Intersectionality

Are women all the same? Are men all the same? Are Chinese all the same? Are Deaf people all the same? 

The answer is intersectionality. It means each person is born with different traits and grew up with different experiences, some bad and some good leading to differing identities in each individual. What counts is oppression against these differing identities. 

Intersectionality was initially meant for women who experience discrimination based on both colour and gender simultaneously. Kimberle Crenshaw, a legal scholar, saw it and coined the term in 1989. She realised that anyone would treat these issues separately. 

There was a case: 

There was a group of African American women who sued a company for racial and gender discrimination. However, the courts found that women in general were not discriminated against when it came to jobs as secretaries in the company. Therefore, the court dismissed their suit relating to discrimination based on gender. The company also employed African American factory workers and the courts found that this disproved racial discrimination. So the court saw race and gender as two separate issues and therefore dismissed the suit. 

What is the problem? The court failed to consider that the majority of secretaries were white women, and factory workers were all men. The women of colour were not seen to be doubly discriminated against and should be treated as a facing a separate category of oppression.

LGBTQ Malaysians Fight Back After Gov't Official Says They Don't Exist

BY NICO LANG

MARCH 07 2019 4:41 PM EST

“I don’t know why I was shocked.”

Harjinder Kier, a nonbinary advocate and conservationist, says after another exhaustingly long day— one of many for Malaysia’s queer and trans community in recent months. On Tuesday, the country’s tourism minister, Datuk Mohamaddin bin Ketapi, claimed there are no LGBTQ people in Malaysia.

“I don't think we have anything like that in our country,” Mohammaddin told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle during the ITB Berlin travel conference.

GTLF: The Most Inclusive & Radical Festival

After the removal of the portraits of LGBT Malaysians in August in Penang, it felt risky to be doing anything queer in Penang again. But three months and several risk management meetings later, we pulled off a very queer George Town LITERARY Festival, where we asked ourselves questions like “Are the Arts just bigger closets?” As this year’s George Town Literary Festival was themed The State of Freedom, festival director Bernice Chauly felt it important to celebrate queer writing and invited me to be one of the curators. My task, particularly, was to help programme some of the queer panels as well as invite a few queer writers to speak.

Yes, we were all a little nervous, but Bernice was adamant we take this chance. It was going to be her last festival as director. If we are going to celebrate the freedom of expression, we must do it, not just talk about it. Even if we needed to have risk assessments to make sure we do it right.

Deaf gay man on dealing with rejection from everywhere

By ANTHONY CHONG.

After I came out of closet as a gay man to my parents, I remember clearly something my mother said. She said, I would inherit her house entirely, but only if I chose another path. In other words, marry a woman. She would even accept any woman she had previously warned me not to marry. I said I would be more than happy to share the house with my two elder brothers.

The house is not my life dream anyway. I don’t plan on sitting at home. There are many things to explore outside the house and the country. I want to live my life without any kind of discrimination or oppression. We could practice our freedom to do the things we wish, yet remember never to cross the line: we should not mind the business of others. Others could do the same. However, this is not the case. 

LGBTQ oppression happens. Audism happens. (“Audism is a set of beliefs that include: hearing people are superior to Deaf people; Deaf people should be pitied for having futile and miserable lives; Deaf people should become like hearing people as far as possible; and shunning of sign languages.” — Wikipedia)

Deaf Community Merdeka

Malaysia has gained independence since 31 August 1957. Every citizen, with or without disability, celebrates the Merdeka every year. Deaf people also celebrate Merdeka.

For me, Merdeka is where everyone can enjoy the privilege of being Malaysians in the country. But is the Deaf community really Merdeka yet? We encounter many obstacles. People decide our destiny. People decide how we should receive our education. People do not see us as a cultural and linguistic minority. We are not allowed to use our official language, BIM, which is Malaysian Sign Language or Bahasa Isyarat Malaysia, to learn Bahasa Malaysia in schools but instead are forced to use an ineffective coding system. Without BIM, we were not able to excel in Bahasa Malaysia.

We have been trying to tell People about our language but our messages never reached them. Deaf children grow up without BIM and was expected to be fluent in Bahasa Malaysia. The children would struggle in acquiring Bahasa Malaysia because they could not make any sense of the language without BIM. We are Malaysians, we should not have to struggle in acquiring Bahasa Malaysia. 

To cut a long story short, we are surviving the society, with minimal proficiency in Bahasa Malaysia. We are pleading the Ministry of Education to replace the current coding system with BIM to allow Deaf children to acquire Bahasa Malaysia without obstacles. Just as Malaysia fought for Merdeka, we will keep fighting until our rights as a Deaf person are rightfully recognised.  It will be truly Merdeka for us when Malaysia hears the cry from our community and recognise the Deaf community as a community with different language, just like Chinese, Indian and Malay, Iban, Kadazan and other linguistic minorities instead of seeing us as a person with disability.

Deaf Community Merdeka! 

Written on 30 August 2018

Deaf and Gay and Proud to be Both

By ANTHONY CHONG.

After struggling to fall in love with women, I finally affirmed my identity as a gay person at the age of 21. But I did not have the strength to open up to anyone as I feared losing my family, my friends, and my reputation as a deaf community leader. 

The deaf community in Malaysia is small. Without any intention, I had emerged as an exemplary deaf person in the eye of the deaf community. But it wasn’t until I entered the deaf community at age of 18 that I found someone to guide me. As I lost much time, I expedited my learning of deaf culture and language until I was ready to live as a cultural deaf person. 

What is a cultural deaf person? A cultural deaf person looks at oneself as part of a linguistic minority. He is proud of being fluent in Malaysian Sign Language and has sufficient cultural knowledge to survive mainstream society. He also does not see his hearing disability as a disadvantage. The disadvantages we experience are produced by mainstream society. 

Must language be spoken to be heard?

Sunday, 27 Jul 2014 

By Priya Kulasagaran 

  

It’s hoped that the new dictionary will help children like these communicate more effectively. 

A new dictionary aims to raise awareness about the complexities of sign language and how it is used. 

IMAGINE if you were told that your mother tongue is not a “real” language, but merely a shadow of one. This is what many deaf communities face when it comes to sign language. 

According to the World Federation of the Deaf, some 70 million deaf people around the world say that sign language is their first language. 

Despite this, the common misconception is that sign language is a crude imitation or ‘inferior’ to spoken languages such as English. 

“Sign language is a visual language, which is actually equal to any spoken languages because this visual language has its own grammar, structure and meaning,” says advocate for the deaf, Anthony Chong.