Transgender journalist humiliated at Xbone event

[The Sceneman]

SMH M$, that about wraps it up for Xbone

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/games/9230421/Transgender-journalist-humiliated-at-Xbox-event

spoiler (click to show/hide)

via Kotaku

[close]

[Sho Nuff]

Is there video of this

[The Sceneman]

there needs to be omg.

Does any remember who hired Jamie Kennedy as entertainment at an expo? Who then took the piss out of attendees for being nerds? Was it EA, Microsoft, Ubi, or Activision? It was one of the big guys iirc

[benjipwns]

Does any remember who hired Jamie Kennedy as entertainment at an expo? Who then took the piss out of attendees for being nerds? Was it EA, Microsoft, Ubi, or Activision? It was one of the big guys iirc

[benjipwns]

Was she dressed like this on stage?

Tex ‏@SumoSushiTubes 8h
@LaurakBuzz I was there when that "comedian" humiliated you. I could have broken his legs for what he said. Hoping you'll feel better soon.

[benjipwns]

are you dressed like donald duck right now?

No, I never wear a shirt on The Bore.

[The Sceneman]

why is humiliated in scare quotes

like, whether you think it was right or wrong, there's no denying the journalist felt humiliated

I was using the quote marks as thats the word the article used, and was a direct quote from the headline. Xbone wasnt. I wasnt trying to imply anything really. I have removed them from op

[headwalk]

i wasted fifteen minutes of my life reading through the GAF thread on this. my conclusion is that it's all very dumb, very messy and could've been solved with a thirty second conversation rather than a military campaign on twitter.

[hampster]

Seems like it all worked out in the end. The girl dressed as rainbow dash got embarrassed on stage, the dumb comedian got embarrassed online, kotaku got some hits and we all learned a valuable lesson about airing grievances online and to not post your phone number on twitter

[benjipwns]

Without Kotaku she might have received a personal apology from him or at least not gotten all the hateful tweets. But the wannabe social/cultural critics at Kotaku/etc. never let a non-crisis go to waste. So now we've got him making a formal apology statement, her accepting it and moving on, and everyone else continuing to fight and argue and trying to out outrage each other until our next "crisis" pops up. Everybody wins.

EDIT: Beaten.

[radioheadrule83]

i wasted fifteen minutes of my life reading through the GAF thread on this. my conclusion is that it's all very dumb, very messy and could've been solved with a thirty second conversation rather than a military campaign on twitter.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=687829&page=36

Yep. Pretty much.

I was at the event on the day in question, and had it been a real public shaming I think you would have heard people on the show floor talking about it... the guy was up on stage all day, so I think onlookers would have disrupted his routine if he'd been truly abrasive or offensive. I didn't really read anything about it until I got home. It's hard to know for sure, but my gut tells me the guy said something innocently that offended Laura, she couldn't get near anyone to complain, so neither party talked before it became a twitter shit-storm and kotaku started reporting on it. Which I'm not sure has helped anyone really. Everybody involved got some shit off random idiots on Twatter because of it.

[benjipwns]

Based on the one story it sounded like they were looking for a girl to come up on stage, and when she got up there the comedian was doing stuff like "No, really, any girls? We don't have any girls?" type of shtick and basically saying shit like that and "he/it" throughout. If it's like most comedians "hosting" events you spend all day making fun of people for random things and this was probably just a bad choice of what to make fun of.

[benjipwns]

if anything, the comments it's generated has been a useful reminder of how fucking awful gamers are, so that's good i guess

Are you saying there needs to be a neutral ground where facts and evidence, presented within the confines of civil, inclusive discourse, prevail through careful moderation?

[headwalk]

if anything, the comments it's generated has been a useful reminder of how fucking awful gamers are, so that's good i guess

Are you saying there needs to be a neutral ground where facts and evidence, presented within the confines of civil, inclusive discourse, prevail through careful moderation?

wait, wait, are you saying that with some issues there's a need for more than 140 characters?

[Damian79]

Based on the one story it sounded like they were looking for a girl to come up on stage, and when she got up there the comedian was doing stuff like "No, really, any girls? We don't have any girls?" type of shtick and basically saying shit like that and "he/it" throughout. If it's like most comedians "hosting" events you spend all day making fun of people for random things and this was probably just a bad choice of what to make fun of.

Apparently he didnt say he/it, but rather "this person" which apparently got the laugh.  But would you blame him if he called her a he?  I cant tell if she was meant to be a man or a woman with that getup, even men in drag look more like women than she did there.

edit:  She looks like part brony(multi coloured hair), furry(dog ears), female(boobs), and maybe male if you think her face has nothing feminine about it.  It looks like she was there to get the guy to make the "it" comment, failed and said he made the it comment anyway.  Seems manufactured.

[etiolate]

A whole big pickle jar of dumb, including a "journalist" who doesn't understand the very viral nature of twitter.

[Damian79]

No i didnt, that changes everything.  Do we have a pic of her at the time?

[benjipwns]

you *know* she wasn't dressed like her twitter picture at the time, right?  she's not a fucking cartoon character.

Yeah, this is my bad, it was attached to a couple articles and I thought it was a shot from the Expo. If she was dressed like that it certainly makes the jokes more understandable and innocent.

It's still somewhat manufactured by Kotaku and others. She tried to talk to him but they probably wouldn't let anyone see the "talent", so she vents a little on twitter, later he apologizes and she moves on. Everybody else gets to keep on going with their preexisting agendas though.

[Damian79]

either way, "she looks rather mannish" didn't work in austin powers, so it shouldn't work here.

I dunno, i thought it got a laugh in Austin Powers in a cringe worthy manner.

That kind of joke is better taken more to the extreme though imo.  Like:

I gave my mother in law a present, it was a grave plot at the local grave yard.  Later she got angry at me for not getting her presents for her birthdays and Christmas.  And I said "you arent using the one i gave you why would i give you more presents?".

Perhaps if he went further than saying "this person" he would have gotten more of a laugh and she woudlnt have cared?  I dunno how comedians work these days.

[Damian79]

I see.  So they joke about that stuff to get a rise out of people?  Makes sense.  Kind of like no such thing as bad marketing or whatever.

[Cerveza mas fina]

This is what stand up comedians do, most of them, unless they are really good.

I know people that won't watch stand up because of this cheap form of humour.

[radioheadrule83]

no, we don't, but apparently radiohead was there, so maybe he can fill us in.

To be honest, I was too interested in queuing for games to pay too much attention to Microsoft's sideshow, and while I did pass it quite a bit (it was near to Sony, FIFA, NintendoLife's streetpass zone etc) - all I saw them doing was demoing things like Kinect Sports Rivals and other big games, with said host. I definitely didn't see the incident in question. It could be exactly as she says, and have been really awful - all I meant earlier is that, in that case, I'm surprised I didn't hear about it until I got home later that night. That might just be British conservatism for you though, people too uncomfortable to talk or gossip about it.

[benjipwns]

I see.  So they joke about that stuff to get a rise out of people?  Makes sense.  Kind of like no such thing as bad marketing or whatever.

Basically at a lot of these events the comedian/host is up there for hours and just improvs based on who is there and what happens. For a good number of comedians their material or personality is based around ragging on people, so they're just spending hours making fun of whoever comes up.

Mr. Caffeine is one of the guys who specializes in doing these type of corporate events so he probably has a more appropriate "set" compared to somebody somebody saw in a club and liked or their brother knew a guy who knew a guy and hired or whatever. No idea what "type" of comedian this guy is though. Could be a bad moment or series of jokes or could be common for him.

[chronovore]

This was a comedian who makes fun of people normally? And the transgendered woman, brave though she might have been, put herself in a situation where she would be publicly confronted by a comedian, was then twitter-righteous that her delicate and unique snowflake nature wasn't respected?

...Sure would like to see actual footage of what is causing all this outrage.

[Steve Contra]

I think there are three takeaways from this:  videogame fans are still fucking horrible, comedians should always ask themselves "could I get away with this joke if the target was black?", and that there is a contigent of people who think that Kotaku has some insidious agenda outside of generating hits.

[Rahxephon91]

Dude Kotaku is the number 1 pusher of the Male-Feminist liberal gaming media agenda. Don't you know!

[Phoenix Dark]

Why attack her gender when there's a perfectly valid reason to clown her: being an adult brony.

[Shaka Khan]

This was a comedian who makes fun of people normally? And the transgendered woman, brave though she might have been, put herself in a situation where she would be publicly confronted by a comedian, was then twitter-righteous that her delicate and unique snowflake nature wasn't respected?

...Sure would like to see actual footage of what is causing all this outrage.

VICTIM BLAMING

[Rahxephon91]

You know it's really simple, PR events are the place to be as PC as possible so that you avoid anything like this.

So really while I don't have any strong opinions on transgender people the comedian seems in the wrong purly on a professional basis. This wasn't a comedy club, this was a PR event.