Lol One time I asked my hearing friend Nick, who knows sign language, to come to this hearing party at my hometown that he never been to. None of my hearing friends from my hometown know who Nick is so I asked Nick to pretend that he is deaf. It was because I felt like my own hearing friends talk funny behind my back b/c im deaf. I just wanted to know if my hearing friends that I grew up with are my REAL TRUE friends..Nick did a good job making everyone think that he is deaf just like me. Nick was spy-listening to everybody who was talking near me and interpreted what they were talking about. I even on purpose acted stupid around a little to see if someone will say "Stupid deaf" or something bad like that..No one said bad things about deafs so that means my hearing friends are respectful..It is good to have a hearing friend who knows sign language to look out for you at hearing parties..
That’s so funny. I'm glad your friends weren't assholes.
My friends and I do that with our friend Courtney (he’s HOH.) Whenever he first introduces us to a guy he’s casually dating or a boyfriend he introduces me and my other friend as his brother and sister who are either deaf or HOH. We only sign around the boyfriend, so that he thinks we don’t understand him. Then we ease drop on everything he says. Because we’re all really passionate about sign language and the deaf community and minus that, we’re protective of our friend, if he says something mean or acts like a dick about us signing or just our friend in general, we tell our friend later “nope, don’t approve. He go away.”
I’ve also gone to silent dinners with a mix of Deaf, HOH, and hearing people where we all go silent and people just assume everyone is deaf. We never bother to correct anyone.
Now, in a situation where someone comes up to us and starts signing and they introduce themselves to us, then we answer honestly, “deaf, HOH or hearing.” Actually legit trying to be a native of something is…too much work. That’s serious scam territory that I couldn’t begin to be bothered with. My friends and I are all lazy young nerds that love languages and like to goof around. I do similar things with my Czech and French speaking friends. Sometimes we’ll only speak Czech or French when we go out and pretend to be foreigners. But in the event that we actually meet a native from those countries (which hasn’t happened yet, but I hope it does) we would tell the person we are non-native speakers practicing our Czech or French skills (even though it would probably be obvious because of our bad accents.
)
In the situations with my friend’s boyfriends, that’s not about us trying to present a Deaf image or us really wanting people to believe we’re Deaf. It’s as simple as us pretending not to know English because it will benefit us during our childish ease dropping missions. It’s something we do for fun in our own little group. If the guys Courtney introduces us to stick around we tell them we’re actually hearing (but none have stuck around long enough for us to meet again and tell them that.) If they signed that would be even better! We would skip the façade all together, just be ourselves and grill him with interrogating signs.
When I was younger, before I started learning sign language, French or Czech and before I was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, I stopped speaking for a while. People would say all kinds of things about me or others around me, knowing I could hear, but assuming “hey she can’t talk, who is she going to tell?” I notice when people think you can’t understand them, they reveal all sorts of things. It’s interesting to those who interested in studying or learning about human behavior.
But yeah, anyway, I understand the frustration with this Ginny person. Sounds a little extreme to actually introduce herself to real Deaf people and other signers as something she’s not and try to keep the lie going when everyone knows it's a lie. Yikes. I definitely would not go to Prague saying “Alo, brothers and sisters!”
Not cool and it would be very embarrassing.