They have obstacles to overcome, but those obstacles are mostly imposed on them by the wider culture, as I've come to understand it. Having spent 4 years learning ASL and being close friends with a lot of deaf people now, I'm starting to conclude that ASL and especially technology makes it clear it doesn't have to be a disability at all, at least for people who were born deaf. Losing a sense is still quite a disability.
I believe people with down-syndrome have a similar community with similar worries. The worries are more about genetic screening shrinking their community than about children, but I feel like the sentiment of wanting to protect and share their community is the same.
I'm surprised it's taken so long for academia to catch up, militaries have figured out decades ago that these "disabilities" are just people who are good at different things and are assigned tasks that they can do much better than the average person.
It is no coincidence that people with ADHD are drawn to certain fields, for example.
Do you have any such examples? Only thing I know of in a military context is colorblind people being better at defeating camouflage, and I believe that isn't actually used in practice.
It gets even funnier. Some autistics claim that it's the "normies" who are messed up with all their emotions, irrationality and social status games. Lots of that on reddit.
It's an immense rabbit hole btw trying to understand how autistics experience life and interactions. I was totally unaware of all this until I met someone who interacted in a very unusual way (to put it mildly)...
I see the logic, but it feels rooted in a sort of state of extreme denial, based on a false starting premise. Deafness, in our world, is a disability. Not being able to hear does actually exclude you from a lot of things that us hearing folks take for granted for the most part. I think it's amazing that so many deaf people are able to function in the world as well as they can. They should be proud of what they've accomplished.
But... man, no no no no. And it's not just communication, either. Like... deliberately denying a child the opportunity to hear birdsong, raindrops landing on a roof, the crashing of ocean waves, their cat purring and meowing at them. Hell, being able to listen to human-made music, more than just feeling the vibrations if it's loud enough and the speakers are on the floor. That's criminally abusive.
If parents had a child with normal hearing, and deliberately damaged it to make the child deaf, we'd call that abuse. Why is refusing a treatment to restore hearing not at least in the same ballpark?
I guess the question for me is, if they have a hearing child, what's stopping that child from being a part of their parents' culture?
If a Deaf couple had two children, one with hearing and one without, would the hearing child be excluded from the community and only the non-hearing child welcomed?
Or is the worry that the hearing child will leave the Deaf community and move on to greener pastures once they grow up, while the non-hearing child will have no choice but to stay?
I'm curious to know if their stance and logic extends to taking government money, registering as disabled for any kind of benefit, and so forth. If it isn't a disability, don't take the money.
If you can't get aid for it, I don't think it's classified a disability. What if they get rid of it later? I registered for adhd in my old school and I don't even mention it anymore since I didn't need the extra time for exams.
> The definition of disability is impairing one or more major life function.
A supplemental framing I've heard is that most of the obstacles that disabled people have to work around are obstacles that society can remove. If all of those obstacles were removed, then the disabled person would be enabled, because that person would be able to live, shop, work, and travel just as other "abled" people can. For example, in the case of people who need wheelchairs, removing the physical obstacles would include designing sidewalks with ramps, buildings with elevators, public buses with wheelchair lifts, and home staircases which can support wheelchair lifts. There are also social obstacles, such as social and employment stigma against people with wheelchairs. Some possible interventions might not be socially or economically realistic everywhere, but perfect doesn't have to be the enemy of better.
For deaf people, restoring hearing using gene therapy removes one obstacle.
Restoring hearing with digital devices (that the user can find support for if the manufacturer goes out of business) removes an obstacle. Another (partially collective) intervention would be adding closed captions (and possibly sign language interpreting) to as many videos as possible.
> So. If they have that culture, is it bad for them to celebrate that they can share in it with their children?
Perhaps "celebrate" is more like "be relieved" that the children will temporarily lack a distraction - spoken language from neighbors, should hearing restoration methods become widespread - from learning to communicate with the deaf parents. Well, that's too strong of an assumption for me to make: a better assumption would be that the deaf parents are relieved that their born-deaf children will be more likely to understand their parents' experiences. Consider immigrants whose biological children don't become fluent in their respective parents' first language. It's not as if immigrants would prevent their children from learning the predominant language of the city they settled down in. Likewise, I find it unlikely that a deaf parent would actively impede a non-deaf child from learning spoken language.
The definition of disability is impairing one or more major life function. Capital D says that's not them. They just communicate differently.
So. If they have that culture, is it bad for them to celebrate that they can share in it with their children?
For reference, I think it's bad. But I can see the logic.