Gamer Says Microsoft Banned Her for Being Openly Gay
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on February 26th, 2009 5:40 am by HL
Gamer Says Microsoft Banned Her for Being Openly Gay
Anyone who’s ever worn a headset while on Xbox Live, Microsoft’s multiplayer gaming-chatting-shopping nexus, knows that it’s dominated by adolescent bigots. It’s bad enough that Redmond hasn’t cleaned things up, but a gamer named Teresa says she was actually banned from the service for being openly gay and allegedly offending the bigots who were harassing her.
Apparently, this sort of thing has happened before. Kotaku reports that Microsoft defends its actions by saying it objects to all content of a sexual nature, but there’s a big difference between sex and sexual identity—isn’t that obvious?—especially on a service that encourages users to dish about themselves, be it through their profiles, status messages or avatars.
Kotaku:
(Former) Xbox Live gamer Teresa found herself on the receiving end of a ban from the service for a surprising reason. She identified herself as a lesbian in her Live profile.
That resulted in a ban from the service after her Xbox Live peers complained about her profile, according to a letter to the Consumerist.
It’s not like we haven’t heard this before. Microsoft has issued bans to players in the past for expressing their sexual preferences in Gamertags, but this is the first we’ve heard of profile info at the root cause of being kicked off Live.
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