The Hearing World Must Stop Forcing Deaf Culture to Assimilate
Too many hearing people view deafness as a deficiency rather than a separate linguistic context, worldview and culture.Not a deficiency? Sad, unfortunate, short one very useful sense, but not a deficiency? I have worked with several deaf people, and everyone of them would have been overjoyed to have normal hearing. This identity politics stuff is just deranged.
Deranged is the right word.
ReplyDeleteI've read about deaf parents who wanted their children to be deaf, as if having all their senses would somehow deprive the kids their bond with their parents.
Of course the same thing goes with homosexuals and "trans" people, who want any children they can get ahold of to have the same outlook. Much of what's done to children by these sorts is child abuse, IMHO.
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/15/us/protest-that-turned-campus-for-the-deaf-around.html
ReplyDeleteCheers
This long predates the current peak of identity politics, as I recall based on kerfuffles I read about at Gallaudet University when I lived in the D.C. area 1991-2004. In part it centers on American Sign Language, which is indeed "a separate linguistic context", as in it's its own natural language, not a way of signing English.
ReplyDeleteThough they'd be wise not to push this since survival in the current SJW jungle depends on detecting subtle cues (sometimes so subtle as to not exist), which ... let's see, that became a big issue when a Node.js top technical dog promoted on Twitter a paper about that WRT to autistic people in college. Which was used to call into doubt his loyalty to the project's Code of Conduct, resulting in a so far failed attempt to remove him, a ludicrous fork, etc. etc. etc.
Now, I don't exactly have good wishes for this hipster cancer (server side JavaScript, attracting exactly the wrong sort of developers for that), which is further metastasizing in the new, hot Electron multiplatform GUI system (which is literally a copy of Google Chrome/Chromium bolted to a copy of Node.js, but, hey, it could force Apple to try to force Intel to help them up the 16GiB max memory of their laptops) ... well, let's just say that it's not an entirely bad thing the two of us are disabled and perforce out of the programming workforce.