The Greatest Lie Part 8

I love academia just as I love getting fucked; each validates me in a different way. I was born of academic parents, and was holding forth at their cocktail parties before I could pronounce all my consonants. To me research papers and exams are just opportunities to display my superior intellect and diligence. By semester’s end, I had not only aced my own courses, but I had successfully tutored my dumb jock boyfriends Rick and Randy through theirs: they had so excelled that their hockey coach wanted me to tutor the rest of the hockey team next semester. I figured I could convert that into work-study credit, and endless nights of hot, varied sexual encounters with the squad. I had so overawed my English professor with my contemporary translations of the Canterbury Tales that she insisted that I co-author a Middle English to Contemporary English dictionary with her: another no-brainer for me.

I’m fluent in French, Latin and Swedish, so Middle English was like a walk in the woods. Professor Finch, my mentor for my Trangendered Sex Industry Workers project, had been so delighted with scope and detail of the sixty T-Girl interviews that I had completed first semester that he was submitting my independent study for publication in Annals of Contemporary Anthropology: he had assigned one of his grad students to write our grant proposal. Professor Epstein of the law school had cajoled the Undergraduate Dean to let me take an upper level law school course for undergraduate credit. Next semester, I simply would not have time to take any of the ordinary freshman curriculum. Thus, it would not matter if I returned to classes a few weeks late, as would be necessary to give me time to recover from my planned sex reassignment surgery.

My greatest fear, dealing with the University about my gender reassignment, turned out to be no problem. The Dean of Students was holding a thick sheaf of letters of support from the cream of his faculty when I proposed re-registering as a female student in the Spring Semester. I’m sure Epstein’s support, and the implicit threat of litigation, moved the bureaucracy. The Dean and the Scholarship Review Committee both signed off on my gender reassignment without a whisper of dissent.