Hearing Privilege: you probably have it. What can you do with it?
- Elisa Nuevo Vallín
- 13 hours ago
- 5 min read
If you are a hearing person, please keep reading.
I have written this article for you. And before you worry, I am not here to make you feel guilty, uncomfortable or responsible for every communication barrier Deaf people experience.
I am hearing too.
But there are certain things you and I can do every day without thinking about them, simply because we can hear.
Have you ever heard of hearing privilege?
The word privilege can immediately make people defensive. It can sound as though someone is telling you that your life has been easy.
That isn't what I mean.
Having hearing privilege doesn't mean you've had an easy life. It means there are certain barriers you've probably never had to think about because you can hear.
Once I understood it that way, the concept became much easier to recognise.
And when you start noticing hearing privilege, you see it in some surprisingly ordinary places.
➤ AT A SOCIAL EVENT, WORK EVENT OR CONFERENCE
Imagine you've been invited to an event next week. You probably think about what you're going to wear, who's going, where it is and whether the food will be any good. 😉
What you probably don't have to ask is:
Will I be able to understand what people are saying?
Will there be captions?
Will a BSL interpreter be available?
Is the room going to be so noisy that communication becomes exhausting?
Can I participate in the presentation AND the conversations afterwards?
Being able to turn up and assume communication will be accessible to you is hearing privilege.
➤ GOING TO THE CINEMA
Fancy seeing a film tonight? As a hearing person, you can look at the listings, choose the film and pick whichever showing suits you.
A Deaf person who needs captions has another question to ask first: Which screenings can I actually access?
Captioned screenings are available, but the choice of times can still be much more restricted. That little extra bit of planning is easy to overlook when you've never needed to do it.
➤ LISTENING TO A PODCAST
Someone recommends a brilliant podcast. You find it, put your headphones on and press play.
You probably don't check whether there's a transcript first. You don't need to.
Now think about how much information is shared through podcasts, radio, voice notes, videos and audio-only content every day.
When a transcript or captions aren't provided, some people are excluded before the content has even started. That's hearing privilege hiding in plain sight.
➤ SCHOOL, COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY
Think about your own education.
You probably walked into a classroom expecting your teacher to communicate in a language you understood.
You could follow discussions between classmates. You could hear questions from across the room. You might have picked up information from a conversation happening behind you without even trying.
You didn't have to arrange communication support before you could access the lesson.
And that brings us to something particularly important: incidental learning.
Hearing people absorb an enormous amount of information accidentally. We overhear conversations, announcements, jokes, comments, television programmes and discussions around us.
We rarely notice how much we're learning because nobody formally teaches it to us.
Many Deaf children don't have equal access to all of those little pieces of background information. We've written separately about incidental learning and Deaf children if you'd like to understand why this matters so much.
➤ WHEN HEARING PEOPLE GET PRAISED FOR USING SIGN LANGUAGE
This one can be uncomfortable, but stay with me.
You've probably seen a video of a hearing person learning sign language and signing a song online. Their signing might still be very basic, yet the comments fill up with:
"Amazing!"
"So inspiring!"
"This is beautiful!"
Learning BSL is something we absolutely want to encourage. Seeing more hearing people interested in sign language is a good thing, but it is worth noticing whose use of sign language gets celebrated.
A Deaf BSL user may create something far more linguistically sophisticated and receive nowhere near the same attention because signing is expected from them.
The problem isn't that we should stop encouraging hearing learners.
The interesting question is: are we giving Deaf creators, teachers and BSL users the same attention, recognition and opportunities?
That's where awareness of hearing privilege becomes useful.
Once you see it, what do you do with it?
This is the part I care about most; recognising hearing privilege isn't an exercise in guilt. I don't want hearing people walking around apologising for being able to hear!
Awareness becomes valuable when it changes what we do.
If you're watching television with a Deaf or hard-of-hearing person, put the subtitles on without making them ask every time.
If you're organising a meeting, presentation or event, think about captions and communication access while you're planning it, rather than after someone complains.
If a Deaf person is using an interpreter, talk to the Deaf person, not the interpreter.
If everyone laughs at a joke and someone has missed it, don't dismiss it with "Oh, it doesn't matter." If everybody else got to hear it, let them decide whether it matters.
If you're sharing video content online, caption it.
If you're learning BSL, brilliant. Keep learning, listen to Deaf BSL users and learn about Deaf culture alongside the language.
And if a Deaf person tells you something isn't accessible, resist the temptation to immediately explain why. Listen first.
You can also learn about audism and how to start unlearning it, because once you understand how hearing privilege works, some everyday examples of audism become much easier to recognise.
You will probably forget sometimes. So will I.
That's another thing worth saying. Becoming aware of hearing privilege doesn't suddenly make us perfect Deaf allies.
We're human.
We'll forget to turn captions on. We'll miss something when organising an event. We may realise afterwards that we handled a conversation badly.
The important part is being open enough to notice, learn and do things differently next time. If somebody points out a barrier you hadn't considered before, they've given you information you didn't have yesterday.
Use it.
Since we first wrote about hearing privilege, we've also explored Deaf disempowerment and how easily Deaf people can lose control of conversations and decisions that directly affect them. The two concepts are closely connected and, once you understand one, you may start recognising the other too.
Hearing privilege isn't something we need to feel ashamed of, but we can become more aware of the access we receive automatically and ask a much more useful question:
How can I use that awareness to make sure someone else isn't unnecessarily left out?
That's where hearing privilege can become allyship, and if this article has made you recognise a little bit of your own hearing privilege, I'd genuinely love to know:
What is something you can do as a hearing person that you'd never thought of as a privilege before?
Let’s learn from each other!
