mocking deaf Love Islander’s voices falls flat
Tasha was defended beautifully by Tiktoker Shiona McClafferty
Tasha was defended beautifully by Tiktoker Shiona McClafferty
Love Island commentary gets gnarly, we all know that. But one recent TikTok went much further than a bit of a rinsing over a misplaced metaphor, or a laugh at the ways in which Casa Amor turns love birds into complete stone-cold menaces. Because these things are choices, right? What’s not a choice to mock is the way a disabled person engages with the world.
Crossing the line entirely, a pair of TikTokers mocked Tasha Ghouri for the way she spoke to Andrew Le Page on their date.
For all of humanity’s advances, disabled people don’t get it easy - official stats show they’re less likely than non-disabled people to go into further education, get jobs and own property. They're also more likely (1 in 7 compared to 1 in 20) to experience domestic abuse.
Additionally, disabled people are four times as likely as non-disabled people to report feeling lonely “often or always” and are almost twice as likely to have high anxiety levels.
How must it feel, then, for deaf people to hear their voices being mocked by their peers?
One TikToker summed it all up in a recent video. Shiona McClafferty, who is deaf, noticed that the mocking TikTokers had got over 30k views for their lazy attempt at humour, and wanted to set the record straight.
Deaf people, she explained in her own video via her own voice and British sign language, speak differently because they hear differently, which is entirely natural. So “why should anyone be mocked because of that?”
She added: “Many deaf people go to speech therapy for years to try to enter society and are sometimes are reluctant to use our voices because of responses like this.”
“This video isn’t only making fun of Tasha, it’s making fun of the whole deaf community”
She concluded: “Maybe we should accept differences and try and make the world more inclusive?”
It’s more than a fair point. Going one step further than those who’d set out to mock her, Shiona ensured that she blurred out the names of the original posters. But something tells us they’ll find out the error of their ways - Shiona’s video has got itself over 2.2 million views in just one day, which is 7 times as many views as them! Her voice might not sound as precise as theirs, but how much clearer - and kinder - is her message!?
