Let's plumb the depths!

UIKEYINPUTDOWNARROWListen, you may have caught a news story about a couple of radio hosts who went on an eye-searingly heinous tirade against the transgender community. No? Here's the Slate article about it. There's a link there to the clip, but if you enjoy clinging to your last shred of faith in the human race, you might want to pass.

If you do listen to the clip, please do so while looking at this adorable photo of a kitten and a puppy.
It will help you maintain your tenuous grasp on sanity as you plumb the depths of morning radio awfulness.

Above: Rochester in winter. That urge
you feel? That's the urge to murder.
Don't worry, it passes. Usually. 

Anyway, those radio hosts? They're from my hometown. Yeah. I know, right? Rochester, as I may have mentioned before is a medium-smallish city in Upstate New York. It's famous, well to people who live there anyway, for serial killers (four of them!), long, sunless winters (which might explain all the murder) and a grocery store chain so awesome that Alec Baldwin does commercials for them. Well now it's also known for being that place where local radio hosts Kimberly and Beck made fun of transgender people for 12 full minutes.

Here you go, Kim. Just so you know, looking
that up took like two seconds. Not telling
you how to do your job, but for real.

What's their beef with transgender people? Here, I'll let recently canned host Kimberly of The Breakfast Buzz explain:

"Hey, the uh City of Rochester, you should, uh be feeling good about this, using your tax dollars, to extend transition-related health care coverage to its employees who are transgendered and gender non-conforming. What does that mean?"

-Kimberly, opening her mouth 

and removing all doubt

Take that, abstract
concept of irony!

Of course not knowing what the terms transgender and gender non-conforming mean doesn't stop the two from spending the rest of the segment blindly and viciously attacking people for struggling with that thing they don't understand. They pick on a local transgender teen who plays on the girl's softball team, they dismiss the medical value of reassignment as a treatment for gender dysphoria and then, as if to wave an ignorant middle finger in the face of irony itself, Kimberly says this:

"The uh services that will be paid for under the new coverage: gender reassignment surgery, psychological counseling because you're probably a nut-job to begin with."

-Doctor Kimberly, radio host and expert on things

Pictured: Cancer. Kimberly and
Beck are up there with cancer.

Among transgender and gender non-conforming people, 41% have attempted suicide at some point. 41 goddamn percent. I'd like to think that if Kimberly and Beck knew that the climate of unrelenting ignorance and hostility they help to create is a huge part of why this health plan now covers psychological counseling, they wouldn't have spent so much time complaining about their tax dollars and picking on transgender teens. I'd like to think that. Anyway, congratulations guys, you are a social ill.

Kimberly and Beck's bosses, sympathizing with seeing their hard-earned tax-dollars go towards such frivolous expenses as healthcare for city employees, have solved the problem by firing their collective asses. No insincere apologies or fumbled attempts to walk back what they said, just indefinitely suspended. So thanks Entercom Media for explaining to everyone that Rochester doesn't tolerate shit like this.

Rochester does however tolerate shit like this, but I'm not sure you can fire snow.