SNL Fake Anchor Colin Jost Taken to Twitter Woodshed for Tinder-Transgender Joke

November 25th, 2016 9:41 PM

Last weekend, MRC’s Brent Baker noted "one good anti-liberal joke" on a mostly Trump-trashing episode of Saturday Night Live. Weekend Update co-host Colin Joke’s fake news included this:  “The dating app Tinder announced a new feature this week, which gives users 37 different gender identity options. It’s called, ‘Why Democrats lost the election.’”

Naturally, the libertine Left had a fit about this joke. It became a Twitter Moment, where the outrage was packaged and presented, most repeatedly by a woman named Sam Escobar:

-- Dear @ColinJost and @nbcsnl: thank you so much for supporting the erasure of non-cis people. Thanks for actively contributing to oppression.

-- And before you say its "just a joke," here are 2 reminders: 1) jokes like these normalize oppression 2) SNL doesn't know how to write jokes.

-- Trans & gender nonconforming people are more likely to be harassed, attacked, abused, discriminated against — but yeah. LOL DEMS! @SNLUpdate

Emma Phipps chipped in: “@ColinJost i don't think, as a professional comedian, it can possibly escape you how this joke is punching way way down.”

Twitter also highlighted criticism from the transgender/queer punk band Power Bottom, without explaining they advocate scrubbing gender divisions in the bathrooms:

Yo @ColinJost, do you not get this kind hatred is why trump won the election? Shame. Shame shame shame.

@PWRBTTMBAND so you think 100 percent of Trump voters were hatred and 0 percent had any other rationale?

@ColinJost listen, I love SNL and I think you're great. Please don't trivialize our right to love. We are all so scared

@PWRBTTMBAND in no way am I trying to. I'm on your side a hundred percent. Only trying to learn from this defeat and get stronger.

@PWRBTTMBAND It's politics. A lot of politics is messaging and getting America on board. I want to examine how we failed at that goal.

@PWRBTTMBAND I worry about not doing any self-examination and making the same mistake again.

@ColinJost this isn't Lenny Bruce v McCarthyism: this is us afraid for our lives. Just let us have fucking tinder. Trump isn't our fault.

The Advocate magazine blamed Jost for turning to the New York Times to underline his point:

Some bristled at blame being placed on transgender and gender non-binary people for Donald Trump winning the Electoral College. The minor Twitter reaction to the joke would have inevitably died down had Jost not responded to the criticism. The comedian argued that "identity politics" contributed to the results of November 8 and Tweeted a link to a reductive New York Times op-ed that made the same claim.