An important concept in social justice circles is the idea of privilege. For those unacquainted with the concept, perhaps the easiest way to describe it is that by being born into a certain group (race, gender, economic class, etc.), you’ve automatically, even unconsciously, been given an advantage in certain matters as a part of that group. This, of course, even applies to disability: if you’re not disabled, you’re automatically granted advantages that many disabled people will have to work for at best, or may never attain at worst.

I’d write about neurotypical privilege here, since that’s the most obvious case that’d be relevant to my own disabilities, but Bev from Square 8 has already created a neurotypical privilege checklist that’s so good, I don’t think I could ever manage to outdo it. (And besides, I contributed a couple items to it myself!)

However, along with Asperger’s syndrome, I also have auditory processing disorder. It affects pretty much every act of spoken communication I participate in, so it’s not something that can be easily ignored. And I’ve noticed that many people don’t even consider how certain activities can be discriminatory to those of us with abnormal hearing or auditory processing.

I wish I could provide an outright hearing privilege checklist, but that’d be problematic given that I have at least some privilege in that respect myself. My hearing itself is OK; I’m overly sensitive to noises, and I have perfect pitch that’s a blessing for solving the Selenitic Age in Myst but a curse when I’m asked to play on a piano that’s horribly out of tune. At the same time, because of my auditory processing disorder, I do share many of the same difficulties understanding speech that someone who’s deaf or hard of hearing would have. Nonetheless, it’d be best to refer to this as an auditory processing privilege checklist, not a hearing one.

So, without further ado:

The Normal Auditory Processing Privilege Checklist

• I can watch first-run movies in any theater and still understand a majority of the dialogue without having to attend a specially scheduled screening with subtitles.
• I can watch movies on streaming services and comprehend the dialogue with the same ease that I could with a DVD rental.
• TV shows are equally accessible to me whether I record from TV or watch them online. I could drop my cable TV subscription without losing access to those shows.
• I can easily carry on conversations with several other people in a bar or restaurant, no matter how noisy the place is.
• I can easily understand what people say to me on the phone, and do not have to frequently ask for repetition.
• If I want a smartphone data plan, the minimum required voice plan of 300–400 minutes that must accompany it is not overkill.
• I can decipher the lyrics for most songs without having to look them up.
• Rock concerts are at a perfectly reasonable level; I don’t need to stand at the back or remember to bring earplugs.
• I can understand messages broadcast over PA systems without a lot of difficulty.
• Lectures are just as easy for me to comprehend without visual feedback such as PowerPoint as they are with visual feedback.

You’ve likely never thought about how many of these experiences aren’t universal, or how these situations might be discriminatory— and that’s precisely the point of this. I see so many posts, for instance, talking about eliminating cable subscriptions and going to online TV viewing; yet most of the cable-only shows I’m interested in, if they are available online in the first place, aren’t captioned in any form.

And that’s just the start. Can anyone think of any other examples of privilege experienced by those without auditory processing disorder? I’m totally open to suggestions; feel free to leave them in the comments!

Long before I had an Asperger’s diagnosis, I had been diagnosed with auditory processing disorder. For those unfamiliar with that diagnosis, what it essentially means is that my hearing is technically fine, but the way my brain processes auditory input isn’t quite normal.

You know the so-called ‘cocktail party phenomenon’ that’s such a marvel to psychologists, where people can pick out a single person’s voice among a crowd of conversations in a noisy restaurant? I don’t experience that. When a bunch of people are talking at once, all I hear is a jumbled, incomprehensible mess. It might be slightly more comprehensible if the speaker I’m trying to listen to has a voice with a distinctive pitch compared to the crowd, or is speaking slightly louder, or is located closer; even then, however, it’s a struggle, and I still have to pay an awful lot of attention to extract that one thread of conversation from amidst all the noise.

(Needless to say, because of this, the college bar scene is not my ideal social environment. But that’s another post entirely.)

Distortion can also render speech incomprehensible. Phone calls, particularly on a cell phone with spotty reception, are frequently an exercise in frustration; even on a land line, higher frequencies (which make up common consonant sounds such as ‘s’ and ‘t’) are muffled due to the limitations of the phone system itself. The situation is somewhat less troublesome when I’m speaking to someone with whose voice I’m already familiar, as I’m already accustomed to that person’s speech patterns and can thus extrapolate more easily from the muffled signal. The same is true for environments with a loud echo; I can recall quite a few assemblies held in the gym back in middle school and high school where I couldn’t make out half of what the speaker was saying.

Even with a clear, distortion-free signal, there’s no guarantee that I’ll necessarily make out what someone’s saying. If someone has an unfamiliar accent or unusual speech patterns, for instance, I may have to go through a sort of learning period before I can really understand ‘on the fly’; most people seem to adapt much more quickly than I can. I also have some trouble understanding fast speech, particularly if I’m feeling tired or overloaded.

One other interesting thing I’ve noticed is that, when I’m really trying to comprehend something I hear, I’ll mentally translate it into written form, like a sort of mental closed-captioning. I think this might be one of the reasons I have so much trouble with faster speakers: doing this translation requires a sort of buffer, which overflows far more quickly, particularly if I’m feeling overwhelmed to begin with. A related quirk I’ve noticed is that sometimes this translation comes to a halt, or at least occurs to an incomplete degree, when I encounter some word that I can’t convert to a visual representation.

Given this, then, I suppose it’s no real surprise that I prefer text messaging and e-mail to phone calls, and that I prefer to watch TV and DVDs with captioning enabled.

Ironically, however, I also have perfect pitch; it seems that my auditory processing is far better suited to music than to speech. This leads to another rather interesting issue: I can carry a tune quite well, even remembering several layers of accompaniment, but lyrics are sometimes a mystery to me even after several listens until I’ve seen them in print (or, at the very least, listened very closely to separate them from the accompaniment).