DeafAndHardOfHearing

Part one of many parts

My request for definitions of "DeafAndHardOfHearing" produced several interesting responses, but none was what I was really looking for ;-)

I use the run-on word to indicate a phrase that people speak as if it were a single word, and without thought to the implications of using the term. In this case, the word "DeafAndHardOfHearing" is meant to illuminate the tendency to group two distinct groups (Deaf people and hard of hearing people) together as if they were a single group. The term slides off the tongue with bewildering ease; we've all said it so many times that we no longer even think about what it means. And there's the rub!

We've reported that some members of the OHL (oral hearing loss) community have started to change the phrase a bit. Some are saying "Hard of Hearing and Deaf" to indicate that HOH people outnumber Deaf people by about 100 to 1. Others are using "Hard of Hearing or Deaf" to proclaim not only the relative numbers, but also to indicate that a particular individual is one or the other - either Deaf or hard of hearing - but not both.

I applaud both efforts as a simple way to begin to expose reality, and I've been trying to use the phrase "Hard of Hearing or Deaf" where appropriate. But I sometimes slip back into the oh-so-familiar "DeafAndHardOfHearing". The term is insidiously entrenched!

But the main problem with "DeafAndHardOfHearing" is far more serious than being simply linguistically inaccurate. The term is oppressive to hard of hearing people and other members of the OHL community. Stick with me here, because I need to establish a couple of premises before giving you the opportunity to arrive at that conclusion yourself.

While Deaf people and OHL people have some common interests (e.g. movie captioning) they are two distinct groups with very different characteristics and very different needs. We'll be expanding on this concept throughout this series of articles, but here are a few of the crucial differences:
- OHL people want to remain in the hearing world, while Deaf people want to remain in the Deaf world.
- OHL people prefer spoken language as their primary means of communication, while Deaf people prefer ASL.
- OHL people consider hearing loss to be a curse and will do whatever they can to reduce its effects, while Deaf people consider Deafness to be a cultural difference.

The fact is that Deaf folks and OHL folks comprise two distinct and separate groups.

The second premise is that Deaf folks control virtually all of the services available to the DeafAndHardOfHearing. This includes service agencies, the DeafAndHardOfHearing sections of state vocational rehabilitation programs, telecommunications relay services, state DeafAndHardOfHearing councils, etc. Examples of this are legion, and I'm sure each of you could create a long list off the top of your head. We've published some examples in previous newsletters and will publish more over the course of this series of articles.

The third premise is that bundling services for OHL people with services for Deaf people generally makes no more sense than bundling services for OHL people with services for people in wheelchairs. There are isolated commonalities between any two of these three groups, but the needs of each are generally quite distinct.

"That's all well and good," you say. "But why is the term 'DeafAndHardOfHearing' oppressive?"

It's oppressive because it's a primary contributor to the lack of services for OHL people. The term implies that the two groups are really the same, and that a single agency or service or program meets the needs of both groups. The people who run the agencies that serve the "DeafAndHardOfHearing" make those claims all the time, and they have gone pretty much unchallenged.

The fact is that the vast majority of the agencies that claim to serve the "DeafAndHardOfHearing" really serve Deaf people, primarily or exclusively.

"Well, yeah, we all know that!" you say. "It's a lousy system. But I'm not sure even that is oppressive."

Agreed! But consider for a moment what will happen when YOU try to get funding to provide services for OHL people. (Please stop here and really think about it for a minute.)

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Did you come up with something?

That's right! You did get it!

The funder believes that Agency X, which serves the DeafAndHardOfHearing population, is already providing the services you want to provide! So your proposal is redundant and is denied!

And that's the oppressive part. The label "DeafAndHardOfHearing" prevents the funding of services for OHL people.

So what's the solution?

It's time to recognize that Deaf people and OHL people represent two distinct populations and that a single organization that attempts to serve both populations can't provide optimal services for either. It makes no more sense to bundle OHL services with Deaf services, than it does to bundle OHL services with services for people in wheelchairs.