Charlie Swinbourne: Hearing impaired? Hard of hearing? It’s hard to find the right term to ‘deafine’ yourself. I should know

Well, two points :
It is not an aim in life to go about not offending anyone. I notice that more and more people are claiming to be offended simply as a tool for getting their own way. The world is becoming full of things that you can’t say. I am very much against this as I see it as the “control freaks” taking over. And we all know how much deaf people get controlled by the freaks. If you have never had your speech corrected by a social worker half your age and experience then you haven’t lived.

Recently I’ve been appalled to see a duly elected Cornish councillor get literally forced out of office because he “said the wrong thing”. This was a signal for every petty bully for miles around to weigh in, and out he went. Don’t like this trend at all. If there’s bullying going on, deaf and especially Deaf people will be the victims. We always are. Don’t go there.

The other point is this : Most deaf people dislike the terms by which we are described. No matter what they call us it will be regarded as a pejorative. That is partly because people don’t appreciate that there are many, many forms of deafness each with its personal manifestations. We all like to think that, being deaf we know a lot about it.
The fact is that we know a lot about our own situation and tend to assume that everyone else is the same. Not so. It’s very misleading to think that you know a lot about the issue because you have experienced one small corner of it.

Anyone who has >studied< deafness as a subject will have a far greater understanding of the whole. It's daft to talk about the medical model and the social model. That is in fact an extreme separation of the two fundamental patterns of deafness. The truth is, it's a mixture. A lot of "deaf lore" is simply pub talk and this gives rise to further misunderstandings. People like to shout "That's medical model" as if it were some terrible offence. Well, we're all medical model. We are all social model too. You can't have one without the other. The word here is "balance".

Everything needs a label of some kind in order to describe it. People who murmur "Don't like labels" just haven't thought it through. We can't talk about it if we can't describe it and therefore if it can't be described it will never be talked about.

Or perhaps that is what they want?

Wow, someone else who uses ‘partially deaf’ like I do to describe themselves. *does the not alone dance*

I have hardly ever seen “partially deaf” used in the deaf or hearing worlds because as you say hearing folk use hearing impaired and deaf folk use deaf/HOH – HOH is not well understood outside of deaf space in my experience. My hearing parents bought me up using the word deaf partly cos it is simple to say and partly to stress that without my hearing aids I am in practical terms completely deaf as I cannot hear speech or even most shouting.

Partially deaf as you’ve already said Charlie, it’s not about “what I don’t have” it’s linking to some level of pride although I didn’t discover deaf culture till university. My parents never let people shame me for being deaf or asking for repeats or needing to see faces. I realise I’m really lucky that my parents (mum especially) instinctively took a social model approach to “If Natalya can’t hear you, it’s because you haven’t got attention/spoken clearly/contextualised things.

I feel strongly that I do not have a hearing loss as I was born deaf and didn’t lose anything – I never had it, I don’t feel a sense of loss, I’ve never known any different and I wouldn’t want to be hearing thanks. Like deafened, hearing loss is a perfectly reasonable term which doesn’t apply to me. I wasn’t impressed when RNID went to AoHL because it felt they didn’t represent me, although that is perhaps a more accurate reflection of their aims.

Partially deaf has the additional bonus of working in my shoddy sign language as I sign half deaf and more proper signers seem to understand me and I’ve never had grief for not using HOH (which I will sometimes use).

I really do need to find some time and comment on the hearing impaired article because my brain is fizzing with things to say about a term I personally detest but don’t think necessarily deserves to be banned.

Just in case anyone’s interested in following this up in the Deaf Studies literature, from Padden and Humphries (1988: 39)

So you know, normally ‘HARD-OF-HEARING’ is understood to mean a departure from a hearing ‘norm’ – well, take a look at the way that it’s used in a discussion between Deaf people:

“The subject was whether a mutual acquaintance could use the phone… She couldn’t, our friend told us, because she was only “A-LITTLE HARD-OF-HEARING”. We understood this to mean that the woman could only hear a little, not well enough to use the phone.

On another occasion, another deaf friend brought up the name of a woman we didn’t know, and explained that she had many of the recognisable characteristics of someone who could hear well, because she was VERY HARD-OF-HEARING. Our friend added that the woman regularly used the telephone to conduct business.”

So, here are two terms used to mean the opposite of what we would assume is ‘normal’ usage – A-LITTLE HARD-OF-HEARING to mean someone who is nearly fully ‘DEAF’, and VERY HARD-OF-HEARING to mean someone who is so able to hear that they are almost not ‘DEAF’ at all.

The point that Padden and Humphries are making is that you start from where you consider to be ‘normal’ – and define away from there.

Bring politics into this, and you start to craft definitions away from a point that you think ‘should’ be normal.

Then things get very complicated…

It seems to me that we either have to all live happily together under a broad brush term such as “Deaf” (a word which I first heard/misheard at school when other pupils asked me “Are you Death?”) or else we need to break it down into discrete and meaningful levels.

The problem with “mild”, “moderate”, “severe” and “profound” is that Joe Public can’t tell one from another. Besides that, most of us are somehow borderline between two categories. i.e. there are not enough levels and the difference is not clear enough.

It seems to me that to even begin to cover all levels, we would have to somehow be able to rapidly convey our audiograms and speech comprehension results. For example, these could be on a badge, T-shirt or tattooed on our foreheads. The latter could be really helpful in the swimming pool where too many people try to talk to me. 🙂

I don’t like Deaf/deaf because it sounds like death. Nor do I like hard of hearing because it sounds stupid; we don’t say hard of sight, hard of smell do we? Furthermore, hearing cannot be expressed as a percentage, regardless of what many people seem to think, so let’s rule that out.

Hearing impaired and partially hearing don’t offend me as such but they still don’t reveal how much hearing one has. Hence they’re not really any more useful than saying you’re deaf rather than Deaf.

Am I broken or defective? I don’t know. But I do know that, if I could choose, I’d prefer to be skint and hearing rather than rich and deaf. If it becomes possible to give people like me “normal” hearing, you’ll find me at the front of the queue. 🙂

I prefer to describe myself as partially deaf too. I’m not completely deaf, hard of hearing makes me think of old people and, like Natalya, I’ve never actually lost anything, so having a hearing loss doesn’t apply.

Whilst shopping the other day I noticed someone working on the checkout wearing a badge saying ‘I am deaf’. Then on entering a certain more upmarket store one of their employees was wearing a badge saying ‘Hearing Impaired’, maybe they thought it sounded posher!

Interesting too that hospitals are now becoming more politically correct. The audiology department in Brum, I’ve been attending for years, was once called ‘Centre for the Hearing Impaired’, now it’s known as ‘Hearing Services Centre’!

I have resisted the term ‘hearing impaired’ for many years telling students and colleagues I am not an impaired hearing person. I have also resisted terms like Deaf people have “special needs”. I say in response, “No, we have specific needs, not special needs” and I go on to list them generally as well as my own specific needs. I changed the name of the Communication Support Unit I once managed to ‘Communication Services Unit’ as a more accurate term of our work and to drag the hearing (and largely unaware) community into understanding that we did not ‘support’ (thus perpetuating the dependency model) but rather, that we provided (communication) services. Services that were used by both parties – hearing and Deaf. I changed my job title too. If we are not careful with the terms we use, we risk misrepresentation and misunderstanding, even being devalued. Think about it, some of the recent news coverage in the UK has referred to Martin Luther King’s astonishing speech (with the first ever reference to ‘Black people’rather than the label of ‘negro’ that had been so often used), and now the issue of the term ‘Yid’ in relation to football chants. It is also okay to learn, evolve and modify language. This comes from greater understanding and awareness. We can influence people in the way we would like or we can perpetuate our lowly status. Remember, the term ‘hearing impaired’ was not ours. It was ascribed to us …. By a hearing person. And therein lies the imbalance as well as the dismissal of our status. Hitler considered deaf people imperfect. We, in his eyes, were impaired. And we all know what happened there….. I’m with you on this one Mark Levin.

…bit late thinking of something other than whats been said, but I found myself tweeting yesterday ” I was HI when I was 5, but socially I am deaf.. impaired is the medical factor not a cultural/social aspect “