Activists love to shit on "respectability politics," but being respectable and behaving in a respectable way is actually pretty effective. Look at what the Civil Rights Movement did with Rosa Parks. The myth was that she just got tired of going to the back o the bus one day, but we now know the reality was that the whole thing was planned and that Rosa Parks was picked for that role because she had a blameless reputation and no skeletons in her closet. She had a spotless background in every way, and thus, no one could undermine her as a sympathetic figure. And it worked.

I think this is the extent of modern kwir thinking when it comes to how to acquire rights. Not only are stories like the "first bricker" a misrepresentation of history to buff up the trans role in the Stonewall riots. But it also portrays spontaneous violent resistance as the only real method of getting what you want, when it's simply just the most visible and dramatic product of a long-term series of subsurface plans, actions and developments that went mostly unnoticed. It's like a person suddenly making a seemingly snap decision to do something completely life-changing without much conscious debate at all, when subconsciously, their mind has already been silently mulling over all the pros and cons of their present choice from all angles for years.