What this means for me was that I have a slight lisp -- for example "three" sounded like "free" when said by me. Also, I've never (until recently) been able to grind my teeth, resulting extra wear and tear in the middle set. Now this alone is not a major disability, though I've always wondered just how or why my teeth were like this. Was I born this way, or did someone damage them when I was young? I remember having an upper plate when I was six years old, but can't remember what for. No. The problem is what happens when it's combined with poor hearing.
Without looking at
someone's mouth, I can't hear the difference between
certain sounds: "S", "F", and "TH"
all sound the same for me, and I often can't tell the
difference between "SH" and "H"(1). It must have been obvious at an
early age because my mother would take me as a child to Princess
Margaret Children's Hospital for speech therapy. I learnt
how to talk by reading and reciting Dr Suess.
The Cat in the Hat and Horton the Elephant made all the difference. I was later to return in regular visits to Princess Margaret when I had epilepsy, but speech therapy was my first memory of it. Afterwards, we would often visit the Save the Children Fund op shop, which is just down the road. I would sit at the back of the shop and read the books that were there, or look at the pictures. I have fond memories of Rupert Bear, as my mother would buy the albums for me when she could afford to do so.
I have other hearing problems too. I've lost part of my high range hearing. This is not uncommon for males, and most of the time I don't notice it. Sometimes however when I'm on the phone I can't understand what the other person is saying, because it seems like the tops and bottoms of their speech has been "cut off". Getting a hearing aid doesn't fix that, because all they do is amplify things, not pick up frequencies that you don't hear.
Other problems relate to concentration. At parties I could hear all the conversations in a room at once. I told this to someone once and they thought it was like a "super power". The problem is, though I hear all of them, I can't make sense of any. This was one reason that I avoid parties in general. At other times, if I'm not facing a direction, I just don't hear clearly anything that's being said, and often don't realise that it's being said to me.
So, what do I do to cope with this?
When I began my gender transition, I began a year's worth of speech therapy. There are distinct cultural differences between the tones that men and women use. I had tended to use a monotone, partly, because it reflercted an emotional state. I learnt to "round" my speech so that it's more interesting. It was also during this therapy that I discovered the problem in hearing certain sounds.
The irony was that I started speech therapy to sound "more feminine", but ended up improving my general speech. It still needs me to concentrate to enunciate correctly.
A couple of years ago I finally had my teeth corrected by having another dental plate in the roof of my mouth. This cost me over $1000 in various charges, and was painful and awkward, but I think it was worth it. I can now (barely) grind my teeth, and the shape of my face has changed too.
Footnotes
(1) And if you don't think this is a problem, try being transsexual and not being sure whether or not the person behind the counter said "he" or "she" in referring to you!