It is appalling and wrong that the federal government on February 13 deleted references to "transgender" and "queer" from the web pages of the Stonewall National Monument. The original material must be restored. The site, and the monument in Greenwich Village New York, is part of the National Park Service, which is overseen by the U.S. Department of the Interior. The monument, of course, honors the 1969 Stonewall riots when transgender, bisexual, gay, and lesbian patrons of the Stonewall Inn pushed back against targeted harassment and police raids. It's considered the birth of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. The removal of "transgender" and "queer" is just another example of President Donald Trump's obsession with eliminating all references to trans people – as if that will make them disappear from society.
And it's not just Stonewall. At the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front Museum in Richmond, California, there was confusion last month after an LGBTQ history-related exhibit was removed and then returned. And it seems that the anti-trans purge has come to the museum's website. While the words "transgender" and "queer" and the LGBTQ acronym were on the site February 13, those had been replaced with "LGB" by February 18. That content must also be restored.
The Stonewall National Monument was designated as such by former President Barack Obama in 2016. "I'm designating the Stonewall National Monument as the newest addition to America's National Park System," Obama said at the time. "Stonewall will be our first national monument to tell the story of the struggle for LGBT rights. I believe our national parks should reflect the full story of our country, the richness and diversity and uniquely American spirit that has always defined us. That we are stronger together. That out of many, we are one."
In 1999, the Stonewall Inn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the area was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2000.
Yet Trump and his administration are obsessed with making transgender content disappear from government sites, and that will have dangerous consequences. Revising history, as the park service has done with the Stonewall National Monument and Rosie the Riveter sites, doesn't mean that the events didn't occur, or that trans people weren't involved. It means that the federal government is working overtime to wrongly change the accuracy of the events. And while there are books, archived interviews online, and news coverage showing the role trans people played in Stonewall, many people may not check out those resources. That's why the website information that the National Park Service maintains is so important. And why the removal of trans participation in events like Stonewall and World War II distort history.
Unchallenged erasure risks becoming normalized, threatening hard-won progress, as the Human Rights Campaign noted in an alert in which it encourages people to sign a petition directed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Republican former governor of North Dakota and a 2024 presidential candidate. It's Burgum's department that oversees the park service.
Other actions
As we've noted, other actions Trump himself has taken pose potentially harmful outcomes, such as his executive order banning the use of gender-affirming hormone therapies for transgender adolescents. That has already had a chilling effect as several hospitals have now paused such treatments, including Children's Hospital Los Angeles. As we've reported, another order targets affirmative actions that schools across the U.S. have taken to support queer and transgender students, from teaching LGBTQ curriculum and providing gender-neutral bathrooms to honoring students' preferred pronouns and names and allowing them to play on athletic teams regardless of the sex they were assigned at birth. Another bans trans women and girls from playing on female sports teams. Trump's executive order banning trans people from serving in the military went into effect February 7 with the announcement that trans people can no longer enlist.
Just last weekend, CBS News reported that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is seeking to drop six of its own cases on behalf of workers alleging gender discrimination. That is to comply with Trump's executive order stating there are only two genders, male and female, and that a person's gender is determined at conception. The decision is contrary to the EEOC's updated guidance from last year specifying that deliberately using the wrong pronoun for someone, or refusing them access to a bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, constitutes harassment. That followed the landmark 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision that gay, lesbian, and transgender people are protected from employment discrimination.
All of these anti-trans actions taken by Trump and his administration perpetuate discrimination, and it likely will be courts that determine which policies stand – we would argue that all of these orders must be halted and reversed.
The removal of trans participation from the Stonewall National Monument site is different, and more dangerous because there is no easy recourse under this president. It is just one more example of the U.S. sliding into an autocracy like Hungary, where strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orban has dismantled institutions and taken control of the media, as the Guardian pointed out in a recent article. (Trump is even attempting to control the media by suing networks. ABC settled a lawsuit for $15 million, a suit against CBS is ongoing. He's banned the Associated Press from the White House press corps because the news service will not call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and possibly because AP's style guide, which hundreds of outlets use, has a thorough section on transgender issues, including gender-affirming care, which Trump despises.)
There are small signs of hope here, as not all trans content is being erased – at least not yet. We recently reported on the San Francisco site of a protest by transgender people against police being added to the National Register of Historic Places in late January. That would be the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria riots that took place at the site of the old diner at 100 Taylor Street in the Tenderloin. It's believed to be the first federal recognition of a historic site specifically because of its connection to trans history.
But that's small comfort, as the erasure that has occurred is only the beginning. That should alarm all of us.
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