References to transgender people were removed Thursday from a National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument, a park and visitor center in New York that commemorates a 1969 riot that became a pivotal moment for the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
The changes were made in the wake of an executive order President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office calling for the federal government to define sex as only male or female.
“This is just cruel and petty,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, posted on X. “Transgender people play a critical role in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights — and New York will never allow their contributions to be erased.”
The monument in Manhattan's Greenwich Village section is based in a tiny park across the street from the Stonewall Inn, a bar that became ground zero for the gay rights movement on June 28, 1969, when gay and transgender patrons and neighborhood residents fought back against a police raid.
The park service website on Friday was still filled with information about the uprising, including photographs of noted transgender activists.
But the words “transgender” and “queer” had been deleted from text that had been on the site.
Also, the letters T and Q were cut from various references to the acronym LGBTQ and replaced with phrases like the “LGB rights movement” or “LGB civil rights.”
Representatives of the present-day Stonewall Inn, which is part of the national monument, and The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, a nonprofit organization associated with the historic bar, expressed anger and outrage over the changes.
“This blatant act of erasure not only distorts the truth of our history, but it also dishonors the immense contributions of transgender individuals — especially transgender women of color — who were at the forefront of the Stonewall Riots and the broader fight for LGBTQ+ rights," said organizers of the two entities in a statement.
“They’re trying to literally cis-wash, if you will, LGBTQ history by taking trans folks and saying they didn’t exist then and don’t exist now,” said Stacy Lentz, CEO of The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative and a co-owner of The Stonewall Inn. “It is very alarming.”
Angelica Christina, who is board director of the initiative and a transgender woman, said the changes to the website are not surprising given “the constant executive orders the Trump administration has been leveling against the trans community.”
But she said it is shocking and unnerving to see the Stonewall National Monument in particular targeted: “The West Village, and especially the Stonewall Inn, has always been a safe haven for the LGBT community.”
Earlier this week, the homepage for the national monument said that “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.”
On Thursday, it said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal.”
The National Park Service did not respond to a message left Thursday seeking comment on the changes. The service previously did not respond to questions about whether Trump's executive order would mean changes for the monument.
Timothy Leonard, Northeast program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, a 1.6 million-member nonprofit group that advocates on behalf of national parks and helped push for the Stonewall monument, said “erasing letters or webpages” does not change history or the contributions of the transgender community at Stonewall or elsewhere.
“The National Park Service exists to not only protect and preserve our most cherished places but to educate its millions of annual national park visitors about the inclusive, full history of America,” Leonard said.
Then President Barack Obama designated the Stonewall National Monument in 2016.
Last year, a $3.2 million visitor center run by the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Pride Live opened at the site, in partnership with the park service, to tell the Stonewall story in more depth. The center was financed mostly with private donations, except for $450,000 from the park service's charitable arm.
Trump's order declared the federal government would recognize only two immutable sexes: male and female, based on whether people are born with eggs or sperm, rather than on their chromosomes. The change is being pitched as a way to protect women from “gender extremism.”
Conservative groups such as the American Family Association have praised the change as one that acknowledges the truth. But experts including the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association hold that gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting only of males and females.
Susan Haigh, The Associated Press
