Editorial: Politically correct billboard ruling just adds to the fun

In an age of hypersensitivity, thank heaven for the Tui billboards. Everyone has seen the big outdoor advertisements with their one-liners followed by the sardonic response, "Yeah right". They can be a refreshing counterpoint to the political correctness prevailing in public forums today. And thank heavens, too, for agencies such as the Advertising Standards Complaints Board when they play their part as humourless police of proper speech. They add richly to the fun.

The board has upheld a complaint against one of the brewery's hoardings which said, "There's nothing wrong with Miriam. Yeah right". Miriam, as not everyone previously would have known, was a "transgendered" individual. She had featured in a British television show in which six young men competed for her affections believing she was simply the woman she appeared to be. Only the audience knew there was, as the show's title put it, "something about Miriam".

Something different, did they mean? Undoubtedly, but they dare not say so unless they want to fall foul of their own branch of the PC police. The Advertising Standards Complaints Board found that the suggestion there was something wrong with Miriam undermined the rights of transgendered people to "normalise their status". Not all of the board agreed. A minority thought the billboard merely irreverent and in keeping with the hard-case character of the beer's promotion. But a majority found the wording seriously offensive to the transgendered and an infringement of their human rights.

If we must take that ruling seriously, it can only be regarded as an offence to free speech and, as usual when speech is policed, it is a futile attempt to deny the plain truth. It is simply a fact that there is something wrong with transgendered people, as they themselves are the first to recognise. They were born into the body of the wrong sex.

It is a predicament that deserves the utmost sympathy and every assistance to correct nature's mistake as far as is anatomically possible. But to pretend that a sex change is nothing out of the ordinary is to invite ridicule. The pretence is as silly in its own way as the insistence in some religious quarters that the gender of birth is divinely ordained and unalterable.

People are born with, or acquire, all sorts of irregularities, some much more devastating than others. Some are so unfortunate that nobody with any sense of taste would derive humour from them. But at the minor end of the spectrum, where the likes of baldness and speech impediments reside, they can still be the subject of humour. And, taken well, the humour can be a kind of social affirmation. After all, if the misfortune was so bad, people would not joke about it.

So, thank heavens for the advertising industry which can restore our sense of proportion in these things. Advertising never takes itself too seriously and it dares sometimes to accept the golden opportunity presented to it by political correctness. But even at its most laddish it lives within today's reasonable constraints. The Tui beer commercials use "Yeah right" lines supplied by people who respond to an invitation on its website. It warns them, though, that the lines "must not be overtly sexual, racist, sexist or rude". Yeah right.

It is in the nature of this humour that almost all of it could give offence to those of a mind to take it. Americans in this country, for example, could take a dim view of one of the most topical hoardings that appeared around Wellington after the failure to find the expected weapon material in Iraq: "US intelligence. Yeah right." Good humour is at a premium these days. But take heart, complaints that fail to kill it should make it stronger. We hope the next billboard proclaims, "There's nothing wrong with the Advertising Standards Complaints Board." Yeah right.