Tue 28 Feb 2012 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
Queer Avengers picket the DomPost's offices Wellington group Queer Avengers has written an opinion piece on transgender issues, which is says will be printed in the Dominion Post, in reponse to a columnist's transphobic tirade. The group picketed outside the newspaper’s offices and delivered a letter to its management, after being angered by a Rosemary McLeod column where she constantly used the disparaging term ‘he-she’ to describe a transman, while launching an attack on ‘ego-tripping’ transgender parents. “It was a successful action in terms of getting heard,” Queer Avengers spokesman Ian Anderson says. He says 60 people turned up with less than 24 hours’ notice, "which was fantastic." “I've also been to larger events with less energy. There's a lot of community discontent about the media profiting from bigotry, especially after that awful Libra ad." Aside from the protest, McLeod has been harshly criticised in the majority of the 123 comments on the story. It’s not the first time McLeod has raised the ire of the glbti communities, with previous pieces ranking being gay as being as unattractive as herpes and bad breath, criticising the presence of gays and lesbians in the corridors of political power and gay sperm donors to lesbian couples. "Future generations will rejoice at being the turkey baster products of gay men and women who never had emotional ties," she once wrote. The Dominion Post says the most recent column was clearly identified as opinion, and while some people may have been affronted by it, “when balanced against the principle of free expression, it would have been going a step too far to have banned it”. As well as penning a piece for the Dominion Post, Queer Avengers is organising a press conference for 15 March to address media coverage of gender variance. “In the long term we're planning actions against bullying, for justice in schools, and other campaigns against gender and sexual conformity,” he says. UPDATE: The piece has now been published in the Dominion Post. You can read it here
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Tuesday, 28th February 2012 - 1:50pm