Innovative transgender MP Georgina Beyer dies at 65

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Georgina Beyer, a pioneering New Zealand politician who became the world’s first openly transgender MP in 1999, died Monday at the age of 65.

Beyer’s friends said she passed away peacefully in a hospice. The cause of death was not immediately named, although Beyer previously suffered from kidney failure and underwent a kidney transplant in 2017.

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said he did not know Beyer personally well, but knew she had a large following in New Zealand and that she made a lasting impression on the national parliament.

“I definitely think Georgina has paved the way for others to follow a lot easier,” Hipkins said.

Friend Malcolm Vaughan said on Monday that he was still with Beyer, whom he had known for decades, and did not yet feel ready to talk about her life. Instead, he and his husband Scott Kennedy issued a statement.

“For the past week, Georgie has been surrounded by the people closest to her 24 hours a day, seven days a week, she accepted what was happening, made jokes and sparkled in her eyes, right up to the last moment,” they wrote.

They said it was a national treasure, or “taonga” in the native Maori language.

“Farewell Georgie, your love, compassion and all that you have done for the rainbow and many other communities will live on forever,” they wrote.

Beyer, who was Maori, worked as a prostitute and nightclub performer before entering politics. In 1995, she was elected mayor of the small town of Carterton on the North Island. Four years later, she received a national post from the Liberal Labor Party and remained an MP until 2007.

She helped pass the landmark Prostitution Reform Act of 2003, which decriminalized sex work.

Speaking to lawmakers at the time, she said the protection offered by the new law could have saved her from being drawn into the sex industry at the age of 16, as well as being threatened and raped by sex workers when she could not seek help from the police.

The story goes on

“I think of all the people I knew in the area who have suffered because of the hypocrisy of our society, which, on the one hand, can put up with prostitution, and on the other hand, wants to shove it under the carpet and keep it in the twilight world where it exists,” she told lawmakers.

In 2004, she helped pass a law allowing same-sex civil unions. Nine years later, New Zealand passed a law allowing same-sex marriage.

Politicians on both sides mourned her death on Monday. Nicola Willis, deputy leader of the conservative National Party, recalled Beyer as brave and amiable.

“We belonged to different political parties, but she had the power to overcome differences,” Willis wrote on Twitter.

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