After listening to Rush Limbaugh discuss the historic Time cover featuring Laverne Cox, a trans woman called in to confront the radio host's implication that trans rights were a negative consequence of DOMA. What resulted was an educational conversation about tolerance, prejudice and anal sex.


When the caller, Tina, first confronted Rush on what appeared to be his stance on trans rights, he blamed the rhetoric on Time. He was simply reading what they had written, he said.

"Oh no! I've been for trannies for a long time. I don't know if you've heard otherwise."


"Well actually I did hear you using that term [trannies]," said Tina. "And a lot of us do find that to be rather offensive, because of the way it's been historically used."

"Well, I didn't know," he said. "Tranny is offensive?"

Rush said he figured "tranny" was acceptable, since he'd heard Alec Baldwin use the term.

"I thought it was cool and hip," he said. "You're telling me it's like the n-word. Do you all use it amongst yourselves?"

So, now Rush can't say that he didn't know that "tranny" is considered a slur.

Tina went on to try to get Rush to understand a little bit of the intolerance that she deals with as a trans woman.

"One of the things about being transgender is that whatever somebody's sexual preference is, you're not it. Gay men don't want anything to do with effeminate types and straight men don't want to have anything to do with people who've got wrong plumbing or wrong history and lesbian women are interested in certain things that's just never gonna be the same no matter how much surgery you have, so that definitely is a problem."


After a long pause, unusual for radio, Rush—who seemed genuinely interested—asked about the mechanicals of trans sex. For instance, what happens, if someone doesn't know you're trans, and then things turn sexual?

"Well a lot of times people have oral sex or anal sex in the dark," Tina explained.



"Oh, that's right, I didn't even think of that!" Rush said. "Oh, you're right, because everybody has — Oh, gee."


So today Rush Limbaugh learned that assholes are like opinions and everybody has one.