I am nearly profoundly deaf, but I have very good speech and lip-reading skills. I have been in situations with other friends (both deaf and hoh), such as at a restaurant, and I am able to order food with the waitress understanding me perfectly and me understanding her by lip-reading, and my friends will say "Oh, you must be hard-of-hearing." And I'll tell them I'm truly not, that I'm deaf, and then a discussion ensues because they don't believe me because they think deaf people can't communicate as well as hard-of-hearing people do. I disagree. And it gets old ... What it all boils down to is that you have the right to call yourself whatever you want because as long as you have any amount of hearing loss, you certainly can call yourself deaf or hard-of-hearing, whatever you prefer. And if somebody else doesn't like it, tough cooties.
