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.
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 didn't respond to a message left Thursday seeking comment on the changes. Previously, the park service hadn't responded to questions about whether Trump's executive order would mean changes for the monument.
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
