And Being Told to Hide Both
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I have four intersecting identities. I’m hard of hearing, transgendered, bi or pansexual, and have dissociative identity disorder. In this article, I’d like to discuss two: being hard of hearing and transgendered. People make bizarre and/or hurtful assumptions about me because of both, and having multiple intersectional identities that mark me as Other has redefined my life. Inside the discussion of protecting trans children, teens, and adults, we need to discuss what happens when someone has more than one identity that society considers Other.
My Experience of Being Hard of Hearing
By the time I was eight years old, I had tinnitus loud enough to keep me awake at night. I’d awaken to the ringing in my ears and stare at the nightlight in my bedroom, wondering what it was. One time, I yelled for my mom, and when she came to my bedroom doorway, I asked her what the ringing sound was. She said she heard nothing, and when I insisted there was a sound, she told me it was in my ears. However, she said that everyone had it, that she had it, and not to worry because it didn’t mean anything.
I was 22 years old before my hearing was tested. I had just graduated college, and I noticed at work that I was having trouble talking on the phone. The results of my hearing test stunned me. I’d never imagined that I would be facing an audiologist who was using the words “severe hearing loss.” What came next was the adjustment period that always happens when people first get hearing aids.
In the months that followed, I didn’t grieve. My family had taught me to have a stiff upper lip, never cry, and never rail against what you couldn’t change. So I went numb and marched forward. While the numbness wasn’t a good sign, I did manage one positive thing: It never occurred to me to think less of myself for being hard of hearing. It never occurred to me to think others would view me as lesser. To me, it was just my new life: the reality of not understanding people’s words sometimes, of asking people to repeat themselves fairly often, and of using closed captions when watching TV and movies.
A year later, when I taught college freshmen for the first time, I told them upfront I was hard of hearing and that they needed to speak up and enunciate. Sometimes I had to ask a quiet student or a mumbler to repeat themselves three or four times, and on occasion, the students would laugh, perhaps out of nervousness and not mockery. On a few occasions, I had to ask a different student with a louder voice to repeat the words for me so I could understand. And if they laughed then, I would remind them that I was hard of hearing. I was bold enough to take up space. I was no-nonsense enough to require that my students accommodate me. I saw no reason not to. I was their instructor, and I was hard of hearing. So what?
That was why my mother shocked me one day. I made some comment about the issue, and she said, “You told your class you have hearing loss?”
“Yes,” I said, worried that perhaps I had over-shared with my students and violated social boundaries with too much information.
But my mother didn’t say I had over-shared and been inappropriate. Instead, she said, “Don’t tell them that! They’ll look down on you.”
I was stunned. It had never even crossed my mind. I’m still me, whether I’m hearing or not. I remember the horror that passed through me in that moment as I thought, You mean that some of my students could have literally thought less of me as a person just because I admitted I’m hard of hearing?
However, when I stopped to think about it, I knew it was true. I’d heard stories about the way d/Deaf people get treated, and then I understood I was taking a risk by being upfront. My matter-of-factness is not a stance shared by others.
And that’s wrong. Being d/Deaf or hard of hearing shouldn’t make any difference at all. That’s why when I wrote my paranormal thriller, Conjure Hill, I decided to make the protagonist hard of hearing, too.
I’m not going to get a cochlear implant—too many side effects—and I don’t need fixing. I keep thinking about a Deaf influencer on YouTube and how her dad pressured her into getting cochlear implants. His attitude was “just fix it already,” which was a stance her mom blamed on his being a man. But that’s not the reason for his behavior. His behavior comes from a place of refusing to accept his daughter as she is. That’s so violating. She didn’t need fixing.
Likewise, I resented that my mom told me I had to hide the fact I’m hard of hearing. When I started learning American Sign Language (ASL), my mom seemed uncomfortable at best and perhaps disapproving. She doesn’t want me to claim this part of my identity, and she can’t understand that being hard of hearing doesn’t impact my soul. It’s not a flaw; I’m not a lesser person for it. And this attitude of “just fix it already so you’re like everyone else” and “hide it” are two ideologies that poison our world.
Along with the hateful ideologies come some strange assumptions. The one that always blows my mind is the assumption I can read lips. Why would I? I literally had a preacher say once, in a tone of dismissal about my being hard of hearing, “Well, you can read lips, can’t you?” No, I can’t. Lip reading is a specific skill that not everyone has. In the years since then, I’ve learned this myth about lip reading is a common one that people in the d/Deaf community get. The answer is always the same: Most d/Deaf people can’t read lips. Personally, I’ve only met one Deaf man who reads lips. He was the one to kindly explain to me that I would still be able to drive; being d/Deaf doesn’t mean a person can’t drive, which is another common myth. Another one seems to be that being d/Deaf makes a person dumber. This is a bizarre assumption. I have a Ph.D., thanks, and I got it after I became hard of hearing.
For the longest time, I thought that being hard of hearing was the only Otherizing identity I had, but then in my forties, I sorted out my life and faced the fact I’m trans. With that came another layer of polarizing identity issues.
photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
My Experience of Being Trans
Perhaps the most dangerous identity I have is being transgender. My therapist, who is a transwoman, and my life partner, Keith, both support my coming out. But the headlines are full of people who are screaming at me to stay in the closest and hide my true self.
The assumptions surrounding me are painful: that I’d just following a fad, that I’m simply confused and need therapy, that I’m defying God, or that I’m rebelling against the natural order of things. I find the latter two especially confusing. People say, “God doesn’t make mistakes.” Well, I don’t believe I am a mistake, but if I set that aside for a moment, then what about the millions of babies born every year with a plethora of medical conditions? No “mistakes,” indeed. Either God or Mother Nature make “mistakes” every day. And if you really believe in the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, then you have to accept that nature “fell” and is no longer perfect. Any chance for everyone to be born perfect ended when Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden.
But I’m not a mistake. The world has narrowly defined, mostly rigid gender roles. If I don’t feel like the gender I was supposedly assigned at birth, then I don’t.
The world would be better off without gender roles, period. Then people could just be who they really are instead of being trained like circus monkeys from birth to perform their society’s and religion’s inflexible, conscripted concept of gender. The training involved is especially obvious when you study history and foreign cultures and discover every century and every nation defines those genders differently. It’s all social training, and many sociologists and psychologists have known that since at least the 1970s. Just consider the England of the 1700s, when men gossiping about other men’s fashion blunders was considered normal and masculine.
Just like with being hard of hearing, I can’t wrap my mind around the idea that people think I’m lesser for being trans. What business is it of theirs, anyway? It’s my body and my life. They don’t have to date me or marry me. If I shave my face instead of my legs, who cares? What possible difference could it make? This obsession people have with others’ bodies is inherently colonial—the desire to colonize other people’s bodies as their turf and tell them how to wear their hair, dress themselves, comport themselves, and have sex with their partner.
The cruelty of this colonizing behavior is only too apparent from the other side of the debate. They aren’t asking me about the pain I’ve felt because my gender and my body don’t match. They don’t care how crushed and suffocated I feel. They don’t care if it makes me suicidal or if I kill myself. They just say, “You’re crazy. Now put on a dress like a good little girl.” They say, “God will send you to hell for destroying your body, which is his temple.”
Now that I’m in my forties, my response is, “Cool. I’ll see you there.”
Also, it’s as peculiar of an assumption to think someone’s gender identity is obvious at birth as it is to think their sexual orientation is obvious at birth. A person should have space to get to know themselves without others dictating to them from birth about their religion, sexuality, gender, race, social class, or anything else. And if Christians stand by the concept that God is Love, then God should love me enough to want me to be comfortable in my own body and not insist that my body is to be used in a possessive, abusive way for his desires instead. If humans were meant to be puppets for the Christian God to inhabit, then we wouldn’t have free will, and there is no love in the claim that we were given free will so we could chose to love God on our own—or be damned to hell for not choosing him. That’s simply, “Love me or die forever”—the words of every husband who kills his wife and then shoots himself.
No, real free will contains the reality that a person’s physical body and gender identity might not match, especially when humans socially agreed to generate the concept of gender and then change at least part of it roughly every 70 years. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself what is different about how boys were raised in 1954 versus 2024. Still unsure? Ask yourself how different it was to be raised as a boy (or girl) in 1924 or even 1824 versus today.
So no, I’m not diminished or lesser for being trans. And asking me to hide it for other people’s comfort is just as cruel as asking me to pretend to be fully hearing for other people’s comfort.
Redefining My Life
The fear of being singled out to be beaten, raped, and/or killed for being trans is all too real, and the fear of being considered somehow no longer human simply for being hard of hearing is equally real. Just these two identities alone have caused me to have to rethink my life, and that’s before trying to handle being bi/pansexual and suffering through bi erasure and hate from both straight and gay people for “not making up your mind.”
As I look into a future in which trans people and their supporters will have to fight as hard as possible for even the most basic of human rights, I see an equal space for people to deal with intersecting identities. Most transgendered people will have more than one “Other” identity they are also dealing with. Just like fourth wave feminists have been discussing race, class, sexuality, and sexism, we need to discuss what happens when a trans person has more than one identity that society considers “wrong” or “lesser” or unwanted. Humans are fully human no matter what their identities, and this is not the moment for transgendered people to divide themselves into smaller identity categories.
We’re all going to have to stand together.
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