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Staff Reports

One Anchorage Calls Anti-Prop 5 Ad "offensive, stigmatizing and distorted" Demands Its Removal

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA -- Trevor Storrs, a spokesman for the One Anchorage campaign says the organisation is demanding that the opposition pull an insulting anti-transgender commercial.

In the ad, a cartoon "transvestite" who wants to work at a day care is drawn as a man with a jutting jaw and body hair, wearing a short pink dress, red high heels and lipstick. If Prop. 5 passes, the narrator of the ad says, "it will be illegal for Carol to refuse a job to a transvestite who wants to work with toddlers."

That imagery is an "offensive, stigmatizing and distorted" representation of a transgender person, said Storrs. Transgender people are twice as likely as the general population to be assaulted, he said, and the imagery in the ad "is definitely fanning the flames of fear that can lead to hate and violence."

The daily Anchorage newspaper, the News Tribune reported that Jim Minnery, a leader of the Protect Your Rights -- Vote No On Prop. 5 campaign, which produced the commercial, said the ad points out that because "transgender" isn't defined in the ordinance, a scenario like the one portrayed in the commercial could play out under the law.

"I think it's a shocking flaw in Prop. 5 and shows profound disrespect to voters that the authors didn't feel it was important to provide a definition of transgender identity," Minnery said. 

He defended his group's free speech rights and said the cartoon caricature was meant to grab attention. "You kind of have to cut to the chase; you have 30 seconds," he said. 

Since the law doesn't define transgender, why couldn't it include a cross-dressing man, Minnery asked. His group's concern, he said, is that without a clear definition of transgender, someone who considers himself to be a different gender could require a business to accommodate him. 

In addition to the threat to religious freedom he says is posed by the proposed ordinance, it "creates a whole set of legal issues for the municipality."

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