The Privilege of Deafness

After high school, I attended Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., where everyone is Deaf. It was fun and distracting to have so many opportunities to connect with other people. That’s when I came to understand deafness not as a loss or an absence, but a gain.

Often when a person lacks one sense, it enhances their other traits. Empathy. Interpreting body language. For me, as a filmmaker, my deaf experience is at the root of my visual intelligence. My storytelling is rich with colour and motion. I even convey sound visually: the play of light and shadow or a reflection will indicate noise — footsteps or a ringing phone — just out of sight. I take this further when I make music videos, layering rhythms and tone with movement and visual pattern, signing, too. The sight of a bird’s wing flapping or a golf club swinging offer their own kind of poetic beat.

Seeing Deafness as a gift has shifted something inside me. It has opened up my world, transformed all that isolation and anxiety into a passion for sharing the insights of my Deafness and Deaf culture through storytelling and art. I want other people to experience the expressive potential of this beautiful language, this beautiful community. I want other people to see what I see. I want them to speak of “deaf gain” rather than “hearing loss.” I want them to stop seeing deafness as a medical condition that requires “fixing.” I want people to understand why I am happy to have a Deaf child, and why I consider our shared Deaf experience a privilege.

I worry, naturally, about the world my son will inherit. I worry that he will be prevented from enjoying his full rights as a Canadian citizen if he chooses to communicate mainly in sign language. I worry that our community is shrinking as a result of medical interventions that promise much and deliver little.

But right now, Titan is a normal kid growing up in Toronto. He loves trains. He loves to run. And he is Deaf. It’s part of his personality, his unique colour.

Recently at a party, Titan saw someone at the front of the hall signing to the group. He had something to add so he climbed right up beside the man and started signing himself. There’s no way I would have been able to do that at five years old.

My son has no fear. He feels accepted. This is my gift to him.