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Time once more for Make It Stop, in which we count down the one thing this week that must stop.

1. Overstepping the bounds of your activism. I was watching The Colbert Report the other night and Stephen’s guest was Janet Mock, the trans* activist who is now famous for thoroughly owning Piers Morgan on Twitter, and Lord knows I side with anyone who can’t stand Piers Morgan. Anyway, Mock was discussing ways of being more sensitive to the trans* community, and one of her suggestions was to not assign a gender to your child at birth, despite the presence of male or female sex organs. The idea was that you could refer to your kid as “they” until they pick a gender classification for themselves (perhaps from one of the fifty suggested gender classifications on Facebook). And while Colbert always remains in character while challenging his guests, I think there was more than a bit of the real Stephen cocking an eyebrow at this idea.

I’m gonna tread lightly here, since both Morgan and the folks at Grantland have recently experienced what it’s like to have the (well-deserved) thunder brought down on you when you anger the trans* community—something that’s pretty easy to do, though no less unforgivable, when you’re an ignorant, enfranchised hetero white dude like, say, me. Many trans* people have been through a lot of shit, and are understandably defensive toward a cruel world that often regards them as less than human. I’m like a lot of people in that I grew up with representations of trans* people mostly as film punch lines, and am now much more sensitive and hopeful that they can have basic human rights. But I think you can overreach in your efforts to build tolerance, and suggesting people disregard their children’s birth gender from the outset is probably a bit too much.

I have two sons and a daughter and I don’t believe I’m some kind of asshole gender tyrant for referring to them that way. If they decide later on that they would like to be more gender-fluid, I’m gonna be 100 percent supportive and accepting, like any good 21st-century parent. And I don’t think calling my son a “boy” up until that point will destroy his life forever—especially when, statistically, it’s overwhelmingly likely that my kid will simply stick with his birth gender and go from there.