Is it better to think of the deaf positively as those who speak America Sign Language, rather than negatively as those who have a distinctive kind of impairment? Sounds good perhaps but here’s Lennard Davis on the reasons not to:

The central problem with defining deaf people as a linguistic group is that to do so, you have to patrol the fire wall between the deaf and nondeaf in very rigid ways. If deaf people are defined as only those who are native users of ASL, you have to define all nonusers of ASL as “other.” That excludes, or at least marginalizes, deaf people who are orally trained — that is, who were taught to eschew ASL for speech alone; have cochlear implants; or never had the chance to learn sign language. Many people who grew up in non-ASL settings in the 1950s and 1960s and who have quite happily thought of themselves as deaf would have to reassign themselves to some other camp. Likewise, the strict linguistic-group definition expels hard-of-hearing people who have not learned ASL. Ironically, the model also stigmatizes those who have been educated orally; they are seen as victims of oral education rather than as victims of audism. Since it is hearing parents who usually make the decision to educate their deaf children orally, rather than with ASL, or to give them cochlear implants, it doesn’t seem fair to define those children as not deaf. The other flaw in the model is that it defines hearing, signing children of deaf adults (CODA’s) as deaf, since they are native sign-language speakers. One could argue that CODA’s aren’t discriminated against by the hearing world, but if one takes that tack, then one has to abandon the idea that language is the key defining term.

To which we can add the following against the specific suggestion considered: it would be crazy to think of the deaf as the community of native speakers of ASL because lots of the deaf speak OTHER sign languages instead.