The piling on is so out of proportion. Certainly it’s totally acceptable and natural to not find Chappelle’s jokes funny, or opine that he crosses into taboo territory. He always has. Like Bruce, Carlin, and Pryor, mining the humor from our darkest places is his genius.

The sad irony is that making The Closer a national pariah and cancelling one of the brilliant comic minds of a generation on behalf of trans activism is less likely to prevent harassment and violence and more likely to encourage transphobic response.