I've been reading this comic for several months now, and I have to saw that it has been a definite eye opener for me.

lol at that comic.

Really drives home how much social awkwardness is about unfamiliarity. People don't know what will cause offense, but their ignorant overreaction makes it even more likely they will offend.

I agree with your overall point about deaf people facing awkwardness and discrimination borne of ableist privilege. As a hearing person, I probably don't even comprehend how that looks and feels in real life. But I don't think what you experienced is remotely analogous, and your attempt to claim empathy based on a short term similarity seems disingenous to me.

I'll address your third bullet first: I have lost my voice for a period of some days three times in the last four years (this seems to be my body's new way of managing colds... Or the universe's way of telling me to pipe down!) I have never had anyone assume I was hard of hearing and speak loudly or overennunciate at me.

However, I know a child who is considered deaf and attends a school for the deaf, but she (and apparently many of her classmates) can hear a small amount. With a minimum of background noise, and if she's not overly tired, she can make out a good deal of what you are saying - if you are clear and loud. My father suffers from tinnitus and does not use a hearing aid. With background noise, he cannot differentiate sounds. Even in good conditions, he needs us to speak clearly and loudly. So the "shout and ennunciate" thing does not come from nowhere. It is a reasonable attempt to bridge a gap and it comes from experience.

Your second bullet: I feel they were responding to the fact that you were temporarily ill and at an uncomfortable disadvantage. It may not be a disadvantage for someone who has spent years learning to manage in a speaking and hearing society, but when you're used to using speech to communicate the simplest of messages and courtesies a hundred times a day, having to adjust suddenly is difficult. If you sprained your ankle, you would expect people to say "I'm so sorry." You wouldn't consider that to be disrespectful of people who don't have legs. Laryngitis is not a disability, it is a temporary illness, you can't compare them and peoples' reactions to them. Those people were being sympathetic. Be thankful.

And your first point: it is awkward to hold a conversation with someone who can't hold up the opposite side of it. Fluid conversation following established patterns is a constant in our lives. It really isn't difficult to understand why we take it for granted. If you encounter deaf or mute people regularly, you grow accustomed to it quickly and learn to adjust your communication patterns. But when it's only once in a long while, it's like rusty gears cranking back into rotation - it takes us a bit to get the hang of it. Not long, but longer than the thirty minutes you're in a diner or the five minutes you're in the convenience store. If you permanently lost your voice, I'm sure your favorite waitress at the diner would adjust quickly and start talking to you more comfortably. But when she has a hundred things on her mind and here comes something outside her experience, I don't fault her for being awkward. We all react awkwardly when someone or something takes us by surprise and takes us outside our realm of practiced courtesies. It's not a slight. Now, if someone treated you as if you were not there, that's different. But not giving a "thank you" because they are distracted by the fact that the usual polite conversation they expected didn't happen? Not a slight.

The first comic reminds me of something I've wondered about Deaf culture. If everybody did, in fact, learn sign language, would that have the same effect on Deaf culture as the controversial cochlear implants, except without the new superpowers? In both cases, is removes a significant part of the barrier that separates the culture from the rest of society, without which I doubt Deaf culture would ever have come into being.

Deaf with a capital D is very different from lowercase-d deaf, and deserves differentiation!

Your first example of people going mute actually reminds me of my experiences when I'm in Japan visiting my in-laws. Being Chinese, I speak English and Chinese fluently, and Japanese feebly. So when I approach someone at a counter or ask for directions, my first attempt is usually in English to avoid embarrassing myself. However before I even get to that point, the listener often stops talking altogether, and starts trying to communicate completely in gestures and body language, even as I try to supplement my gesturing replies with halting Japanese (and then just smiles and ah-has.) I think as the conversation gets more complex and we lose our ability to express ourselves in the language the other party is comfortable with, we resort to the most common, basic language between us to communicate, rather than burden the other party with something they have to work hard to grasp.

At least, that's what I thought of our interactions before; hopefully I haven't accidentally been mis-stepping all over Tokyo!

I'd like to thank TB for articulating important points. I love this blog, I come here every day for insights and there are genuine insights in this blog. But, on the other hand, I'm not sure they derive from the experiences from which it would seem you derive them. Part of that uncertainty comes from my own voice-losing experiences, which as TB notes, have never been confused with deafness, so I wonder what signals you sent that might have confused this. And part of it comes from five years work at a nursing home. Therein, the occupants are not Deaf, but they are sometimes unable to hear or "hard of hearing." The first thing I learned in that context is that no one cares if, as you age, you are blind. But lose your hearing, and you lose most human companionship, speech being integral to so much of how we express solidarity and concern and happiness in each others' well being.

I live in Vancouver, WA. a small city only about 170,000 people. In Vancouver we have both The WA State School for the Blind and The WA State School for the Deaf. As a result of being a small city and having 2 unique schools in the city people who live and work in Vancouver become fairly adept at interacting with both the blind and the deaf.

I often see notes passed, the casual thank you signed and returned with a smile and a spoke "your welcome" from those in the customer service profession in Vancouver. Sign Language interpreters were present in more than one of my community college classes, and Sign Language is offered as a Foreign Language credit in all our High Schools. Also it is not uncommon to see a person assisted by a Dog or a cane as they walk across the local college campuses, or to hear a person call out "passing on your left" as they walk by a blind person, or even to press a cross walk button only to hear it beep when it's time for you to cross.

I took all of this to be the norm, because for me it is. I've lived in Vancouver practically my whole life and for me that's just how it is, that's how you interact with those who are deaf. I honestly thought only old people treated the deaf the way you are describing, I didn't realize it was still common.

I think you mean you were MUTE, not deaf. There is a large difference between not being able to speak and not being able to hear. Perhaps when people were speaking to you, it is because they merely thought that by gesturing to your throat and writing things down, it meant you couldn't talk. Not that you couldn't listen.

I see a lot of parallels with my own experience as a person with Asperger's Syndrome. We have our own way of perceiving the world, our own culture. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not the majority view or culture. I personally wouldn't be any other way, and find that the biggest disability is others' perception of & reaction to me.

BTW I'd LOVE it if more people knew how to sign. If my parents had learnt, now that they're old & very hard of hearing, we wouldn't end up BELLOWING at each other in the pub. Also jolly useful for communicating across a distance with direct LOS.

Deaf people have trouble hearing, not speaking. The illness made her temporarily mute, not deaf. Many people with deafness also experience muteness, but they are not the same thing.

The author's conflation of deaf and mute is rather insensitive.

My sister is an an american sign language interpreter. A surprising thing I learned from my sister, is that deaf people, are actually very blunt and straightforward compared to us hearing folk. So, for example, if you got fat, they'll straight up tell you, "You're fat." No one gets offended. That's just how they interact with each other in the deaf community. In fact, according to my sister, being a shy deaf person can be difficult, because, like mentioned above, generally, in their culture, deaf people communicate very directly, openly and bluntly. So, when it comes to socializing, a shy deaf person will struggle. Anyway, from the stories I hear from my sister, they have very colorful and fulfilling social lives, at least in America. Deaf culture and sign language in other parts of the world are completely different from the one in the states. The Japanese deaf culture is interesting... of course, the sign language is different, they sign in front of their face, instead of below, or is it vice versa? I forget. But they sign in a different position than U.S. deaf people.

Lisa, maybe someone else mentioned this, but generally today's Deaf community prefer that word be capitalized "Deaf" when referring to a group of Deaf people. It can be lower-case when used as an adjective describing one's condition. There's no perfect rule but e.g. "There are hundreds of Deaf students living in Washington DC." vs. "Turns out our cat may be congenitally deaf." THANKS!

I remember when I worked at McDonald's I rang up a regular couple comprised of a wife who could hear and a husband who was deaf. They handed me the note, but I did something wrong, like talked to the wife instead of the husband about something they ordered, and she said "He's the one you need to ask- he can read lips!" or something, and they laughed at me! It was a bit rude to make fun of me as the new girl. I was trying so hard to treat them like normal customers, and I still said the niceties I said to every customer, but it was so embarrassing. I would never dream of saying any of the faux pas described above but even for a well intentioned person with no experience it can be very difficult interacting normally with a deaf person! I think this is a particularly challenging disability for "normal" people to deal with because communication is so different. Deafness, and even though I have no experience with them, I expect other disabilities like severe Autism and other conditions that affect communication, turn everyday conversations into a puzzle for the average hearing person who does not know sign language. Can they hear? Can they read lips? If they are with someone, who should you talk to? If they hand you a note, should you ask follow up questions? All these things most people never have to think about when communicating suddenly are very important. It is flustering, but that wouldn't stop me from trying to have a successful conversation with a deaf person again. That man was the only fully deaf person I have ever met.