One of the key moments in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights was the Stonewall uprising, five nights of resistance in 1969 after the cops picked on patrons of the Stonewall Inn one time too many. Trans people and drag queens were among those targeted by the cops, who used anti-queer legislation – at the time, the law stated that people must wear at least three pieces of “appropriate” clothing according to their birth sex – to harass and humiliate them.
If you think of Stonewall, you’ll probably think of trans women: two of the most iconic figures from the LGBTQ+ rights movement, Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.
This week, the US National Park Service, the US government agency that looks after the Stonewall monument, has erased all mention of trans people from its website. It then returned and removed all references to queer people too.
It’s ineptly done, leaving sentences such as “fighting for gay and rights”. But as symbolism goes, it’s hard to beat.
This is just the latest and perhaps most symbolically potent step in the administration’s methodical campaign to eliminate trans people from public life entirely. Since January 20th, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented assault on trans existence: The State Department has frozen all transgender passport applications. The Social Security Administration has banned gender marker updates. The military ban on trans service members has been reinstated. Schools have been ordered to out trans students to their parents. Federally-funded hospitals have been banned from providing gender-affirming care to trans youth.
The scale of this is staggering. Federal agencies across the board have been ordered to scrub their websites of any content related to gender diversity. The CDC’s LGBTQ health resources? Gone. The Department of Education’s guidance for supporting LGBTQ students? Vanished. Even Census.gov temporarily went dark as they purged references to gender identity from their systems…
This matters because when you erase a group from the past, it becomes easier to erase them from the present.