The 2013 Eurogamer Expo kicked off this weekend with an incredibly rocky start, including public sexism aimed at a journalist who happens to be transgender.

Eurogamer Expo 2013 started over the weekend with an Xbox One conference from Microsoft. British comedian Fraser Millward, who was hired as an Xbox One presenter, ridiculed Laura Dale of IndieHaven during the show, referring to her as a man, “it”, “thing” and “this one”; while Dale was on stage, the presenter insisted that they needed “a woman on stage, any woman here”. The incident was revealed to non-attendees through Dale’s Twitter account:

Millward has since issued a statement to Microsoft and Eurogamer, claiming the incident was blown out of proportion:

“Staff apologized to her, but every single part of the first sentence of that tweet is made up. We called for more women so as to balance things up as there were mostly male gamers on stage, yes. There are ways of complaining in a mature way, but this is inflammatory and slanderous. 350 witnesses saw that this did not happen and that I didn’t say those things. I would like to speak to her face to face to sort this out, but she’s taken to Twitter and now I’m getting hundreds of tweets per minute…I referred to her as ‘this person’, at which point some of the crowd laughed. I should have diffused that situation, but I think that is what’s caused this to happen. I did not refer to the woman as ‘thing’ or ‘it’ at any point.”

Laura Dale is a founding member of IndieHaven and a contributing writer for Destructoid. With the above incident, and a supposed “twerking” contest for t-shirts, the Eurogamer Expo doesn’t seem to have a very tasteful presence in the industry this year.

Sources: Kotaku, Twitter, Facebook, PureXbox
Image courtesy of Microsoft