170 Howerton-Fox is an assistant professor of language and literacy, Department of Education, Iona College, New Rochelle, NY. Howerton-Fox, A. (2019). What went unsaid in my TEDx talk on language, literacy, and deafness: Invited editorial. American Annals of the Deaf, 164(2), 170–174. What Went Unsaid in My TEDx Talk on Language, Literacy, and Deafness: Invited Editorial Amanda Howerton-Fox In the spring of 2018, I was invited to give a TEDx talk on the theme of “boundaries.” Boundaries in deaf education? I thought. Tankfully, there was no shortage of possi- ble angles. I thought frst about the widely recog- nized, and ofen oversimplifed, boundary between proponents of a bilingual approach to deaf education and proponents of a listening and spoken-language approach. I considered, also, the boundary that exists between hearing people who cannot sign and deaf people who cannot speak, and the ways in which those on both sides fnd ways to breach the barrier. I thought a lot, too, about the linguistic boundary between spoken languages and signed languages and all the fascinating structural things that happen at that boundary, with the languages on one side occurring linearly in time and space— word by word by word—and those on the other making powerful use of their ability to simultaneously layer information in both dimensions. But I ultimately decided to address a dif- ferent boundary—one that is more rarely discussed in our papers and at our confer- ences—and I did so because I believe that it is the most toxic and dangerous bound- ary in our feld: the line we draw between the able-bodied and the disabled, between the normal and the abnormal. My mother was born lef-handed, a con- dition that was viewed by many as deviant when she was young. My grandmother stood over her, like a vigilant watchdog for normalcy, to ensure that she learned to write with the “right” hand. She later attended a prestigious women’s college, then successfully navigated multiple careers while raising her children. My father-in-law was also born lef-handed, just a few years later than my mother. His parents thought nothing of it. He easily got through medical school and his pulmonol- ogy residency writing with his lef hand, and he continues to use it to write poetry and take award-winning photographs. Te only diference between them is that my mother grew up thinking there was some- thing inherently wrong with her and my father-in-law grew up thinking he was just as good as anyone else. We no longer talk about lef-handed people as being “abnormal”; we simply accept lef-handedness as a part of human variation, like being too tall to ft through a low threshold, or needing to wear glasses, or being a terrible speller, or being unable to curl your tongue. Tere is a general acknowledgment that we all have a diferent set of abilities, and that these diferences are an important part of what keeps things interesting and makes each of us unique.