Quote of the day

We've watched this pattern repeat itself for decades. Gay organizations distanced themselves from drag queens because they were considered too embarrassing for the movement. White-led organizations sidelined Black queer activists whose struggles complicated a cleaner public narrative. Transgender people were told, explicitly and implicitly, that their visibility threatened everyone else's acceptance and that their liberation could wait until a more politically convenient moment. The names and targets change, but the promise never does. If we simply push those deemed the least respectable to the edge of the movement, perhaps the rest of us will finally be allowed to belong. History has never been especially kind to that strategy, because respectability politics offers a promise it cannot keep. It imagines acceptance as something earned through conformity, when conformity only invites an ever narrower definition of what is considered acceptable. 

~Josh Ackley