NEW ZEALAND PRESS ASSOCIATION
Wednesday, June 25, 2003



Transexual MP makes last minute appeal to Parliament

New Zealand Press Association: Wellington, June 25 NZPA - A desperate appeal to Parliament from transsexual MP Georgina Beyer may have helped swing just enough support behind the Prostitution Reform Bill for it to succeed.

The former prostitute said if it had been law when she was 16 and 17, she might have been spared the six years she spent in the sex industry.

"I support this bill for all the prostitutes I have ever known who died before the age of 20 because of the inhumanity and hypocrisy of a society that would not allow them, or give them the chance, to redeem whatever circumstances made them arrive in that industry," she said.

Her voice breaking, she spoke of her life on the streets.

"This bill provides people like me, at that time, with some form of redress, for the brutalisation that may happen in a situation when you're with a client and you have a knife pulled on you.

"It would have been nice to know that instead of having to deal out justice myself afterwards, I may have been able to approach the police and say 'I was raped. Yes, I'm a prostitute and it was not right.'"

She asked MPs to think of all the suffering of all the people she had known because of society's hypocrisy.

"This is about accepting what occurs, it's about accepting that the people who work in this industry deserve some human rights," she said.

"I plead, for heaven's sake, think of the people I have spoken of, who may be spared some of the hideous ways society treats prostitutes."