For those who haven't played it, Cards Against Humanity is a game of equal-opportunity offensiveness. Each round, a judge puts down a question card -- for example, "What's that smell?" or "What's the gift that keeps on giving?" -- and players throw in, anonymously, answer cards designed to make the judge either bust a gut laughing or possibly storm out of the room in dismay. It is most definitely NSFW.
But there is one card in the deck that went too far even for its creators -- and we found that out courtesy of a 19-year-old in Boston named Jonah Miller.
Jonah, who is transgender, was playing the game one night with friends when they discovered the answer card that says "passable transvestites." Many players of Cards Against Humanity keep a pile of answer cards marked "that's not okay," but Jonah and his friends decided this card really wasn't okay.
Jonah burned the card on June 8, and posted the burning on Instagram and Tumblr with the simple caption "DEATH TO TRANSPHOBIA."
And that would have been that, except that Max Temkin -- co-creator of the game and Chicago-based designer -- picked up Jonah's Tumblr post on his blog late last week.
"I regret writing this card," Temkin wrote. "It was a mean, cheap joke. We took it out of the game a while ago."
Jonah's Tumblr got more than 40,000 notes -- and the teen found himself having to explain why that particular card, in a game that includes such cards as "poorly-timed Holocaust jokes," was more offensive than others.
"CAH cards are a lot of terrible things — racist, sexist, anti-semitic, etc.," Jonah, who is Jewish himself, wrote in a follow-up post Friday. But "laughing at cross-dressers (especially while using an outdated/slur word) is inherently transphobic as well," he added.
Or to look at it another way, take this video Jonah posted to his YouTube account, which succinctly explains his life story so far -- and explains why a boy in his position might be especially sensitive to such slurs.