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On Thursday night, the National Park Service removed the words “transgender” and “queer” from the web pages of the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. The move, taken in the wake of Trump’s so-called “gender ideology” executive order, represented yet another step in the administration’s ongoing attempt to erase trans people from public life—and now, their own history. A 15-part video series about Stonewall Riots—a three-day uprising against anti-queer police harassment that occurred on the site in June 1969, which is widely celebrated as galvanizing the nascent gay rights movement—was also removed, and every use of “LGBTQ+” was lopped down to “LGB.”
Judging from the grammatically tortured sentences left behind, this culling was probably conducted by code; it looks as though someone ran a slightly more complicated version of Find + Delete across the site. Thousands of government websites presenting information running afoul of the right’s “anti-woke” crusade have been edited or taken down in just the first few weeks of the president’s tenure, raising alarm about not only the losses themselves, but the material impacts those changes portend for communities ranging from people with HIV, disabled people, those whose primary language is Spanish, and of course, queer people.
But the defacing—and that’s what it is—of the Stonewall Monument website has hit the LGBTQ community particularly hard, given the location’s venerated status. On Friday, hundreds gathered to protest the move, bearing signs like “No T? All Shade!” and “Can’t spell HIS-ORY without the T.” I was there myself, because as a queer historian, I know that the erasure of history, while it might seem unimportant in the moment, is in fact always a crucial step on the road to autocracy. Indeed, the specific case of “deleting” trans people from the record is an action with a deeply troubling, almost century-old precedent—one that should motivate us all to resist its repetition aggressively today.
About that record: Let’s be crystal clear that trans and gender nonconforming people were crucial to the Stonewall rebellion—as were lesbians and gay men, and even some straight people. But this truth has been hard won, for several reasons.
First, Stonewall lasted many nights (which is part of why it received more attention than earlier uprisings, like Compton’s Cafeteria or Cooper Do-Nuts). Each night, a broader community showed up. As Stonewall vet Jay Toole told me, “It was every form of human being, every shade of human being, every sexuality of human being, all coming together as one. It was just like, enough is e-fucking-nough.”
Second, certain parts of the uprising (like the accompanying riot in the Women’s House of Detention) have been routinely sidelined. Third, our language and thinking around identity have shifted, obscuring the fact that many people in previous generations used terms like “drag queen” or “stone butch” to discuss their gender who might now identify as trans. Fourth, because they are hard to research, comparatively little attention has been paid to the queer “street youth” who were the most active part of the resistance, many of whom were gender nonconforming.
Finally—and most tragically—there is a contingent of people even in the gay community who are actively working to distance themselves from trans people and to erase our historical connections. For them, “LGB” is not vandalism, but a victory. However, let’s be clear here too: These people are absolutely wrong, and making this argument is a sign of their willful ignorance and transphobia. Because if there is one place in American history where trans existence has been well documented for decades, it’s Stonewall.
David Carter, who wrote the definitive book on the Uprising, was so frustrated by the deliberate transphobic attempts to erase trans people from Stonewall that he wrote an essay about it in 2019. Meticulously documenting his evidence, Carter concluded “the two most important groups in the vanguard on the first night—beyond the butch lesbian who resisted arrest and probably had the greatest impact—were homeless gay street youth and transgender people, including Marsha P. Johnson and Zazu Nova, both trans women, and Jackie Hormona, a member of the gay street youth. Most of the gay street youth were more or less feminine—or, in today’s parlance, non-gender conforming.”
So, it’s settled that trans and GNC people are integral to the history of Stonewall, and they should unquestionably be part of the story told at the National Monument. But why, you might wonder, does the Trump administration care either way?
KENA BETANCUR/Getty Images
All autocracies attempt to control the past in order to control the future. Their methods are ham-fisted, because they see history as a purely political endeavor, and their attempts to compete with legitimate scholarship, produced by actual historians, are risible (remember the 1776 Commission?) But laughing at the Fuhrer is perhaps the cardinal sin when living under fascism—this is no joke. Like Stalin and Putin and the Lost Causers of the Confederacy before him, Trump and his cabal are seeking to annihilate any ground that they cannot easily dominate. In the case of Stonewall, they cannot actually change the past—trans people existed there, as they do now. But if they can make it harder to remember that earlier generations of trans people shaped history, it furthers their goal of delegitimizing trans people and identities today. Thus, it becomes easy to cast trans people as a sudden contagion that must be resisted, or a mental illness that must be eradicated.
You might think I’m overreacting here—are a few letters lost from a website really a crisis?
I get it: Prioritizing the past can be hard, especially when the administration is making it impossible for living trans people to travel freely and threatening to pull funding from hospitals that provide appropriate and affirming medicine for trans youth. But history tells us this erasure is a trial balloon for much worse things, and it’s essential we hold the line.
In May, 1933, five months after being elected to power in Germany, the Nazis burned the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, including some 25,000 books. Magnus Hirschfeld, the founder of the Institute, was queer, Jewish, an advocate for birth control, and a pioneer in gender confirming medicine. The institute held the largest collection of queer writings in the world at the time, and connected and trained queer researchers from many countries. The first documented orchiectomy, penectomy, and vagioplasty were performed at the Institute at the request of a German trans woman named Dora Richter.
The burning was part of a broader policy of terrorism aimed at Jewish, queer, Communist, feminist, and left-wing scholarship. The Nazis were obsessed with the birth rates of (some) white people—sound familiar?—and their purge of sexual science and queer community was depicted as much as being pro-natal as it was anti-queer.
It might surprise you to learn that no one was killed that day, or even arrested. The burning was largely conducted by Nazi-affiliated youth groups, though overseen by the party itself. Afterward, pro-Nazi newspapers and bootlicking appeasers declared the Institute “degenerate” and “un-German.” The lack of public outcry emboldened the Nazi campaign against queer people, which ramped up over the next two years (in part fueled by the lists of names they took from the Institute before it burned). By the end of the Holocaust, tens of thousands were arrested, and an unknown number killed.
But it took many steps to get to that point, and at each one, the Nazis were testing to see how far the public would let them go. By targeting the “worst” degenerates first, they fractured the opposition, and inadvertently created that “First they came for …” poem that we all now memorize in middle school.
On that note, I offer a cautionary tale for those LGBs in our community who are tempted to throw trans people under the bus. At the time of the burning, there were known homosexuals in the Nazi party, including its leadership, such as Ernst Röhm, head of the SA (the Nazi paramilitary). For the most part, these folks were white, German-born, Christian, gender-conforming homosexuals, who saw no connection between what they did in bed and what those degenerate gender freaks did anywhere else. But they were the weakest part of the Nazi coalition, easily sacrificed to maintain power and escalate the broader assault on civil liberties and sexual freedom. One wonders what Röhm thought about the burning of the Institute a year later, in 1934, when he was removed from power, incarcerated, and then killed by his fellow Nazis. Regardless, the message of his fate is clear: Complicity will not save you.
While we may not feel much sympathy for Röhm, it’s hard not to mourn what was lost when the institute was destroyed. Their archives went back decades, possibly further, and documented the birth of the 20th century ideas of what it meant to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender—ideas that made new forms of life possible, even as that very flourishing drew suppression and violence from those who feared it.
But for all that the burning of those treasures may have slowed queer understanding and freedom, here’s what I consider the essential lesson of the incident: those Nazi losers lost. They were fighting a rear-guard action, using escalating violence to destroy a queer community that had been blossoming for decades. Fundamentally, they were trying to fight modernity. Popular understandings of sex and sexuality had already changed irrevocably by the time the Nazis came to power. In fact, they came to power in part by exploiting fears around those very changes—much like Trump and Musk have done around trans people today.
Once again, we are in a moment where our global way of living has transformed rapidly. The internet-ization of the Western world at the end of the 20th century parallels the urbanization of the Western world at the end of the 19th century. New and more capacious understandings of queerness, and growing numbers of queer and trans people, are just part of this change. Conservative reactionaries can target us, make our lives awful—and they will—but unless they can somehow radically change the structure of the entire world, they will inevitably lose as well.
Still, it is imperative that the queer community—and those who would be our allies—stand against every step in this death march we’re on, even those as seemingly small as a deleted letter. Because to understand that you have a viable future, you have to know you have a past to be proud of. For trans and queer people, that past is rich and inspiring, full of bravery and invention and tragedy and joy—at Stonewall and far beyond it. And that’s a truth that no bigoted government or hacked up website can ever take away.
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