sheofthevoid:

so

mainstreaming

people love to share “Cute” videos of “DEAF BABY HEARS FOR THE FIRST TIME/DEAF MOTHER HEARS HER KID’S VOICE FOR THE FIRST TIME” and everyone lavishes praise on auditory verbal therapists and everyone is so fucking glad that we might soon Cure deafness with the wonders of science and everyone thinks that deaf people with an opposition to any of this are just a product of Barbaric Deaf Culture Bullshit

meanwhile if you’ve ever spoken to any of those kids who were mainstreamed when they were 20 and had the mental capacity to comprehend and express how they felt about it all, way after all of those cute videos were long forgotten and they were gone from any sort of public eye, you’d notice a similar narrative

unrelenting trauma

you talk to nearly any mainstreamed kid who couldn’t integrate quite as well as the wunderkind that had a hearing problem that hearing aids could help and you’ll find out that they leave linguistics classes with haunted eyes that turn to tears because they can no longer handle hearing anyone deliberately enunciate sounds without reacting like they’ve been smacked and shaking as they desperately wish they could leave the room

it doesn’t matter if their Integration was formal or not, you talk to a grown mainstreamed person and more often than not they’ll tell you they can’t handle soundless videos anymore because the impulse bred in them to never Not Hear gives them panic attacks when something like that shows up (ps if you can recognize that a video has no sound you might want to start tagging it. the only reason i don’t is because i can’t fucking tell adequately at this point)

the kids who, when their moms (#mumblr) saw them removing their hearing aids (did you know that doctors often turn those things up so high that adults have reported their ears hurt on those settings?), had their hearing aids strapped to their heads; the kids who didn’t get to have a true choice between sign language and Being Fixed because their parents would never let them (and if any hearing parents get the idea that they can get around this i hope you realize that in a society that demonizes sign language like ours actually does under the veneer of caring about deaf people a 3 year old will never not be pushed away); the kids whose parents just thought they were doing well enough as is or could try harder and that would solve it all; these kids do not come out of this emotionally unscathed. they come out of this nervous wrecks who feel like crying anytime they have to ask someone too many times to repeat themselves.



auditory verbal therapy groups aren’t smarter about deaf issues, kinder about deaf issues, than deaf people. they create actual fucking little meme images where they don’t simply talk about the “necessity” of punishing deaf kids for failing, they laugh about it amongst each other.

these people willingly use information from the foundation named after the guy whose name was deeply associated with oralism, who didn’t want deaf people to intermarry to “keep the gene pool clean”, to tell everyone about how deaf kids are fine without sign language thanks to the wonders of auditory verbal therapy. they post shit like this.

people who have been mainstreamed spend the rest of their lives regretful that they’ve been kept away from other deaf people their entire lives, regretful that they’ve never learned sign language and instead have their language skills fried because they completely rewired themselves, hyperfocusing, to be able to hear just the people around them so they’d stop being yelled at, finally. they become more and more emotionally fragile around anything that makes them feel like they’re back to being lectured about how they say things funny or don’t understand sounds.

mainstreaming is fucking evil and the only reason you consider “fixing” it to be a good outcome for us is because you refuse to listen to any grown deaf people that didn’t come out of this golden

tldr: if you’re wondering why sharing “DEAF BABY HEARS FOR THE FIRST TIME” videos is bad and why deaf people hate you for it is because you are celebrating the very ideology that will lead to that kid being a regretful emotional wreck when they can finally understand “oh wait what i was actually given was a bunch of complexes to force me to pretend i’m functioning most of the time”

