Why I do not use my voice

Although I was raised orally, and my speech is close to that of a Hearing person's, I made a decision long ago not to use my voice with most of the general public. In the vlog, I give my reasons why I made that decision.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• NoVoice

[Shelllium]

Thank you so much for captioning! Whew! Am having my beginning ASL class view and then we are going to discuss. Many thanks for captioning! SH

[DrDonGCSUS]

@Shelllium No problem, Shellium! Educate your students well! 

[RandomUsernamed]

A non-signer asked what was said, I thought I would post a paraphrasing. Hope you don't mind the text summary of your vlog being posted for non-signers. I think you make many clear and good points and I'd like for it to be more widely shared, I think adding a text summary is a good start. There's a 500 character summary for each post, so I'll split it up in portions. Read the next few posts to see the summary.

[DrDonGCSUS]

@RandomUsernamed Video IS captioned, if you click on the CC in the video.

[rhosbrink]

Thanks for sharing. I have encountered all the situations you've pointed out when it comes to using one's speaking ability. The only thing I would've liked to see is if you had titled it to "Why I do not use my speaking ability" or something similar without needing to mention "voice". I understand it is used in context but often when Deaf people use "voice" in place of "speaking ability" implying that we don't have a voice; therein lies the problem of "voice". Again, thanks for sharing.

[DrDonGCSUS]

@rhosbrink Good point, Rory. I will definitely try to keep that in mind for the future.

[thedirtymeatball]

I wanted to hear you speak. :/

[dmfsmartfox]

Yes very rare very few deafies can talk like a normal hearing person Again you are right most hearing people are under an impression how a deaf person can talk well but they do not bother to try to understand what the deaf person tell. I did practice speaking one to ten. My relatives were excited as the result. It turned me off they had no right to make me like a normal hearing. I did learn the good lesson I never used my deaf voice

[DrDonGCSUS]

@tincancompany Good luck in learning ASL! Keep a positive attitude about the Deaf community, and you will find that most of us are more than willing to help you learn more!

[RandomUsernamed]

7) As his mother says, his capacity to use speech as well as he can is a gift and it's a gift that he'd rather only share with people he trusts.

[RandomUsernamed]

6) Reciprocity: as a participant of the interaction, he does all of the work to lipread and make sure that he is able to understand the interlocutor, while the interlocutor has life made easy for them because he uses speech which isn't any work to listen to. "I make their life easy by speaking, what are they doing for me?" He would like people to use writing or gesturing as alternatives to supplement speech.

[RandomUsernamed]

4b) as a PhD student, he seeks to avoid the association of intelligence and speech. He'd rather people see that yes, there are deaf people who are intelligent and use ASL.

5) the use of speech and being deaf seems to promote people paying attention to the form of his speech, not the content that he is conveying, i.e. people are thinking about how good his speech is, not what he's talking about.

[RandomUsernamed]

3) When using speech, people seem less willing to communicate with any other method than the typical way they use speech. By not using speech, people will communicate much more freely with visually oriented methods.

4) Also he feels mindful of the implicit message that fluent speech from a deaf carries.

4a)it encourages hearing parents of a deaf child to have false or overly simplistic expectations for the speech fluency that their deaf child can achieve.