Y'all. It's 2018 and I go to a public university in New York, an hour away from one of the gayest cities in the country, and I still have to write this piece.

Here's what's up: as the Editor in Chief for my community's chapter here at Odyssey, I read and edit about 40 pieces a week. One of the things that make this place so special is that people can truly write whatever they want and create what feeds their soul. As a result, there's a wide range of opinions and viewpoints from my community that I read on a weekly basis. And I love it. But I didn't love what I saw when I logged on last week.

I'm referring to this piece titled, "Coming Out." The piece, fully adorned with a rainbow flag as a cover photo and tags including "LGBTQ," "Queer," "Coming Out," and "Closet," as well as a slug that reads "coming-out-lgbtq," starts off with about three paragraphs that consist of the kind of rhetoric and sentiment often expressed by someone who is coming out as a member of the LGBTQ* community.

The kicker, of course, comes a couple of lines later with the punchline, "I fell in love with a mini-fridge."

The following five paragraphs only see the piece get more off-color and, to be frank, cringe-worthy. The author, in an attempt to be satirical, writes lines like "there are no restrooms for mini-fridges, which is so offensive and disgusting " and "for everyone reading this that will inevitably encounter me, my new pronouns are fridge/fridgee/frideir and anything but those pronouns will not be tolerated."

Here's the thing: I get it.

It's easy to make fun of the current social climate.

It's especially easy to do that from a position of privilege toward a group of individuals that it continues to be socially acceptable to be passively (or actively) discriminatory towards. And who's going to get offended over a piece as silly as this?

I'm not offended. I'm annoyed. I'm tired. I'm mostly bored by the lazy attempts at comedy people make by calling out how awful it is to be "politically correct" or how "sensitive" people are becoming.

I'm not amused by having my identity or the identity of others adopted for satire in a piece that fails to have any sensitivity for the fact that, for some people, coming out can mean the difference between having a roof over their heads, a family to come home to, an education, or even a life.

Attempts at satire aside, coming out is not something that can be appropriated by people who aren't forced to deal with the reality of what it really means, be it by an ally or someone with what they consider a clever idea for their next Odyssey submission.

And to make fun of things that are taken for granted by those lucky enough to be born in the body of their choosing like restrooms and pronouns is just plain ignorant. It's not cool, it's not funny.

Frankly, it's the kind of joke I expect to hear recycled by someone's uncle at Thanksgiving.

Not to be turned into a full-length piece by a college student in 2018.

I know it’s easy to make fun of what you don’t understand and right now it feels revolutionary to be the voice of conservatism on a college campus, but this is real life for some of us. And our identity is not material for your satire.