Recently, the renowned children’s hospital down the street from my house restored hearing to an 11-year-old boy via a cutting-edge experimental gene therapy. Coverage was predictably fawning, with almost no one stopping to ask basic questions about the ethics of the trial, like, “why are we experimenting on disabled immigrant children of color when they are not suffering from a life-threatening condition, and will receive no meaningful benefit from ‘treatment’?” (Being long past the critical window for language acquisition, the 11-year-old is likely language deprived, and will hear sound, but never understand speech.)

I wrote about this, and some of the other educational, social and moral concerns in the Inquirer, here.

The response was, of course, terrible. Hearing people everywhere slid into my DMs to tell me I was selfish, that what I had written was, “a slap in the face to doctors and researchers everywhere,” that I was mentally ill for finding life as a deaf person preferable to their experience of hearing, that deaf people should happily lay themselves down in sacrifice to the greater good of curing cancer or tay sachs, or other actual diseases that see a future promise in the technology.