Feds Remove References to Trans People on Stonewall Site

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 Trump signed on his first day in office calling for the federal government to define sex as only male or female, the AP reports. The National Park Service told the Washington Post it was implementing the order.

• "This feels especially personal … when you're coming into the birthplace of the LGBTQ rights movement—where Pride began—and erasing the history of the LGBTQ rights movement by erasing trans folks," said Stacy Lentz, co-owner of the Stonewall Inn, per CNN.

• "This is just cruel and petty," New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a post 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 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. 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.
• "Let us be clear: Stonewall is transgender history," the organizations said in a statement. "Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and countless other trans and gender-nonconforming individuals fought bravely, and often at great personal risk, to push back against oppressive systems."
• Angelica Christina, board director of the Stonewall Inn Gives Back, said the move comes amid "relentless and insidious attacks by this current administration against trans people across the country," CNN reports. She tells the Post: "When they try to come for trans people, it's only a matter of time before they come for everybody."

(More Stonewall stories.)