I'm glad the guy who made the joke wasn't forced to change it, and that he got to take a shot at the phony outrage manufacturers, but neverthless Obsidian's evasions here are just sad. The whole bit about the joke being removed because it wasn't "vetted" is just an insult to every thinking person's intelligence. We all know that there would never have been any reason to remove it if a certain self-loathing blue-haired nutjob with a hair-trigger offense mechanism and an over-active imagination hadn't decided to pretend to see "transphobia" in it and have a Twitter freakout session. And while it's good that the poet was consulted and not coerced, there was no reason to dignify the mewlings of a few fringe outrage merchants with attention in the first place. It simply encourages such people, and makes life harder for other developers by doing so.
I also can't help but notice that none of the people "defending" Obsidian's decision are actually defending it. The only responses anyone has made in this thread to the point that this opens the door to anything that offends some fanatic being changed at their demand is that THIS particular case is "no big deal" because the joke was "bad" anyway, where "bad" turns out to mean nothing more than that it offends them or people they sympathize with, or that they personally didn't find it amusing - which rather makes the point rather than rebuts it (and as if the joke were removed for being "bad" rather that offending a loudmouth looking to be offended anyhow).
And in response to the point that the hypersensitive dude pretending to be "offended" is himself a self-loathing, man-hating rageaholic who spouts off about killing all men (or at least heterosexual Caucasian ones not on hormone replacement therapy) with some frequency, the only response has been that their very real man-hating is not a big deal and no reason for marginalization, whereas the the completely imaginary "transphobia" of the poem is. And again, the only "justification" for this is that the people saying it are fellow travelers with the same nutcase's hypocritical ideology and aren't personally bothered by the inconsistency - which again makes the point rather than rebuts it.
