Georgina Beyer

Georgina Beyer
Georgina Beyer addresses the International Conference on LGBT Human Rights
List MP for Parliament of New Zealand
In office 17 September 2005 – 14 February 2007
Member of the New Zealand Parliament for Wairarapa
In office 27 November 1999 – 17 September 2005
Preceded by	Wyatt Creech
Succeeded by	John Hayes
Mayor of Carterton District
In office 8 October 1995 – 27 November 1999
Personal details
Born	ca November 1957 Wellington, New Zealand
Political party	Mana Movement (2014-)
Other political affiliations	Labour (1999-2007)

Georgina Beyer (born November 1957) is a New Zealand politician and former Labour Party Member of Parliament. She was the world's first openly transsexual mayor, as well as the world's first openly transsexual Member of Parliament. She is also among a very small number of former sex workers to hold political office.

Beyer was born George Bertrand in 1957 at Wellington Hospital to Jack and Noeline Bertrand (née Tamati) and assigned male at birth. They named her after her maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel George Bertrand, who was second in command in the Māori Battalion. Her parents were living in Hataitai at the time of her birth. She is of European and Māori (Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Raukawa, and Ngāti Porou) descent. Her mother had a second child, Karen, to her first husband in December 1958. Karen was adopted out and few in the family knew that her mother had been pregnant a second time. Beyer was sent to live with her grandparents on their farm in Taranaki during this second pregnancy. Her parents divorced by 1962.

Her mother married again in 1962. Her mother's second husband was Colin Beyer, a recent law school graduate. The couple moved to Upper Hutt. Beyer, now aged four and a half years, returned to live with her mother and stepfather. A brother, Andrew, was born in December 1963. Beyer attended Upper Hutt Primary School and from age seven, after the family moved to the Wellington suburb of Crofton Downs, Ngaio School. With marital problems developing between her mother and her stepfather, Beyer was sent to Wellesley College boarding school, where she tried to commit suicide amid feelings of rejection by her parents. From Form 2, she attended the school as a day pupil, as the hostel had closed. After her parents' marriage failed in 1971, financial constraints meant that a private school was no longer affordable, and Beyer attended Onslow College in Form 3. Beyer then moved with her mother and brother Andrew to Papatoetoe to be near family (her brother Raymond lived there, and her sister Joan lived in Glenfield) and friends, with Beyer attending Papatoetoe High School. Before enrolment, a legal name change by deed poll from 'George Bertrand' to 'George Beyer' meant that the difference in family name did not have to be explained at school. It was also seen as socially advantageous for Beyer to be linked to her successful father. Beyer began acting while at that school and decided to make a career out of it, leaving school at 16 (against her mother's will).