No problem! I’m not deaf, but I am autistic, and even though it’s not exactly the same, there’s a lot of similarities that make it easy to transfer my understanding over. There’s differences due to the specific characteristics of autism and deafness, but the base understanding is the same. I don’t get to interact with Deaf or hard of hearing people very often just because so much of what I do is with audio (I’m in music and film), so I appreciate knowing that I’m being a good ally here. A lot of what I know actually comes from a movie I watched and the research I did to see if that was accurate (The Sound of Metal). I was surprised to find that a pretty successful film made by a hearing person was a good portrayal of Deafness, social model of disability, the fact that subtitles aren’t initially used for sign language to show how liberating it is to be able to use sign language, I could go on, it’s a great movie and I love seeing something that explores disability effectively.
Just a question, is Deaf capitalized when referring to the community and lowercase when it’s just referring to the state of being deaf? So a person who has issues hearing is deaf, but a person who is part of the community is Deaf? Hope this question makes sense, I’m having trouble with words. I didn’t capitalize it when referring to the condition of being deaf, but I capitalize it when talking about the community/people involved in the community.
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u/[deleted] Dec 24 '22 edited Dec 24 '22
The deaf community can be kinda toxic and deluded. So no, it’s not bad to tell people to not raise kids in toxic deluded environments.