Punknews would like to create some space on the site to apologize for one of our April Fool's stories and create a space to converse about transphobia and privilege. Today we wrote a fake story about Latterman as part of our April Fool's coverage. While we could explain the intent, we could also reiterate the famous line, "The path to hell is paved with good intentions."

The post was written in a place of privilege. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of privilege, here's a great illustration explaining it.

When stories are posted, they're posted as-is. What is important to remember is the time and place of posting a story because context can affect the message of the story. We want to acknowledge that the Trans community and allies are working harder than normal lately in order to keep our communities safe and inclusive for all identities. For this, we apologize.

This story was written within the context of privilege from a cis-male identified staffer and edited by other folk who operate within the gender binary. This being said, no one looked for the unintended meaning this might create which in turn caused pain. We want to apologize, but also thank the commenters and the people who have reached out to us for challenging our behavior and our policies.

The volunteers that make Punknews agreed that we don't want to contribute negativity to our community. We have chosen to take the story down, but we also recognize it has facilitated a lot of necessary dialog, and we invite you to continue that dialog here. Some of it is very ugly, and we understand why you might want to attack us and we'd like to keep a space for frustrations or anger to be vented.