Because they could have societies composed of nothing but those with the condition and then the problems they encounter go away. For example, if everything was designed without sound, you wouldn’t have issues like not noticing an alarm or needing subtitles on movies. This isn’t the case for quadriplegics.

Sign languages also have their own cultures built around them. There’s people who wouldn’t trade that for anything, in the same way anyone else wouldn’t want to give up their first language. For the deaf, being amongst the non-deaf is like being in a foreign country.

Anywho, there’s some neat stuff to find if you look into deafness groups. I do not know if there are neurodivergent communities living together, only that it’s been talked about.

My hearing is extremely important to me and I can’t imagine what I’d do without it.

There are a lot of hearing people who say this, I believe that Deaf people actually see this type of utterance as an incredibly, outright tediously cliché thing to say… Yet I wonder how many hearing people have actually taken the time to really think about why hearing is important to them personally, and actually attempted to imagine what they would do without their hearing, as opposed to just saying “I can’t imagine” upfront. Now this is obviously not to say that there is anything wrong with valuing one’s own hearing, I’m not exactly going around blasting airhorns into my ears 24/7 desperately trying to make myself deaf — but it is just a fact that a lot of hearing people go around with audist brainworms, that make them not think about d/Deafness soberly, as it were.

If I were to lose my own hearing I honestly think I’d gain just as much as I’d lose — Deaf people actually have a term for this I know, “Deaf Gain” they say.

This being said, obviously there are some number of d/Deaf people who think of (their own) deafness as a disability, just as there are neurodivergent people who think of (their own) neurodivergence as a disability. What sets Deafness apart as a cultural identity separate from disability is the shared history, the passed-down stories and values and traditions, and the languages unique to Deaf people, that make them advocate for themselves as a language minority — but cultural Deafness and medical deafness do not form a perfectly circular Venn diagram, hence why people often write d/Deaf rather than just deaf or just Deaf.

I think it is always important to recognize that no group is a monolith and there is going to be a breadth of opinion in all forms of advocacy. I am autistic myself and personally don’t really have a strong opinion at this point about whether or not ASD “is” a disability. There are certainly aspects of autism that are just a matter of someone being a little different and society deciding to take issue with that for no good reason, but there are also aspects of autism that actually are disabling — and autism being a spectrum, I think that some people will naturally understand themselves more in terms of the non-disabling but still pathologized aspects of autism, and others will understand themselves more in the disabling aspects. So the relevant question is maybe less “Is autism a disability?” and more “When is autism a disability?”, those are my two kopeks.