Women’s college redefines ‘women’

[EasterJoy]

No problem. The other poster wrote:

I’ve assumed that the parents were not bullied, because that was not said by the poster, but my response to him was to solicit did we have the whole story. I’d be interested to know what “drove” the angry refusal. Perhaps it was the kind of factors that cropped up in that movie to which I referred earlier? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Nothing_in_My_Ear ]

Issues of deaf culture / pride are somewhat more understandable in the context of adults dealing with their own circumstances. I think viewing the deafness of a **young child **as something different from a medical condition deserving of prudent medical treatment, is a big call.

Knowing what I know about this debate, I’m not willing to believe the parents got angry at no more than a “suggestion” unless I heard it from someone who heard it first hand. I say this because the advocates for and against implantation can be extremely partisan about the decision.

Some in the Deaf community think the procedure should never be done on a child, but that the child ought to decide for themselves when they are old enough to do so. These are largely people who have gone through a childhood without hearing. Many who oppose implants also think it is robbing a deaf child if the child is not taught sign language. (My objection to that is that some children are not just hard of hearing, but also have fine-motor delays. My hard-of-hearing children would have nothing to do with sign language. We’d get many cultural advantages if everyone knew sign language, but that isn’t going to happen.)

Some in the pro-implant crowd, which includes deaf people who did not get their implant until adulthood or close to it, think the advantage of being able to hear during the formative years for spoken language acquisition can make refusing the procedure for a very good candidate tantamount to child abuse. You don’t get those years back, and it makes a huge difference in the fluency with which you will be able to use spoken languages. This comes from people who, because they learned to speak oral languages early, are better than the Deaf to discern the difference in language quality between someone with no natural hearing who was given hearing and speech opportunities earlier rather than later. I say this because on written English message boards, many Deaf advocates have noticeable problems with English grammar and usage. There can be a “deaf accent” among non-hearing people who are not yet fully fluent in English. (It ought to go without saying that a child who does not grow up using ASL will use it with lower fluency, as well, which I am sure comes across to the Deaf as a “foreign” accent.)

So you see? The same child, two options, and someone out there is going to think you’re abusing your kid no matter what you decide. Of course the parents could get emotional in their response. Once you make a decision, you have taken sides in a very heated debate. You should not be expected to be left alone about, no matter what you decide. Even if there was only a single suggestion, that doctor may have walked into a mine field he did not know was there.

There is a similar debate going on over the transgender question, as well. Considering that children go through stages of imagination with regards to their own identities that could be considered delusional in an older person, at what age can a person say that their inner sense of their gender trumps physical evidence to the contrary? When a person was born neither genetically nor physically ambiguous with regards to gender, when are they allowed to say that their self-concept trumps all other evidence? Why is this instance of a self-concept at odds with the physical facts different than other instances where the person pronounces that they are not what they seem to be? Does a child have a “right” to belong to “their community” when there is a Deaf community or a Transgender community, or does the child have a “right” to be given a chance at the most “typical” life possible, instead?

 

[Rau]

There is a similar debate going on over the transgender question, as well. Considering that children go through stages of imagination with regards to their own identities that could be considered delusional in an older person, at what age can a person say that their inner sense of their gender trumps physical evidence to the contrary? When a person was born neither genetically nor physically ambiguous with regards to gender, when are they allowed to say that their self-concept trumps all other evidence? Why is this instance of a self-concept at odds with the physical facts different than other instances where the person pronounces that they are not what they seem to be? Does a child have a “right” to belong to “their community” when there is a Deaf community or a Transgender community, or does the child have a “right” to be given a chance at the most “typical” life possible, instead?

While there may be parallels, there are considerable differences. Hearing loss (at least a large subset of instances) is well understood. We know that every single person is “meant” to be a hearing person - there is not a set of options in the human blueprint, as we have with sexuality. Further, in many instances, we know how to treat (imperfectly of course) hearing impediments. And there is no equivalent of a dysphoria. The transgender situation is so much more complex.

Would we ask whether children ought to join communities of polio sufferers, or paraplegics, if their condition is resolvable? And if we had a drug that would eliminate the dysphoria from an unambiguously sexed person, would we use it? Would the patient be brave enough to take it?

Note that the idea of self-concept “trumping” physical evidence Is to mis-characterise the situation though I appreciate the difficulty it poses for deciding actual treatment. But it is not about discovering the “true” sex and trying to align to that. Body and brain are out of alignment and neither can be “corrected” entirely. There isn’t treatment at all for the brain. It is about how to help the sufferer live bearably. Certainly I have no insights on the handling of real cases.