I was thinking of the social model of disability where I am impaired by my hearing loss, but I am disabled by the behaviour of people around me.
The reality is that if I had normal hearing I would be able to join in the group conversation without anybody making any adjustments to their own behaviour, so my hearing loss impairs me from doing this.
However, despite being my hearing being impaired, I could still participate if people make small changes to their behaviour. For example I will ask to people with quiet voices to speak louder. But more often than not, they usually persist in talking at their low volume as that's what they're used to doing. Then they have disabled me from participating by their audist behaviour. The sad fact is that people do do this to me and I am stopped from participating. It's also sad that the other hearies didn't intervene and insist that the quiet person speak up. Rather as they could hear, I'm left fighting a one man battle and it stops being a group conversation.
And this leads me full circle to my first point, if I had normal hearing I wouldn't be excluded. So if you want to participate in the hearing world, it is a disadvantage to be deaf. Fact. But it's the hearing world that has disabled me. Fact.
Final observation: If I was in the Deaf community, then this would be no longer a disadvantage.
