The National Park Service removed references to transgender people from its Stonewall National Monument web pages on Thursday, as the Trump administration continued its push for federal agencies to recognize only two genders: male and female, as assigned at birth.
The move to strike the word “transgender” from the website for the first Park Service historic site devoted to America’s gay rights movement elicited anger in the symbolic heart of New York City’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
“It is outrageous,” said Erik Bottcher, the city councilman who represents the Greenwich Village neighborhood that is home to the monument. “This is the latest attempt to erase the very existence of transgender people.”
He added: “The rebellion at Stonewall would not have happened without trans people. To attempt to erase their existence is utterly shameful.”
Dr. Carla Smith, the chief executive of the L.G.B.T. Community Center, said in a statement that the website changes were “factually inaccurate” and “an affront to our entire community,” and she urged the Park Service to “immediately restore accurate and inclusive language.”
The Stonewall Inn, a tavern on Christopher Street, has been considered a cradle of gay rights activism since a police raid there in 1969 touched off three days of protests that helped galvanize a long-marginalized population into a force for political and social change.
The 7.7-acre national monument — which includes the bar, Christopher Park across the street, and several other nearby streets and sidewalks — was established under President Barack Obama in 2016.
On Wednesday, according to a version of the Park Service website saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the introductory text on the monument’s main page said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.”
By Thursday afternoon, the word “transgender” and the letter T in the abbreviation had been removed from the page. By Thursday evening, the word “queer” and “Q+” had also been removed from the website.
A Park Service ranger at the monument’s visitor center said on Thursday afternoon that she had not been informed about the changes to the website and had just noticed that the “T” was missing. She declined to provide her name and would not comment further.
The Park Service’s public affairs department said the agency had taken the actions to carry out an executive order signed by President Trump on his first day in office that was described as “restoring biological truth to the federal government” and a second order signed by the acting secretary of the interior last month.
In addition to being part of the national monument, the Stonewall Inn is a New York State historic site. A plaque on the facade of the building identifies it as a place associated with “monumental change for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer” Americans.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, in a statement posted online, condemned the changes to the monument website as “cruel and petty.”
“Transgender people play a critical role in the fight for L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, and New York will never allow their contributions to be erased,” she said.
The website changes included the virtual elimination of a page listing interpretive flags associated with the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, including the pink, blue and white one representing transgender people, and the times when the flags typically fly in Christopher Park.
On Thursday, the transgender pride flag still waved over the park.
Randy Wicker, an L.G.B.T. activist since 1958, was close to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transgender women who are widely seen as mothers of the movement and as pivotal figures in the Stonewall uprising. The scrubbing of the monument website left him aghast.
“It’s frightening what is happening, the extent of it and the venom of it,” Mr. Wicker, 87, said, adding that “the idea that they would try to take transgender people out of the Stonewall National Monument — you can’t just erase history.”
Raquel Willis, a founder of the Gender Liberation Movement, a trans activist group, echoed that sentiment.
“The Stonewall riots happened because trans people, particularly of color, rose up against state violence,” she said. “You can’t tell the story without us.”
The changes to the monument website followed a series of other moves by the Trump administration to strip transgender people of federal recognition, including by altering other government websites. The effort began with the executive order by Mr. Trump that the Park Service cited on Thursday.
The measures have included moving to bar transgender people from identifying as they choose on documents like passports; imposing a national restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths; investigating schools with gender-neutral bathrooms; criminalizing teacher support for transgender students; and commanding federal prison officials to force an estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men.
Stacy Lentz, an owner of the Stonewall Inn and the chief executive of the nonprofit Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, said she had learned about the website changes Thursday morning.
“I want to say that I’m shocked, but I am not shocked,” she said.
Still, it was almost incomprehensible to her that the anti-trans campaign had arrived at Stonewall.
“Coming into our home, into our place, and trying to erase folks who are instrumental to this movement is insanity,” she said.
The Park Service had not purged all references to transgender people from its website by Friday morning. A biographical page for Ms. Rivera that linked to the services’s Stonewall site described her as a transgender activist. One for Ms. Johnson called her a transgender woman of color.
It was unclear whether the entries would remain intact.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/nyregion/stonewall-transgender-parks-service.html (Archive)
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