I don't think anyone is arguing that bringing up the T in LGBT isn't cogent. I'm just suggesting that casually bringing up people going through radical surgery as a proxy for hipsters when constructing a joke about shallow Mac users is a bit of a weird stretch.

I appreciate your apology Mike.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but I don't think it's always so simple for people to choose whether or not they will be hurt by statements others make.

As I said, I don't think you intended any malice. Just in the future please consider that reassignment surgery isn't a frivolous lark.

Anyway that entire thread has made me interested in what a Yggy actually is so I'm off for some snooping.

I'm not sure if you noticed that your "Just in the future" comment is offending and patronizing. Perhaps much more so than Mike's transgender or whatever comment mostly due to context and intent.

Intent carries a lot of weight, and it seems like Mike made his position fairly clear. Nobody is asking you to apologize for smearing Mike, but I believe you made a mistake. If you feel remotely the same way, it's honorable to understand this and carry on.

Really simply put, my concern about Moffat's joke was this: I thought it was a cheap shot that traded on some cruel stereotype about the LGBT community, where a joke about hipsters would have made the point. Somehow LGBT folk got pulled into the punchline for no apparent reason. If it had been other groups of people that were swapped into the joke, I'm sure more people would have just thought it was a plain weird thing to say.

From everything I've read and heard from Mike, he certainly doesn't seem to target just one group for poking fun at. If anything audiophile stereotypes tend to be the subjects of most of his joking around. I'm assuming that, despite yourself being an audiophile, you were OK with those jokes, or casually ignored them. Unless this is the first thing you've read from Mike I imagine that you must have run across mockery of audiophiles and other random groups.

I'm not saying that the LGBT community are precious flowers. I wouldn't for a second insist that you can't make jokes about sex changes or abortion or the Holocaust or any other topic, and I'm not declaring myself the sole arbiter of what makes for good satire. But you have to be aware that there is a gravity when talking about certain topics, and that gravity sort of demands that you should think carefully about who and what you are satirising before reaching for a punchline.

A sex change operation is not a frivolous thing. It's a multi year process that involves hormones and therapy, and its a decision that often comes after a great deal of anxiety and trauma. I'm not sure how it works outside of Australia, but here Doctors often require you to live as your self-identified gender for up to a year before they'll even prescribe you hormones. Some people can't imagine living like the opposite gender when they don't look anything like it, so instead they self-medicate and risk liver damage just so they don't have to go through a humiliating Doctor's gauntlet.

Who the hell said that sexual reassignment was a frivolous thing? No one here is under the impression that it isn't a life changing ordeal. Even graver matters of life and death are routinely made fun of, but sexual reassignment surgery holds a special place? Grow up. I've had the privilege of having friends who have gone through any number of conditions, including gender dysphoria which led to such surgery, and none of them were begging white knights like you to protect them from some stranger's jokes they might accidentally run across on some forum. They have more important things to worry about.

Still, thank you for signing up for an account and taking the time to discuss your objections directly with Mike.

Apologies to everyone in the thread when (not if) I come across as an annoyingly selfrighteous asshat

I think you've been pretty cool, lachlan. Don't worry. As you can see, there are other self-righteous asshats here. They seem pretty content in that mode, so don't bend over backwards.

Thank you for pulling me up on that.
Apologies to everyone in the thread when (not if) I come across as an annoyingly self righteous asshat. All I'd like is for people to think about how painful it might be to just fundamentally not feel right in your own skin, and carry that empathy with them if they're going to make jokes about it. I suspect it would make for more creative and interesting jokes anyway.

I have a better understanding where you are coming from, the internal turmoil you must deal with, and your sensitivity to this matter. However, you have to understand you are not the center of the universe. All other human beings have their own fucking problems. They have marital problems, they have problems dealing with dying parents who are losing their minds, pulling the plug on parents who are vegetables, taking care of retarded ahem "autistic" kids, paying the mortgage, being evicted, getting killed by Tesla driving douchebags, being skullfucked by bad managers in big companies, trying to avoid having their guts and brains splatted on a wall in Iraq, etc. (this small list of real problems based on real-life friends or friends of friends in my local community - they are not hypothetical.)

You are going to be one helluva mess if you let these small things get to you. Not worth it. Not worth the drama. Learn to deescalate. Based on what you have been saying, the Internet is the last place you should be. You should take up surfing or meditation.

Finally, skillful means goes a long way. Muppetface's ":/" response was far more poignant and much more effective than any of your methods.

Now how should I understand that.

As there being a sizable comorbidity between autism and mental retardation.