True Biz

by Sara Nović

You could reinvent yourself! said her mother. Charlie considered telling her mother that she had not yet invented herself a first time.

Sign language had been so thoroughly stigmatized that in trying to avoid it parents had unknowingly opted for a modern version of institutionalization, locking their children away in their own minds.

Teenagers got a bad rap, she thought, because people didn’t understand why they were so volatile. The problem, February had decided, was a simple lack of language. The vocabulary and logic that had served them in childhood were inadequate in the face of new and much more complex challenges and emotions. The teen years were, in effect, a second-wave terrible twos.

In a community where everyone knows sign language and things like employment discrimination aren’t a problem, is deafness a disability? Why or why not?

lately she’d been thinking that the truly unfair thing was the expectation that a mother should completely understand another human just because she’d given birth to them.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What are the medical community’s ethical obligations when it comes to preserving human diversity? At what line does the practice of “designer babies” become unethical, and who gets to decide?

Where Milan’s resolutions were implemented, deaf children were forbidden from using sign language in the classroom or outside of it. As punishment, hands were tied down, rapped with rulers, or slammed in drawers. The period between 1880 and 1960 is considered the dark ages of deaf education.

Attempts to eradicate the Deaf world came in waves, attacks dating back to the ancient mystics, but now their fate was firmly in the hands of doctors, researchers, engineers—cochlear implants and the latest string of therapies designed to delete them from the human genome before they technically even existed.