Outraged LGBTQ+ activists and human rights advocates gathered in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village Friday afternoon to protest against the Trump administration’s latest — and perhaps boldest — attack on the community.
A day earlier, internet users noticed that all references to the words “transgender” and “queer” had been removed from the Stonewall National Monument website, a move described by New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal as “one of the darkest moments in American history.”
Seen as a deliberate attempt to rewrite history while further marginalizing trans people, the move sparked a near-immediate response from hundreds of members of the community, who gathered on Friday at Christopher Park, just across from the historic Stonewall Inn, to express their fury and frustration.
Waving transgender Pride flags and signs that read “No LGB without the T” and “You can’t spell Stonewall without the T,” politicians, activists and community members came together to protest against the website’s change while renewing their commitment to fight against the Trump administration’s relentless attack on LGBTQ+ rights.
“The Trump administration is hell-bent on erasing the rights of transgender people who’ve been here since the beginning of time,” said Tanya Walker, a 61-year-old U.S. Army veteran and organizer for Equality New York.
Walker, who’s trans, compared Trump’s treatment of the community to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.
“What he’s doing is genocidal, and it’s dangerous, and he has Secret Service around him,” she said. “We’re American citizens, and he hates America. … He didn’t build it, but he wants to tear it down.”
Fellow protester Nikita Shepard, a 40-year-old doctoral candidate in history at Columbia, said the recent change impacted them directly, calling it “an insult to me, both as a member of the community and as a historian who cares about getting the past right.”
Shepard, who’s nonbinary, said removing trans and queer references from the Stonewall website is harmful “not just to historical memories, but to real live trans people in the present who are denied an opportunity to understand the long and rich history that they’re a part of.”
The Stonewall Inn bar — the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ+ history — is the site where in the summer of 1969, trans women of color, homeless LGBTQ youth, lesbians, drag queens, gay men and their allies rioted, protested, got arrested and changed the course of history.
As recently as Wednesday, anyone visiting the National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument would read the following paragraph:
“Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal. The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGBTQ+ civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.”
On Thursday, however, a chilling modification to the text replaced “living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ+) person” with “living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person.”
The change stunned LGBTQ+ activists, who pointed out the pivotal role transgender women — particularly trans women of color — played in the Stonewall Uprising.
“Let us be clear: Stonewall is transgender history,” the Stonewall Inn said in a statement shared with the Daily News. “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. Their courage, sacrifice, and leadership were central to the resistance we now celebrate as the foundation of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.”
The decision is just another example of the Trump administration’s “blatant attempts to discriminate against and erase the legacies of transgender and queer Americans,” a GLAAD spokesperson said.
“[This] attempt at LGBTQ erasure not only distorts U.S. history but also contradicts factual evidence,” Sen. Hoylman-Sigal, who’s openly gay, told the Daily News. It also “signals the continued, morally reprehensible effort by the White House to demean, demoralize and discriminate against an entire population of Americans.”
But the administration’s “horrific ways” of persecuting trans people and trying to erase their history will only make the LGBTQ community stronger, said 39-year-old protester Jason Jack.
Carrying a sign that read, “Gays stand with trans folks,” the Brooklyn resident vowed to continue fighting.
“In singling out the trans community, they are really trying to divide the LGBTQ community,” he said. “And we’re here to say that that’s not OK. We’re not gonna let that happen.”
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