Trans people were at Stonewall!

Among the many evil things the Trump administration has already done only in his first month in office (hard to believe!) is their attempt to erase trans people from American life and memory. One thing they did was to try and erase the role of trans people in the Stonewall rebellion that began the modern gay liberation movement (as it was first called). From a letter of protest written by scholars of the movement:

On February 13, 2025, the National Park Service, following an executive order issued by the Trump administration on January 20, 2025, “to recognize [only] two sexes, male and female [that] are not changeable,” removed references to transgender people from the web pages of the National Stonewall Monument in lower Manhattan. Later, the word “queer” and the letter “Q” were also removed.

This part of the letter explains the rebellion:

As scholars who study the history and politics of sexuality and gender, we write to testify that these changes are not supported by the historical record concerning the events that the monument commemorates.

The National Stonewall Monument commemorates an important event in the history of LGBTQ+ activism. During a six-day conflict that began at a New York City tavern called the Stonewall Inn in the summer of 1969, commonly referred to as the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ+ New Yorkers resisted systematic harassment and mistreatment by police in a series of clashes that continued in Greenwich Village for several days. The Stonewall Inn’s patrons and the participants in the subsequent uprising were predominantly young New Yorkers who defied dominant sexual and gender norms. Some understood themselves as gay or lesbian or queer, and some lived part or all of the time as members of a sex other than the one assigned to them at birth. Some called themselves “drag queens” and “crossdressers,” others “transvestite” or “transsexual,” and still others used ambiguous terms that could describe both sexuality and variation in gender expression. The rioters at Stonewall varied in their class background, their racial and ethnic identity, and in words they used to describe themselves. This range and complexity of variation in gender expression and sexuality were common in the gay liberation, lesbian feminist, and trans movements of the period, which were characterized (like all social movements) by some disagreements and debates about language as well as shared visions of liberation.

Diversity in both sexuality and gender expression, forms of human variation often inextricably related to one another, are empirically verifiable parts of the historical record, even as the terms different societies use and the particular meanings of those terms change over time. Neither “transgender” nor “queer” were commonly used as terms of identity in 1969, but “transvestite,” “transsexual,” and other terms were, including by people at the Stonewall Inn and the protests that followed. Notable examples included Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, influential activists who were assigned male at birth but lived for periods of their adult lives as women.

Participants in the Stonewall riots challenged both mistreatment based on the kinds of sexual partners they sought and mistreatment based on how they performed gender in everyday life. Efforts to address both forms of oppression were part of the riots in 1969 and the civil rights struggle that followed. Any accurate account of the Stonewall Riots and the subsequent fight for LGBTQ+ civil rights must recognize the full range of people who joined the battle and the full scope of the oppression they faced. The actions of the National Park Service reduce these events to a story that is only about sexual orientation, but that interpretation lacks basis in historical fact and distorts the legacy of this important event in American history.