A trans woman called in to the Rush Limbaugh radio show and set the record straight, this is a transcript directly from the Limbaugh website of that conversation.
Transgender Says "->-bleeped-<-" is Offensive
May 29, 2014
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Tina, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Hi. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Thanks for having me on, Rush. I really appreciate it.
RUSH: You're more than welcome. It's great to have you here.
CALLER: When I heard you this morning, you know, one thing that jumped right out at me was when you used the Scalia quote about gay marriage, to say that this is gonna lead to all kinds of other implied bad things, and then you linked ->-bleeped-<- in, you know, getting our rights in with that. You know, that really alerted me that I wanted to talk to you.
RUSH: Now, wait. No, no, wait, I was reading from TIME Magazine.
CALLER: Oh.
RUSH: "Nearly a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, another social movement is poised to challenge deeply held cultural beliefs." It's a whole story in TIME Magazine called "The Transgender Tipping Point," and it is they who discuss the Scalia Supreme Court ruling and what he meant, and they say he was right. Now doors are wide open.
CALLER: Well, I'm really glad to hear that you are not, you know, saying that transgender rights is a bad thing that conservatives should oppose.
RUSH: Oh, no, I've been for trannies for a long time. I don't know if you've heard otherwise.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, actually I did hear you using that term, and a lot of us do find that to be rather offensive, because of the way it's been historically used.
RUSH: Oh, I didn't know that. ->-bleeped-<- is offensive?
CALLER: Yeah. It's kind of an argument, and RuPaul has taken a position.
RUSH: I heard Alec Baldwin use the term, you know, when he was in trouble because he has made a lot of homophobic comments.
CALLER: Right. Yeah.
RUSH: He wrote this big apologia that ran in one of the New York area publications. He used the term "->-bleeped-<-" as though it were hip and an inside baseball term that made him cool with the transgender community.
CALLER: Yeah. You know that is kind of the minority viewpoint on it, is that we're reclaiming that word like black people use the N-word.
RUSH: Okay, so you --
CALLER: But a lot of us are genuinely fighting for our rights. We hear "->-bleeped-<-" as a joke on Two and a Half Men, and we hear "->-bleeped-<-" as a joke, as a derisive term all over the place.
RUSH: Oh.
CALLER: And so we don't really appreciate it. We would rather be called trans or transpeople or transmen or transwomen for sure.
RUSH: All right. I didn't know. I thought it was cool and hip. You're telling me it's like the N-word, except do you all use it amongst yourselves?
CALLER: In certain context. Like I will use it when I'm talking about the way somebody else sees me.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I'll say something like, "They don't want a ->-bleeped-<- working there."
RUSH: Well, how do people know you're a ->-bleeped-<-?
CALLER: Well, a lot of them don't, and that certainly leads to part of the problem. You know, people have this fear that they're gonna get attracted to somebody who turns out to be a ->-bleeped-<-. And one of the things about being transgender is that whatever somebody's sexual preference is, you're not it. You know, gay men don't want anything to do with effeminate types. And straight men don't want to have anything to do with people that have got, you know, the wrong plumbing or wrong history. And, you know, lesbian women are interested in certain things that are just never gonna be the same no matter how much surgery you have.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: So that definitely is a problem. People often think that I'm going around trying to trick people, and so I will often, if I'm going to a bar --
