Jennifer Pritzker is a retired U.S. Army colonel and a businesswoman. She is also thought to be the only openly transgender billionaire in the world.

The Pritzker family founded the Hyatt hotel chain and, according to Forbes magazine, is one of the 400 wealthiest broods in America. Forbes estimates that Pritzker alone is worth $1.76 billion.

But if money doesn’t buy happiness, it also doesn’t buy tolerance. This is why Pritzker, who enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1974, didn’t come out publicly as transgender until 2013.

“If you wanted to stay in the army you simply didn’t mention it (being transgender) and you didn’t make it known to your chain of command or anyone else,” Pritzker told me earlier this week by phone; she was in Toronto to receive an award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto for her contributions to the field of sexual diversity education.

“It was hard to know whether you had a penchant for wearing the clothing of the opposite gender, or whether it went much deeper. You couldn’t go in to see your company first sergeant, and say, ‘Hey Top, I need to fill out a DA-31 so I can leave and try living as a woman for a couple of weeks.”

Fortunately, Pritzker says, a lot has changed since 1974. Not enough, but a lot.

Determined to help foster that change, the military veteran and philanthropist recently donated $2 million to the University of Victoria to establish a chair of transgender studies at the school — the first of its kind in the world.

“Knowledge dispels fear,” she says (a motto she picked up from the British Royal Air Force.) “It helps people dispel fear of the unknown, of (for instance) jumping out of an airplane in flight.”

If you can train people to do something as inherently terrifying as jumping out of airplanes, Pritzker believes, it’s reasonable to assume that you can also convince prejudiced lawmakers and American citizens to accept their transgender peers.

That task, however, appears suddenly more daunting, due to recent political developments in Pritzker’s home and native land.

Parts of the U.S. seem to be engaged in a convulsion of perverse and tiny-minded discrimination against transgender Americans.

North Carolina recently passed HB2, a law effectively separating public bathrooms and locker rooms not merely by sex but by anatomy: citizens of North Carolina are now prohibited from using public restrooms that do not align with the gender on their birth certificates.

Another similar law — or “bathroom bill” as such decrees are now dubbed — was proposed in South Carolina.

Meanwhile, a senator in Michigan recently threw his support behind legislation that would require transgender elementary and high school students to obtain written consent from a parent or guardian in order to use the bathroom of their choice.

“I’d be curious to see any documented cases of anyone transgendered who entered a bathroom for voyeuristic activities,” says Pritzker.

But concentrating on this depressing fog of bigotry against transgender Americans can cloud the brighter response, the enormous and unprecedented backlash provoked by the bathroom laws.

This has come not just from grassroots activists, but from celebrity performers such as Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr who have refused to play shows in North Carolina, and from several major corporations.

Discrimination in North Carolina isn’t simply ruffling liberal feathers, it is costing the state money — and real jobs. Just this month PayPal announced in an official statement on its website that in protest of the discriminatory law it will cease plans to open a new global operations centre in Charlotte, N.C. — a business venture that would have brought the state more than 400 new jobs.

“This decision,” wrote Dan Schulman, the company’s president and CEO, “reflects PayPal’s deepest values and our strong belief that every person has the right to be treated equally, and with dignity and respect.”

Corporate cheerleading for a social cause can often seem cynical and exploitative (how many times do I need to be reminded that Dove thinks I’m beautiful?), but it’s also more than merely financially powerful when so many businesses rise to the occasion.

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It indicates that the status quo is moving one way (toward acceptance, however slowly) and small-minded policy-makers are moving another way. They are fighting a current they can’t fight forever, a war they will ultimately lose.

“There’s still work to be done,” says Pritzker. But those who support transgender rights can take some solace in the fact that big business is beginning to understand the bottom line.

“Productivity and profitability will not suffer by virtue of inclusion,” Pritzker says. “I’m as much a capitalist as I am anything else. And capitalism doesn’t have to be a zero sum game.”