Today I had an interesting experience relating to Deaf identity.

Yesterday, my Honors first year seminar did an activity in which we placed ourselves on a scale of 1-10 where 1 was 100% hearing and 10 was 100% deaf. Nobody was a 1 or a 10; I picked 5, as did a couple of CODAs. The other two hearing girls were a 4 and a 3. I felt 5 was best for me because I am equally comfortable in both worlds. My home and family life is primarily hearing, and my professional, social, and educational life is primarily deaf. So I go back and forth just fine, I am happy this way. I enjoyed the activity.

Today in my Deaf Studies class, we did a similar activity that wasn’t as good, and I actually really hated it. Instead of positioning ourselves in 10 clusters, we had to form a line. There were no numbers, just a continuum. Initially, the teacher said “at this end, I want the people who REALLY identify as Deaf, and at the other end, I want the people who only identify as deaf a little bit.” I’m hearing, not d/Deaf, so I stood apart from the group. Once everybody was done sorting themselves, they started to notice I wasn’t in the line. So I had to come out as hearing, which is not fun.

The teacher realized she should probably be fair to me, so she had us reorganize and made it a deaf/hearing scale. I started to head for about the middle, and everybody kept saying no, move down! Somebody said “you’re hearing, you go down to the end!” And I said “oh no don’t. This is about identity, not audiological status!” I argued the point with several of them, how the fact that yes, I could hear the other classmates laughing and chatting was not the point, that we were supposed to be basing this on identity, and I don’t identify as 100% hearing identity!

They finally relented and ONE kid was on the “more” hearing side of me. We went around and everybody said why they’d put themselves where they did. I said “well I feel like a big dumb ape, because I’m the only hearing person in the room.” I explained just what I’d said yesterday, the inside my house vs. out and about stuff, and I don’t know if any of them got it. I emphasized that I felt the exercise was about identity and not audiological status. (I left out the part about how saying “you belong over there” could be considered reverse audism.)

But this was a bunch of freshmen, most of them had been in deaf schools, and - although it wasn’t explicitly said - I think most of them didn’t expect to find a hearing person in what they thought was an all-deaf environment. (And why should they? As a HUG friend of mine pointed out, the fact that hearing students are admitted now is not advertised. She and I both had such a hard time finding the HUG pages on the website that we had to email admissions when we wanted to apply!) I also want to note that this was not an honors course. Gifted students often have more mature thinking patterns, so I’m not sure these kids could even understand yet what I was trying to say.

I talked to the professor after class and she seemed to like my contribution. I also had to debrief with somebody, so I went to the honors lounge and chatted about it there. We talked about tribes, and how it would get better as time went on, and how I have as much right to be there as they do - I got admitted, didn’t I? (And the HUG admissions process is far more rigorous than the one for deaf students!)

I hope that over the course of the semester I can teach these kids that it’s okay for a hearing person to be in the Deaf-World. Does it make me Deaf? Of course not. But I’m part of the deaf community, and I hope they can come to terms with that.