I'm still stuck on what she said. It's extremely USAmerican to say, “I’m not a political activist,” and then do political activism.

Idk, she's also 20 years old. A lot of us thought we were invincible and free from consequences at 20

It may have gotten into interesting territory if instead of going to the Capitol herself, she had a cis girl look-alike go in her place, and pretend to be her.

I wouldn't expect it to change much but there would be some spectacular gears grinding in the process of detaining a cis woman for entering a bathroom, on suspicion of being a trans woman entering a bathroom.

The winning perspective here is that a bathroom police is eventually going to come for us all.

Did she genuinely think if she seemed normal-christian-white-girl enough they wouldn't touch her?

There are definitely some strains of thought of that kind in parts of the trans community, especially among the trans medicalist folks. There's a subset of trans folks that believe the present upsurge in bigotry is due to the presence of nonbinary people, polyamorous folks, and any other trans folks that don't present as conventional binary heterosexual. Her vibe really screams that. "I just have to show these police that trans people can be perfectly normal, and they'll leave us alone!"

I see this belief as a tragic and misguided self-defense mechanism. It's really hard to accept that there are simply people that will hate you for no reason. It is deeply hard to accept that there are people that want you dead, and there is nothing you can do to dissuade them. It's really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if trans people simply all acted "normal," then the hate would go away. This kind of thinking is comforting to some people. It at least provides a path out of the nightmare the trans community finds itself in. If we all just became straight-presenting, then everyone would leave us alone. It provides a kind of desperate hope. There is some path forward for the trans community to escape bigotry. If we just assimilate, we can end the madness.

In truth the recent upswing in anti-trans hate has nothing to do with the existence of nonbinary or any other less conventional form of trans folks. People that we would now call nonbinary have existed for generations. The recent upswing in hate is entirely artificial and the result of a deliberate propaganda campaign by Republicans. They lost on the same-sex marriage issue, they managed to overturn Roe, and now they need a new moral panic to rile up the base. That's it. The trans community could be composed entirely of trans women that look and act like this woman and trans men that look and act like frat bros, and the recent upsurge in anti-trans bigotry would still have occurred. They needed someone to hate, so they found someone to hate. It's fascism 101, always find and target the Other.

feel like shit, just want them back