Not syscourse but a Deaf Culture question (I assume you are Deaf given you’ve spoken on the issue — if you are not feel free to disregard) - and sorry if it’s a dumb one lol.
So I don’t know if you saw my brief reply to the amity situation where I very briefly explained the whole gorillas don’t understand sign in any capacity at all thing (I do genuinely recommend the video I linked, I don’t remember if it had subtitles though) but as I mentioned in that post, I often refer to myself as Deaf adjacent when discussing related topics / issues (when relevant obviously I don’t just go around announcing it) because I have multiple Deaf friends and Family members and have been involved at least in passing with the community for going on 4 years now. I’m also “conversational” in ASL if that changes anything.
Is this okay in your opinion? I would ask my friends/family but obviously they like.. like me, so they’re a little biased here lol. If not, what should I say instead?
I by no means use that label to talk over people, just to sort of explain why I know as much as I do so that people don’t just assume I’m just Saying Things to say them (as people on the internet are one to do)
And obviously I know you’re not the magical arbiter of Deafness but you are an unbiased third party for my question haha
Have a lovely night!
(Did you know you can’t italicize things in asks? Because I didn’t until just now)
Hello! I'm sorry it took so long to get to this, I wanted to give it my full attention.
I'd like to clarify that we are NOT Deaf. We grew up with and have many connections with the Deaf community, but the body is hearing. But that's part of why I commented: Sign Languages aren't just for the Deaf. There are many, many reasons to sign.
In our personal experience, our mother raised us on it because, at the time, she was studying to be an interpreter. ASL is as much a native language for us as English (although we've lost some fluency because it's hard to practice without other people). Eventually my youngest sibling was born. He has Down's Syndrome and was fully nonverbal until around 7-8 so it was used daily in our family (along with AAC) to communicate with him (and each other). Even later, after we discovered the system, we had a mute alter who needed ASL to communicate whenever he fronted.
With this in mind I unfortunately can't answer your question, I apologize! My immediate knee-jerk reaction was "that sounds fine" but personally I'd use it to quickly describe my pretty severe auditory processing disorder instead ^^; I'm sorry I can't help but if you ever find an answer, I'd genuinely like to know! I'll toss a few Deaf tags in there in case anyone in the community is willing to answer. I also didn't know you can't italicize in asks. That feels like a tumblr crime :(
