of identity policing within separatist communities that ends up echoing the prejudices of mainstream society. And I don’t think that that’s a good path for entire communities to go down. But, if separatism helps an individual heal from the traumas of prejudiced society on the personal level – okay, that’s cool.

I have way more to say about this topic – will cochlear implants really annihilate Deaf culture? How does it make me feel when I see Hearing people telling Deaf people to be separatists, to just learn ASL and stay within Deaf culture? There’s so much.

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  1. This is yet another reason that I strongly dislike the deaf-for-a-day ASL class exercise, btw – it sets up a context that does allow Hearing people to lie to Deaf people. [↩]
  2. Edit 2/14/12: I just realized that a new reader might have misunderstood this – just to make it clear, I think that trans women are absolutely women and that MichFest’s polies are ridiculous. [↩]
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Relating to Deaf culture as a queer man

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Posted by maxporter on January 24, 2012 – 10:14 PM
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Remember that post about an identity schism that I just put up? Well, more identity stuff happened today. I am just going to quickly type up this blog post to get it off of my mind, then head out to the barcade and shoot baddies.

Today I gave a presentation to a bunch of Hearing students in an ASL class with an older Deaf instructor. It went really well. After the presentation, the instructor and I chatted for a bit in the lunch room.

She said that cochlear implants are against God’s will – I have a cochlear implant and she knew that. It was quite upsetting because, as a queer man, I have had “it’s against God’s will” used against me. Like, people have sat in front of me with the Bible open on their laps while they quote Bible verses at me for hours (and several tissue boxes, all of which they ignored) to explain exactly why I am such a horrible person for exactly these reasons as stated in God’s book. It’s against God’s will to like people of the same sex, it’s against God’s will to have a gender expression contrary to what God “intended,” all that crap. I don’t want to have it used against me from the Deaf community, too.

I also don’t think that “it’s against God’s will” is the most logical and airtight argument in the world. I’m such an atheist that the notion of creating an ethical code based upon this imaginary person’s desires is just so foreign to me.

Another thing that bothers me about it is that religious notions in Deaf individuals just seems so foreign to me. Religion is something that Hearing people forced upon us. They didn’t – and often, still don’t – care about us until we said, “Okay, we will listen to your teachings of Jesus Christ just so that you can give us food/money/whatever.” So to hear a Deaf person, who probably would not have been religious if Hearing people had not forced it upon her ancestors hundreds of years ago, talk as if God was the only thing in her entire life that mattered – it was upsetting.

Also, this lady said that her body told her that she is deaf, so she obeyed her body and socializes primarily with the Deaf community. Again, this triggered me on the queer aspect. In order to have a fulfilling life, I have had to change my body to be more congruent with my identity. And, upon changing my body, I have been happier because now my body fits my identity. I tried to do it the other way around – changing my identity to match my body – but I was just so unhappy that I had to go ahead and change my body. So, to have this lady sit here and tell me that she socializes with the Deaf community because she has a deaf body – I had to take a headspace break before I could work again.

It also really highlighted some of the downfalls to having a complex identity. For the most part, I like having a complex identity. You can’t make any assumptions about me. That’s okay, because I don’t make any assumptions about you either – to the best of my ability. But it made me remember that nearly everyone else sees identity as a simpler thing. Either you are a man or you are a woman. Either you are deaf or you are hearing. That kind of thing.

I’m very definite in some categories, – I’m definitely that blue-eyed and blond whitey who could never be mistaken for any other race, for example – but I blur the lines on the categories in the minorities that I belong to. Do I act Deaf or Hearing? Neither/both. Do I act gay or straight? Neither/both. That kind of complexity may upset people who are used to a more binary mode of relating to others.

I mean… this lady was saying that I should have an interpreter at work and just sign all the time. Because I guess that being neither fully Deaf nor fully Hearing is too complicated. Which was rude – it’s my life, so let me live it. I tried to convey to this lady that I do share her mixed feelings about cochlear implants – it’s not right for everybody, and it shouldn’t be the first solution that parents go to – but I definitely did not share the fact that I personally appreciate my cochlear implant as a tool that enables me to function in the Hearing world.

Like, I don’t blame her for telling me to not trust Hearing people. She told me that her own brother would make fun of how she spoke. I can definitely see why she would be like, “Fuck the Hearing world!” after that. But the world is not the same as it was in her day. My problems are different than her problems.

It’s just all so complex. Other people see intersectionality as this kind of academic theory that doesn’t really apply to them – I don’t. It’s definitely very much a part of my day-to-day life, and sometimes that makes it harder to find people to talk to.

Alright, time to go shoot those baddies at the arcade.

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