Listen, I don't know how to tell you this, but disabled people don't actually need to be polite when educating you for something you should already know.
I'm not being an asshole when I tell you that obviously we don't use American Sign Language in Australia. (/directed)
I'm not being an asshole when I tell you not to push me when I'm in my wheelchair without asking.
I'm not being an asshole when I tell you you're being ableist.
Disabled people don't owe you shit. I'm not going to be respectful to you when you're not respectful to me or other disabled people.
Was watching a video essay about disability in horror and this arsehole called Deaf actor Millie Simmonds "hearing impaired". Jesus christ. How long until Deaf people will be recognised as Deaf?! How long until people will stop ERASING us?! How long until people will stop pretending we don't exist?! We are DEAF! I am not ""hearing impaired"". I do not have "'hearing loss". This is not a loss! This is not a negative! BEING DEAF IS NOT BAD! I LOVE BEING DEAF. FUCK YOU! STOP PRETENDING I'M NOT. STOP ERASING ME. STOP DEMONISING US. STOP. STOP SAYING MY CULTURE AND LANGUAGE AND LIFE IS LESS THAN. YOU. ARE. NOT. BETTER. THAN. ME.
Person: We can't let kids have gender surgery, it's too big a change for someone too young to understand themselves to make >:(
Same person: I'm fine with deaf babies being given cochlear implants and see no problems with the way medical practitioners pressure uninformed parents into forcing long term surgical alterations on a baby that will affect them for the rest of their life.
TW: this post will contain ramblings about Quinn’s childhood, which, for those who may not know, was a pretty rough one. Specifically, I want to talk about his “mainstreaming,” or the process by which caretakers and guardians forced him at a young age into hearing culture.
Gather round, my friends, because we’re going to take a trip to Tragic Backstory town to talk about Quinn’s childhood. I’ve been thinking a lot about why Quinn is the way he is, and how he manages to stay so resilient despite, to be blunt, all the trauma he’s been through.
I believe, if you go way back in the recesses of the Quinn tag, you will find two different posts which talk about his childhood. This one was the first instance of someone asking for more specific info about Quinn after his first appearance in fic, and though it contains some outdated information about his theatre career, it’s otherwise reliable for learning. The same goes for this one.
What we know: Quinn spent his formative years in foster care after the abandonment/neglect of his biological parents. By approximately age 12, he and his sister were placed under the reluctant guardianship of their paternal grandparents. Quinn’s grandparents really didn’t want to spend their 70s looking after the products of their son’s bad choices, but I imagine it goes down in a way where the state leaves them without much of a choice.
So Quinn and his sister move in with them, and that’s where he’s living at the time he starts college. I think it’s necessary for Quinn to have at least some of a scholarship in order for his grandparents to even consider financing his higher education. As I’ve said, they’re not jazzed about being guardians. But they also have money— and they get checked up on every so often— so Quinn and Tess are never exactly neglected from a monetary standpoint. I imagine there’s a lot of financial guilt-tripping when they do have to invest in them, but...... okay.
Anyway. The actual thing I wanted to talk about in this post is the fact that Quinn is mainstreamed.
Reading my writing, it’s incredibly obvious that he’s mainstreamed, and has been for a long time. If you don’t know what mainstreaming is, I will now define it for you. Mainstreaming is the process by which, from a young age, a deaf or hard of hearing child is “integrated” into hearing environments. This is mostly done for the purpose of attempting to get them used to going to schools that aren’t necessarily acceptable.
I’ve said before and will say again that I’m hearing, and therefore I’m not and never will be fully able to understand Quinn’s experience. But from reading a lot online and speaking to people who are better acquainted with Deaf culture, what I gather is that mainstreaming is considered to be an unfavorable practice from the Deaf perspective. The tried and true saying is that d/Deaf people can do anything a hearing person can do..... except hear. So the idea is that if possible, you very much want to raise a d/Deaf child in their own culture rather than attempting to have them assimilate into hearing culture.
Which leads me to this: the reason Quinn is mainstreamed is because, when he was young, he didn’t have anyone to advocate for him who knew enough about Deaf culture or wanted to put in the effort to help him create his own experience, one that wasn’t catered to hearing culture.
Quinn gets his first hearing aids early. I don’t know exactly what age he is, and I think I’ll stick to not slapping an age on there. It’s somewhere between the ages of 4 and 7, depending on how quickly his hearing gets bad. A big part of the reason he gets tossed around between foster families so much is because they see his hearing as a burden. He has a counselor from the state who teaches him ASL, and also participates in his mainstreaming.
By the time he gets to his grandparents..... Quinn hates those hearing aids. He’s incredibly sensitive to sound, and he just vastly prefers not to wear them. But he’s spent the past little while in the care of foster parents and state workers who insist that he mainstream. Put simply and bluntly, people consider Quinn’s Deafness too much of a burden when the possibility of mainstreaming exists.
Quinn’s grandparents are adamant that he continue mainstreaming. We saw briefly in this ficlet that Quinn does eventually manage to convince them to let him participate in Deaf community events around Grand Rapids, but a.) that takes several years of convincing, and b.) events like the one you see in that ficlet are pretty much the only time they let him embrace his culture.
Is this messed-up? Yeah, absolutely. But these are the same people who wind up cutting all contact with him when they find out he’s gay, so they’re really not the standard of good guardianship or behavior.
I don’t think Quinn sees his grandparents as abusive, at least not until he gets out and gets to college. He definitely recognizes that he doesn’t live in a totally safe environment, given the amount of lying to them that he does, but he doesn’t fully recognize the level of messed-up that his situation is until he’s a young adult.
One might ask, why was Quinn mainstreamed before he got to his grandparents? And the answer is this...... Quinn was already using hearing aids when he got to them, but he was really not doing a whole lot of verbal speaking. ASL was (and still is) his preferred method of communication, and he probably had an aide at school, even though he was going to public, non-specialized school. He was sort of halfway mainstreamed.
Quinn should have had a Deaf advocate while he was in foster care, but he just didn’t. His case was never handled well, and he didn’t have the support he needed. When his grandparents came along, they pretty much just drove the process home. And that is how Quinn winds up going to a mainstream college.
Would Quinn change it, if he could?........ Ahhh... hard to say, because when you think about Quinn’s life, a lot of things happen to him because he is mainstreamed that otherwise wouldn’t happen. He and Nando are the biggest thing, I think, because it’s pretty unlikely he would have wound up going to Kiersey had he not been mainstreamed. Yes, Nando absolutely does take very significant steps (even pretty early on in their relationship) in order to learn about Quinn’s culture and the way he best prefers to communicate.... but I think if Quinn weren’t mainstreamed, their first meeting would have gone a lot different.
Also, theatre. We know that Quinn eventually participates in Deaf theatre, but he gets his start in hearing theatre. I don’t think he would want to give that up, because yes, he hates his hearing aids and all that jazz, but I think one of the very few things he’s grateful for is that they let him act. Not that he wouldn’t be able to act without them; he just would have a lot more difficulty finding theatre companies where they would welcome him in.
And by the way, why did Quinn ever start theatre in the first place if it’s (for the most part) so oriented towards hearing people? Well, good question. For him, it began on social media. Reading about shows, watching clips and stuff, listening to soundtracks. Music— particularly Broadway music— is something Quinn loves even in his pre-hearing aids stage. He likes to “feel” it, and he learns to like to listen to it as well.
So by the time Quinn gets to high school, he’s well acquainted with online theatre kid culture. He sees that they’re putting on a musical, walks onto the audition stage, and.... is a natural. The rest, with regard to his acting career, is history.
Anyway. I’ve gotten on a bit of a tangent, but please know that by no means do I intend to say with this post that “oh, Quinn was mainstreamed and that sucks, but actually it was a good thing because he gets Nando and his acting career because of it.” Yes, Quinn’s life would look a lot different if he weren’t mainstreamed. But it happens to him, and that’s how his life goes, and he manages to hold onto his culture pretty well, all things considered.
So Quinn wouldn’t change his life. I bet he would have liked to have an aide in high school, but he likes theatre and he likes his college, and he likes being himself, in all the nuanced and unique ways he is himself.
And yeah, he hates those hearing aids. When he doesn’t have to be listening, he’s never listening. As an adult in Arizona, he’s a lot more immersed in Deaf culture again than he was able to be when he was living with his grandparents or going to college.
But anyway. I basically wanted to share this post to explain in a little more detail exactly how Quinn winds up where he is when you first meet him at Kiersey. I know literally nobody asked for this, but I hope at least somebody learned something about him from it.
trust me, i would love to switch to an alternative for youtube, but nobody seems to have made it a priority to find places that have good CC. i complain about yt's CC all the time, and it definitely isn't perfect, but fuck, at least it's something. sigh
