“There is a cyborg hierarchy. They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us Deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to ask the Hearing to learn sign language. Instead they wish for us to lose our language, abandon our culture, and consider ourselves cured. They like exoskeletons, which none of us use. They don’t count as cyborgs those of us who wear pacemakers or go to dialysis. Nor do they count those of us kept alive by machines, those of us made ambulatory by wheelchairs, those of us on biologics or antidepressants. They want us shiny and metallic and in their image.”
― Jillian Weise, "Common Cyborg" from Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century edited by Alice Wong. Edit: Updated. Sorry for the incorrect attribution. I didn't have a copy of the book readily available and assumed deaf authors I follow on social media were correct when they were sharing this quote. Thank you @themathomhouse for bringing this to my attention.
