There are a lot of things that Donald Trump has done – either directly or indirectly through someone he appointed – that hurt trans people. From limiting gender identity, to reducing options for trans youth to access health care, to pausing at least some U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding for gender support, to slashing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) funding, and many others. Trump also had references to trans people and identities scrubbed from government websites, including the National Park Service (NPS), which is what I want to talk about today. But before I explain what happened, let me explain a bit of queer history for context.
In the early hours of the morning on June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular queer bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Over the next several hours, spontaneous riots and protests repeatedly broke out against the police violence. It’s popularly believed that Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera threw the first bricks, though they said this was not the case; Rivera said she was not even at the protest until a couple hours after it started. That said, this put both women at the forefront of the history surrounding what are now known as the Stonewall Riots, which are often considered the birth of the modern pride movement. (To this day, it is not known for certain who actually threw the first bricks and probably never will be.)
The thing is that, for both Johnson and Rivera, these were chosen names, not birth names. Both considered themselves “transvestites” and “street queens”. Transvestite is a now dated but then current term for people who dress according to norms for the opposite binary gender, and street queens were a specific subset of drag queens who lived in drag full-time – i.e., on the streets. For everyone who says “transgender” is a new term, that’s true, but these are the predecessors for it. Particularly in the case of those who lived as street queens, that meant living as a woman regardless of what your birth sex was. Rivera in particular also later identified with genderfluidity and as a trans woman. Even if there is a possibility that Johnson was a cis man who just liked to present in a feminine way – which is considered unlikely, due to her using a different name and pronouns, but not impossible – Rivera was trans. One of the two people who pop history has decided threw the first brick at Stonewall was trans, and the other likely was as well. Gender non-conformity and trans identities have been around for thousands of years, but in the modern context, are also intrinsically tied to the modern queer movement.
There is a Stonewall Monument memorializing these protests run by the NPS. At this point, any reference to trans people or identities has been removed from the website. Whether or not Johnson and Rivera did throw the first bricks, they are now intrinsic to queer history and the riots. That history is being erased before our eyes.
I don’t agree with transphobia. I don’t agree with trans people being harassed and identities erased. I don’t agree with censorship of queer themes in libraries and in the media. But this extends beyond that to removing the actual history of events on purely bigoted and ideological grounds. Changing history to support an ideology should be a bright red line, but this has gone largely unreported outside of queer circles. We’ve crossed that line, and there’s really no way to come back from it. Even if the decision is undone, the precedent has been set that it is okay to literally change history to suit your political agenda in ways we haven’t seen in a long time. This example may be fairly specific. But it will take much longer to undo the broader damage this precedent sets than this incident.
There have been a series of protests against this, organized and supported by groups like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the No Hate Campaign (N0HC), and the Women’s March. And I’m glad to see that. I’m glad that people are standing up to this and fighting against it. I hope this is also a sign that the queer community will continue telling the actual story of Stonewall and queer history. But the irony of all these protests is they’re using the slogan “There’s no S’T’onewall without the ‘T’.” At this point, according to the official version of history that the United States Government is promoting, there is just that. There’s Stonewall without the “T”.