Hundreds of New Yorkers rallied at Stonewall National Monument in the West Village Friday afternoon, a day after the National Parks Service replaced the acronym LGBTQ+ with just LGB on its websites describing the historic plaza and removed the word “transgender” entirely.
“I’m angry,” said Tabytha Gonzalez, a trans activist who works at the City’s Human Rights Commission. “We won’t be erased. We think that our histories [are] found on the website or in the textbook it is not. Our histories are in our bellies and in our hearts.”
The removal of the letter “T” came after President Donald Trump quickly issued executive orders declaring that declared only two genders will be recognized by the federal government, blocking gender affirming care for youth under 19, prohibiting transgender girls from girls sports teams and banning transgender service from the military.
Many of those orders are facing legal challenges. But despite the stay on the order around gender affirming care for minors, hospitals across New York City already pre-emptively started from their websites.
Trans veteran and activist Tanya Walker with Equality New York, made a jab at Trump for dodging the Vietnam War draft saying “I didn’t say I had bone spurs.
“I’m not going to another country, I fought for the United States,” she said. “My ancestors were enslaved in this fucking nation. I am not going no fucking where.”
The spur of the moment rally, where hundreds of demonstrators clogged the public plaza and spread out into the adjacent roadway, came a day after the New York Times reported the National Parks Service had removed the “T” and then the “Q” from the mentions of “LGBTQ+” referring to Transgender and Queer from the site mentioning the Stonewall Monument. A separate page on the Stonewall Monument still had “T” in references to LGBT as of Friday morning.
Other pages about Stonewall had been updated saying the site tells, “the story of the LGB rights movement.” “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal,” the updated website read.
Archived versions of the website available on the Wayback Machine made mentions to LGBTQ+ as recently as Wednesday. A spokesperson for the National Parks Service didn’t return a request for comment right away.
The removal of the word “transgender” from the NPS website enraged demonstrators Friday, who pointed to the centrality of trans activists like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson in the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights.
Some demonstrators carried bricks with them, an homage to the rumour that Johnson was among those who threw the first bricks at the infamous 1969 uprising, triggered when police tried to raid the gay bar the Stonewall Inn. The attempted raid sparked a revolt among patrons and six days of protests and clashes with police, and is now understood as the catalyst for the broader LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.
Former President Barack Obama created the Stonewall National Monument in 2016, as the first national monument to commemorate the LGBTQ+ civil rights struggle.
But nine years later, President Donald Trump has taken aim at trangender people in a series of sweeping executive orders promising to restore “biological truth to the federal government.”
Among the speakers was 17-year-old Lorelei Crean, who said they’d just gotten their New York state ID which identified them with a “X” gender marker in the mail a few days before Trump’s executive order. They’d finally convinced their parents to allow them to seek gender affirming care in recent weeks, and were trying to set up an appointment but nervous about their ability to do so.
“In the eyes of the government I no longer legally exist,” the youth said to the crowd, who chanted back at them, “you exist.”
