Dr Kelly Fleming

First I have to say I would never want to be hearing. I’m Deaf. I’m proud to be Deaf. I’m a part of a rich culture with a beautiful language. I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world.

However, being Deaf in a hearing world is not easy.

Deaf people are often left out of conversations. We are often amongst family members who are hearing but they don’t learn to sign. I can’t learn to hear, but hearing people CAN learn to sign.

Hearing friends are kind but if they don’t sign, they leave their Deaf friends in the dark about what is being said.

Being Deaf comes with a lifetime of discrimination. People often assume if a person is Deaf, they must also have an intellectual disability.

My parents fought the local school board to allow me to go to the neighbourhood school. They and myself, spent my entire childhood fighting teachers who were set in their ways of how they taught and did not want to make exceptions. They expected me to learn the same way as my hearing peers. How could I follow a lesson when they were facing a blackboard and explaining what they were teaching. I could not see their faces to try to pick up a few words and I could not hear anything they said.

When fellow students tried to show me where we were in a book, I was accused of cheating.

As a teenager, I wanted a job just like all my friends. But I wasn’t like them. In the eyes of potential employers, I was not only Deaf, I was also disabled, as I used crutches and braces after my sports accident at the age of 9 which left me with a spinal cord injury.

Potential employers set me up to fail by giving me tasks that I physically could not do, such as working on the cash register which required me to take orders from customers when I worked at McDonald’s.

Other jobs I had as a teenager also required that I prove to my employer that I was equal to my hearing, non-disabled peers. Employers did not want to give me tasks that I could do and needed to be done, they always put me into positions that were impossible for me.

Discrimination is a part of every Deaf person’s life experience in the hearing world. We always have to prove to others that we are “equal”.

As I grew older I found my niche, just as most other Deaf people. Academic study, becoming a theologian and writing became my outlet to excel in a hearing world.

Deaf children and adults still face discrimination today. We have technology in our hands to communicate with hearing people. We have interpreters in person and for using the phone. Yet still, hearing people have a broad tendency to “feel uncomfortable” using the resources available to Deaf people to communicate.

We are still not seen as equal to hearing people and that attitude needs to change.

It is NOT the responsibility of Deaf people to conform to the hearing world. We do our best to survive in the hearing world. It’s time for the hearing world to step up and meet us at least half way. Accept the technology we use to communicate. Learn some sign language. Deaf people do not expect every hearing person to be fluent in our language but just seeing someone try to communicate with us makes us feel welcomed in a majority world where we are a minority.