Following criticism over insensitive comments about Facebook's new gender options, Fox News host Clayton Morris gave a heartfelt apology to the intersex community, stating that he regretted his “stupid” remarks.

During the February 14 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Clayton Morris joined a number of his Fox News colleagues in mocking Facebook's decision to offer its users a variety of new terms to identify their gender, including “transgender” and “cisgender.”

Following a brief mention of Facebook's announcement, Morris joked that he had changed his gender identification to "intersex," describing people who are born with a physical anatomy that does not appear to fit typical definitions of male or female:

Those comments triggered a wave of criticism, including an open letter from the intersex group Inter/Act which expressed the group's frustration with feeling “disregarded as a butt of a joke.”

During the March 1 edition of Fox & Friends Saturday, Morris and his fellow co-hosts Anna Kooiman and Mike Jerrick discussed a high school considering making all of its graduation gowns one color in order to be inclusive of all students. Though the segment was framed by a chyron that asked “Over-Sensitive Society?”, Morris quickly shifted gears to make an impassioned plea for understanding of transgender and intersex people (emphasis added):

MORRIS: There are millions of Americans and children who are born with the sexual organs who are not there or are not fully developed and therefore don't define themselves by a particular gender. I mean, that's a fact. It's not as black and white as we would like to make it. Just pick whatever color gown you want. Imagine being a parent and your daughter is born a specific way where her sexual organs are not developed. Then as a parent you have to be sensitive to the fact that your daughter doesn't identify with a particular gender.

KOOIMAN: And we've done news stories too about bathrooms and some schools, middle schools and high schools, considering having unisex bathrooms, so that these people who fit into this category won't have to pick the boys or the girls. But then you think about these young teenagers who are going through puberty, if you're a mom or a dad, do you want your daughter in the bathroom with a boy, potentially?

JERRICK: My goodness, are we overthinking this? It's just the color of a garment.

[...]

MORRIS: Just put yourself in the shoes of those children, though, who have to deal with that. Look, I made a pretty ignorant statement a few weeks ago, we were talking about the Facebook story where they added the bunch of different gender-identifying things. And I made sort of an offhanded comment and I regretted it later because now, 'Wait a second. There are people who are actually dealing with this and I'm an idiot for saying something stupid like that.' So before you open your mouth, just think about it a little bit.

Morris' comments are extremely uncharacteristic for Fox News, which has never missed an opportunity to mock and demean people with different gender identities. Morris demonstrated a degree of empathy and willingness to accept criticism rarely seen on his network. He deserves to be commended, and his colleagues who have yet to apologize could do a lot of good by following his lead.