Part of our problem is LGB historical ignorance

Stonewall is really just the tip of the iceberg, but it points to why LGB opinion has been susceptible to manipulation by trans activists.

For example, I recently decided to re-read George Chauncey's groundbreaking 1994 book Gay New York about gay communities in NYC 1890-1940. It dovetailed at the time with work I was doing on Whitman and other gay authors. Chauncey's book was researched to the hilt, full of data he pulled from many sources including personal journals, letters, police and legal records, and records of social purity organizations. If nothing else, Chauncey makes clear that there was an active, thriving gay subculture in New York (and other major cities) long before Stonewall, one that required a lot of courage and creativity from those who created it. The story we've been told about how everyone was in hiding before a brave transwoman started a riot is simply not true.

Then I decided to look at youtube to see what kind of gay history was being presented. In an "LGBTQ+" video on the 1920s, all that complexity (the lives of thousands of everyday gay men and lesbians) is glossed over, but the writer makes sure to mention a single transsexual FTM doctor, Alan Hart, one of the first in the U.S. to have SRS.

The thing is, Hart was able to change his legal sex and legally marry not one, but two women (after the first ended in divorce), first in 1918 and then again in 1925. Consider that this is 40 years before interracial marriage was legalized in all U.S. states and 90 years before same-sex marriage. And though Hart paid a price in his career for being trans, he was nonetheless able to have a long and successful medical career at the same time that police were raiding bars and baths and judges were sending gay men to prison for years for sodomy -- when any man revealed to be a homosexual might well lose his career and end up in disgrace.

Yet we're told that trans people are the most oppressed people ever.

We should never forget that the fight for LGB civil rights was a long and difficult one with many casualties along the way and that it's still very much being fought. We survived by carving out niches for ourselves over and over amid the growth of major cities, adapting to changing forms of oppression over the decades. Our civil rights were not won for us by one mythical transwoman in 1969.