Exclusive: Love Island’s Tasha Ghouri on the ‘pivotal’ moment with Andrew which never aired

Tasha Ghouri made history over the summer when she was the first deaf contestant on the ITV dating show, Love Island.

In an exclusive interview with The Limping Chicken, the dancer and model tells Liam O’Dell why she was thankful for the negative comments, what her deaf identity means for her, and what’s next after leaving the villa.

Life post-Love Island still seems to be rather hectic for 24-year-old Tasha Ghouri. Just days after jetting back from Majorca for the ITV reality series, she announced she was eBay’s first pre-loved ambassador. A string of mainstream media interviews followed, and after a couple of pushbacks, our interview over Zoom is finally booked in.

“I think for me, even before Love Island, I was raising money for charities and I was constantly talking about my own [Instagram] page, Talks With Tasha,” she tells me, after I ask if she feels any pressure as an advocate after appearing on such a prominent TV show. “For me, I’m quite passionate. I think coming out of Love Island, I haven’t felt that pressure in terms of having to speak out about it.”

My question comes after EastEnders actress and Strictly Come Dancing winner Rose Ayling-Ellis gave a lecture last week on deaf representation in the media industry.

“I was thrown to suddenly find myself considered a deaf pioneer,” she told an audience in Edinburgh, “the poster girl for the deaf community.” The new situation she found herself in post-Strictly, she revealed, brought new pressures she had never come across before.

Tasha, however, has had a different experience. “I’m doing what feels right,” she says. “I’m not trying to put that pressure on me to be like, ‘I have to do this, I have to do that’. I haven’t felt that pressure at all.

“But I can 100% see where Rose is coming from because you’re in the public eye, so I feel like you do have that extra pressure, I get that.”

“I’m doing what feels right. I’m not trying to put that pressure on me to be like, ‘I have to do this, I have to do that’.”

I reference her tearful reaction to being placed in the bottom three after three public votes. “In terms of wanting to be in the public favour, it was just more about I felt like I wasn’t doing my job,” replies Tasha. “When I was going in there, I wanted to be inspiring people and the fact that I was bottom three, I felt like, ‘I’m not achieving it’. I started beating myself down.

“I even said to [my partner] Andrew, ‘I feel like I’m not doing my thing, I’m not inspiring people,’” she continues, now wiping away tears. “So when I was in the bottom, that’s what it felt like.”

Needless to say, public opinion of Tasha and boyfriend Andrew Le Page wasn’t always positive. At worst, it veered into ableism. One viral TikTok mocked her deaf accent, others dreamed of ripping out her ‘hearing aid’ – which is actually a cochlear implant.

While producers failed to specifically condemn the ableist remarks aimed at Tasha, they went on to issue a statement on Instagram stating they “do not tolerate trolling or abuse of any sort”. It was visible on their Stories for 24 hours before it disappeared.

“It was hard seeing those comments,” Tasha admits, “but then comments like that gives me that fire, gives me that spike. It gives me that motivation to make sure our community is getting the recognition [and] it gives me that energy to push it more now.

“So in a way I do thank the people that leave the negative comments, because it’s given me that fire now to keep pushing on and pushing for the community that I’m in. So that’s the way I look at it.”

“In a way I do thank the people that leave the negative comments, because it’s given me that fire now to keep pushing on.”

And what does that community look like? “The community that want to represent is everyone that is deaf, hearing impaired, wears a cochlear implant, wears a hearing aid, pretty much anyone,” she explains. “Going into the villa, I was putting myself in a very vulnerable position because I had no idea how people were going to react to having the first ‘deaf Islander’. I don’t like to be known as ‘deaf Islander’, because I am Tasha Ghouri.”

She continues: “Growing up, I went to public school and I grew up around a lot of hearing people. That’s why a lot of people don’t really fully understand what cochlear implant is or how it really works, or BSL [British Sign Language], how important it is and things like that.”

Reading other articles from Tasha, and comments from her father while on Love Island, there’s a sense the Yorkshire influencer has taken time to accept her deaf identity, something which she affectionately calls her ‘superpower’.

“I think deafness in my eyes, I don’t see it as a disability,” she explains, revealing in a later question that the term ‘disability’ makes her feel segregated. “This is my personal preference. That’s why I call it a superpower, it gives me that positive empowerment.

“I think deafness gets overlooked quite a lot in in this world,” she explains. “It’s always overlooked in terms of like, ‘oh, it’s not a proper disability’, or things like that, but it actually is, because we go through struggles every day and it’s not easy for us.

“A lot of people think cochlear implants are an instant fix, but it’s like you don’t know the hard work and the graft behind it to get to where I am now – especially with my speech or what I hear.”

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The acceptance of her ‘superpower’, I’m told, came during a dance workshop ran by her friend and choreographer, Josh, when she encountered issues with her cochlear implant.

Tasha sets the scene. “There’s hundreds of people there watching and there’s a group of five. Basically, in a dance class, you get to dance the choreography and get put into groups and at the end, we get filmed. I was in the middle of the five girls, and halfway through the choreography, I was dancing in time with the music. I still got the choreography right.

“Before that, when my cochlear implant used to fail, I’ll walk out, I’ll get angry, get upset and frustrated,” she continues. “I’d never fully accepted it. I’d still be blaming my cochlear implant, I’d still be blaming my superpower being like, ‘I’m sick of this’.”

This, explains Tasha, was when she experienced a change in attitude. “That’s where I just started to honestly fly, where I’ve grown into a butterfly. The fact that I just carried on and there was hundreds of people watching. That’s when I went, ‘yeah, I love my superpower’.“

Yet despite her pride in her deaf identity, it seems the Love Island producers weren’t all that keen on showing it more often. When a series of controversial clips of the Islanders were shared during a ‘Mad Movies’ night, some viewers wondered why they weren’t captioned for Tasha’s benefit – sources close to the show refused to tell The Limping Chicken whether they discussed it with the Islander.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t know if there was going to be subtitles or not,” admits Tasha. “So when the movie clips did start, in my head, I thought, ‘Oh, okay, there’s no subtitles’, so I really had to try and listen in as much as I could.

“I did kind of wish I’d said [something] to the producers and chose to have subtitles, but I just didn’t think in the moment.”

“There were times where I said to Gemma, ‘what was said, I didn’t know what was said’, things like that, so yeah, there was no subtitles. I had nothing to do with that,” she reveals. “I did kind of wish I’d said [something] to the producers and chose to have subtitles, but I just didn’t think in the moment, because we don’t know what the night is going to be.”

Not only that, but one “pivotal moment” between her and Andrew, she says, never went to air. “I really opened up to him massively about [my cochlear implant]. I took it off or showed him how to change the batteries and things like that. I got him to feel my magnet in my head and he really got it.

“It’s a shame they didn’t show that, because that was a big pivot moment for me and Andrew,” she continues. “I talked about the struggles and how tired I can get lipreading, it’s not that easy. He literally was like, ‘yeah, I get you. I get exactly what you’re saying’.

“From that day, when I was tired, he would know why. If I was getting a headache, he’d know why. If I need to change batteries, he will come and watch me change batteries.”

While ableist viewers or editorial decisions may have tried to limit how much Tasha talks about her deafness, she tells me it’s a part of her she’s not going to stop talking about any time soon, with a few upcoming projects yet to be announced.

“Obviously I can’t say too much, but I definitely will – hopefully – be working with some deaf charities, for sure,” she teases. “Hopefully [I will be] going down that route, raising more awareness and I’ve got some things – my own personal things – that obviously I don’t want to say, but will definitely help people with superpowers for sure.

“I’m still going to keep talking about it even though it may annoy some people. It has to be done and I’m passionate about it.”

Photo: @TashaGhouri/Instagram.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is an award-winning Deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.