As I was telling a friend on this site in a chat we were having recently, a colleague at my university surprised me with a question just the other day.
A bit of background. My university was one of the first in the United States to codify, in school rules and statutes, protections for LGBT students, faculty, and staff against discrimination and any sort of hateful behavior, and to establish very stern punishments for violators of those rules. When we did that, a very long time ago, I was the first faculty member to join with the staff member who initiated the campaign.
Last week, an issue came up at school involving a transgender student and a laboratory maintenance worker who called her a hateful name. I sit on the board that investigates these matters, and I went to a meeting to determine what to do. After the meeting, I had lunch with a colleague. He asked me what I had been doing that morning, and I told him.
He looked at me and said, "I've been meaning to ask you this for 10 years. Do you like trannies? Or did you start all that stuff purely out of your commitment to human rights?"
I laughed, and he turned a bit red.
I told him that I would have done it regardless of whether I had an attraction to transsexual women (I corrected him on his use of terms), but that, yes, I happen to have such an attraction.
"Oh," he said.
After lunch, as we were walking back to our offices, he turned to me again and said, "I think I know someone you might like to meet."
He was trying to set me up on a date.
