XBOX Live Decides Your Surname Is Offensive Because It Contains The Letters "G-A-Y"

Reader Richard would like to use his full name as his gamer tag, but XBOX has decided that “Gaywood” is offensive. Here’s his letter:

After that fuss t’other day when Xbox Live banned the gamertag TheGayerGamer, I wondered if this would happen; lo and behold it has. They’ve banned my gamertag too. What makes this funny is that my old tag is just my name — Gaywood is my surname, which they could easily verify from my Live profile etc. I can’t decide if I’m amused or annoyed by this.

Thought you might like to note this in your coverage of the story. I’d suspect anyone with the string “gay” in their name is going to get a free new Gamertag soon. I haven’t played much on public live servers of late, so I suspect this is more likely to be down to an automated script trawling the database rather than individual tags that have been complained about. So, where does this end? What if my home address is in Scunthorpe?

Our sister site Kotaku obtained Mr. Gaywood’s driver’s license, which is more than Microsoft bothered to do:

PREVIOUSLY: “Gay” Player Name Banned By Xbox Live

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