Tue 22 Mar 2011 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
A popular daily deals website has apologised for classifying Georgina Beyer's gender as “random” in a promotion. 1-day is peddling $11 “bags of crap”, which it has split into being suitable for ‘blokes' with a picture of MP Hone Harawira, ‘chicks' with picture of former Prime Minister Helen Clark and ‘random' with a picture of Beyer. Auckland-based trans support group GenderBridge says using the term ‘random' to define the gender of Beyer, a woman who is proudly out and transgender, is offensive. “It is saying that Georgina, and by inference all transgender people are neither male or female, but ‘random',” says Chairperson Jaimie Veale. “The term ‘random' negates Georgina's valid identity of female.” The website has since released a statement apologising: “At 1-day we are all about having fun. We even find it hard to take ourselves seriously most of the time. So we take it to heart when we get complaints from our customers about our promotions,” it says. “The use of images of a selection of local New Zealand politicians was our attempt to poke some light-hearted fun at the ‘politically correct' world we live in, and was in no way an attempt to appear bigoted or trivialise the individuals pictured, their gender, political beliefs, race or sexual orientation.” The site says its intention was not for the promotion to cause offence to anyone and it sincerely apologises if this has been the case. It says it's removing the images and replacing them with something it hopes is less controversial. “Again we apologise for any bad feeling this promotion may have caused.”
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Tuesday, 22nd March 2011 - 10:54am