The world’s first openly transgender member of Parliament, Georgina Beyer, passed away on Monday at the age of 65. She was a pioneering New Zealand politician who broke barriers and inspired many.
Her friends said she left this world peacefully in hospice care, without disclosing the cause of her death. Beyer had battled with kidney failure and received a kidney transplant in 2017.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said he was not close to Beyer personally, but he recognized her legacy and influence on the country and its parliament.
“I certainly think that Georgina has blazed a trail that has made it much easier for others to follow,” Hipkins said.
Her longtime friend Malcolm Vaughan said Monday he was still grieving for Beyer, who he had known for decades, and was not ready to speak about her life. He and his husband Scott Kennedy issued a statement instead.
“Georgie was surrounded by her nearest and dearest 24/7 over the past week, she accepted what was happening, was cracking jokes and had a twinkle in her eye, right until the final moment,” they wrote.
They said she was a national treasure, or “taonga” in Indigenous Māori.
Farewell Georgie, your love, compassion and all that you have done for the rainbow and many other communities will live on for ever,” they wrote.
Beyer, who was Māori, worked as a sex worker and nightclub performer before turning to politics. In 1995 she was elected mayor of the small North Island town of Carterton. Four years later, she won national office for the liberal Labour Party and remained a lawmaker until 2007.
She helped pass the landmark 2003 Prostitution Reform Act, which decriminalized sex work.
She spoke to lawmakers with courage and honesty, sharing how the new law could have prevented her from being forced into the sex industry at the age of 16, and how sex workers suffered from violence and abuse without being able to seek justice from the police.
“I think of all the people I have known in that area who have suffered because of the hypocrisy of our society, which, on the one hand, can accept prostitution, while, on the other hand, wants to push it under the carpet and keep it in the twilight world that it exists in,” 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 from both sides of the aisle mourned her death Monday. Nicola Willis, the deputy leader of the conservative National Party, remembered Beyer as brave and gracious.
“We came from different political sides but she had the power to breach the divide,” Willis wrote on Twitter.