[MontyCarloHall]

>This is already the norm for disabilities requiring e.g. braille or a wheelchair.

I have never seen anyone argue against cures for blindness or physical impairment. Every visually/physically impaired person I know would be elated if their condition could be cured, and would have no issues with prenatal screening for their disabilities, if it were possible.

The only disabled community I know of where a not insignificant fraction of people oppose curing their disability is the deaf community, and it is nonetheless an extremely controversial position to take.

[noneeeed]

I've always felt the defensiveness/unease from some in the deaf community is understandable, even if I think fitting kids with things like implants is a good idea. Being deaf, certainly up to the widespread use of the internet in the last couple of decades, meant that you were essentially cut off socially from mainstream society.

The vast majority of hearing people have no interest in learning sign-language unless they are related to a deaf person. You are, in a sense, a perenial foreigner in your own land, surrounded by people who you cannot communicate freely with and never will be able to (unlike a migrant who can learn the language). So you form communities with other deaf people with who you can communicate freely. Deaf culture has become something more distinct than simply a community of people with a shared experience within a wider culture, it's much more isolated.

Obviously hearing loss is on a spectrum, with varying levels of remediation available from aids and implants to lip-reading and speech training so the above is a generalisation. But especially for adults, things like implants are not a panacea, you don't suddenly hear perfectly. I have a friend who uses a combination of an implant and an aid, but talking with him still requires continuous extra thought and consideration to make sure he can follow me, and that I can understand his speech. A noisy pub or a free-flowing multi-person conversation with everyone butting in is still incredibly isolating for him.

The internet has changed a lot of this from what I've been told, with so much culture being online and in text, deaf people are able to interract with hearing people much more often and freely (and on equal terms) far more often, even if they have many of the same issues IRL that they have always had. But the seperation remains, and it's mostly a result of the hearing world's almost total lack of consideration or effort to accomodate (see the absense of a sign-language interpreter for UK government announcements as an example).

[hnbad]

I think there's some overlap in spirit between the autistic community and the deaf community (in so far as you can cast this wide a net and call it "a community") in that the reason some deaf people argue against a cure is that it would eliminate deaf culture (e.g. sign languages). There's no real equivalent in the form of "autistic culture" but this is at least in part because most autistics who are able to have learned to "mask" (i.e. try to hide their autistic traits often to the point where they forget they're doing so). There's still a specific way of thinking and form of humor that's shared by many autistic people and which they fear would be lost if they were "cured".

Additionally the deaf community has every reason to be skeptical of a cure because many so-called cures come with massive caveats. For example Cochlear implants are often seen as a magical cure for deafness but there are many reports from formerly deaf people of experiencing intense discomfort if they gain any meaningful hearing from them at all. But due to the existence of these "cures" non-deaf people are more likely to treat deafness as a choice and affordances for deaf people as unimportant - similar to how according to some studies bicyclists are treated with less care by drivers when visibly wearing helmets.