Last week, the National Park Service removed transgender activists’ contributions from Stonewall National Monument’s website. To placate the radically intolerant new regime, federal agencies have begun haphazardly removing keywords from their websites. There is something very sinister about witnessing a historical event that united the Queer community in pursuit of their liberation being sanitized of all mentions of among its most prominent and loudest actors. The move shows that the goal of the new administration is erasure via any means necessary; the transgender community cannot afford to forget its history now.
The Stonewall Inn, now the Stonewall Monument, was a prominent Greenwich Village gay bar. The NYPD raided the club monthly since homosexuality was illegal. On June 28, 1969, when the police came out of the bar, the people outside the bar began to fight back, throwing bottles at the officers. The riot continued for six days as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender members of the community shouted to the world that they were not going to take it anymore. Among the more prominent activists were nonwhite transgender women like Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who together sparked a global protest for Queer rights. Ironically, the National Park Service itself had previously acknowledged the contributions of transgender people, showing that their recent removal is entirely to pretend they never existed.
If you visit the National Park Service’s website for the Stonewall Monument, you would be hard-pressed to find any mention that transgender people even existed. The words “transgender” and “queer” have been systematically and methodically removed from the website. However, to draw a different historical comparison, it would be as if a website commemorating the transcontinental railroad’s construction had not a single mention of Chinese migrants. Would such a retelling of history be accurate? Hardly. The omission of such a foundational group’s contributions to a key historical moment is not only doing them a disservice by ignoring the sacrifices they made but also doing future generations a disservice by not teaching an accurate model of our nation’s past. It needs to be noted that the reason behind this change is one of President Trump’s very first executive orders: a mandate that the federal government only recognizes the sex people are assigned at birth, male and female. Even LGBT has been cut down to LGB.
This is a calculated attempt to rewrite history. The erasure of transgender contributions from the story of Stonewall is historical revisionism intended to further marginalize an already vulnerable community. By scrubbing the word “transgender” from the record, the administration is sending a clear message: Trans people have no place in America’s history and, therefore, no place in its future. If a government entity can alter the past so brazenly, what is to stop it from altering the present? The more history is erased, the easier it is to justify the oppression of those who lived it.
The public reaction to this blatant erasure has been swift and fierce. Activists and historians alike have called out the National Park Service for its politically motivated censorship, with protests erupting outside the Stonewall Inn. These protests are not just about words on a website; they are about the fundamental right of transgender people to be recognized as part of the Queer movement, to be seen and to have their history acknowledged. New York Governor Kathy Hochul and advocacy organizations have denounced the edits, calling them out for what they are: “cruel and petty.” But outrage alone will not be enough. As we have seen time and time again, silence allows oppression to fester. The only way to combat historical erasure is through vocal, unrelenting opposition.
Removing transgender history from Stonewall is an attack on the past as well as an attack on the future. Historical erasure is a precursor to real-world discrimination. If the contributions of transgender activists can be wiped from the record today, then tomorrow, their rights can be stripped away just as quickly. The government is attempting to rewrite the past to control the present, and the only way to stop it is to demand that history remains intact. The National Park Service must reinstate transgender voices in its documentation of the Stonewall Uprising. Anything less insults the movement, the truth and the very concept of historical integrity.