The Government Is Literally Erasing Trans People from American History
Trump's removal of trans references from the Stonewall Monument website isn't just another culture war battle; it's actual government censorship.
There are moments when the mask slips and you can see exactly what's happening. Yesterday was one of those moments.
The National Park Service, following orders from the Trump administration, has begun removing references to transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument's website. They're quite literally trying to erase trans people from American history. And no, I'm not being hyperbolic here: they are systematically going through government websites and removing references to trans people's existence, including one of the most important sites in LGBTQ history.
As the New York Times reported, the agency stripped the "T" from "LGBTQ+" throughout the site, and later removed "Q+" as well. A page about pride flags associated with the movement, including the trans pride flag, has been virtually eliminated. They're doing this while claiming to be "restoring biological truth to the federal government," which is both Orwellian and historically illiterate.
This is just the latest and perhaps most symbolically potent step in the administration's methodical campaign to eliminate trans people from public life entirely. Since January 20th, we've witnessed an unprecedented assault on trans existence: The State Department has frozen all transgender passport applications. The Social Security Administration has banned gender marker updates. The military ban on trans service members has been reinstated. Schools have been ordered to out trans students to their parents. Federally-funded hospitals have been banned from providing gender-affirming care to trans youth.
The scale of this is staggering. Federal agencies across the board have been ordered to scrub their websites of any content related to gender diversity. The CDC's LGBTQ health resources? Gone. The Department of Education's guidance for supporting LGBTQ students? Vanished. Even Census.gov temporarily went dark as they purged references to gender identity from their systems.
Let's be crystal clear about what's happening: This is government censorship. This is the exact thing that conservatives have been falsely claiming happens when social media companies fact-check posts or when schools remove books with racial slurs from required reading lists. But this? This is actual, literal censorship — a government agency actively removing historical facts to align with a political agenda.
The most infuriating part of this is that you can't tell the story of Stonewall without trans people. As activist Randy Wicker told the Times, the idea that they would try to take transgender people out of the Stonewall National Monument is absurd because "you can't just erase history." He's right. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two trans women who were instrumental in the Stonewall uprising, are being effectively written out of the very history they helped create.
"Coming into our home, into our place, and trying to erase folks who are instrumental to this movement is insanity," Stacy Lentz, an owner of the Stonewall Inn, told the Times. She's right. But it's also calculated. This isn't just about updating some website text; it's about controlling the narrative of who we are as a country and who gets to be part of that story.
For years, I've watched as right-wing media has worked overtime to paint basic trans visibility as some sort of radical agenda. They've successfully convinced millions of Americans that acknowledging trans people's existence is somehow "political." But there's nothing political about historical facts. There's nothing political about acknowledging that trans people were at Stonewall, that they helped lead the riots, that they've always been part of the LGBTQ community.
What's political is trying to erase us from history.
This matters because when you erase a group from the past, it becomes easier to erase them from the present. When you pretend trans people weren't part of historical movements, it becomes easier to exclude them from current ones. When you remove references to trans people from government websites, you're sending a message about who counts and who doesn't in American society.
The conservatives who have spent years crying about "cancel culture" and "censorship" are notably quiet about this actual government censorship. Their silence is deafening, and it reveals that their concerns about censorship were never about principles, but about power.
This is what actual authoritarianism looks like. It doesn't always arrive with dramatic fanfare. Sometimes it comes in the form of quiet edits to government websites, the steady removal of recognition, the gradual erasure of people from official records. It's happening right now, and we need to call it exactly what it is: censorship, plain and simple.
This isn't just some culture war skirmish. This is the federal government systematically working to eliminate an entire group of people from public life — from healthcare, from schools, from sports, from the military, from official documents, and now, most chillingly, from our own history. If that's not Orwellian, I don't know what is.
Nobody can wipe out 2 of my grandchildren, the kindest, most honest, peace loving, generous people. They are examples of what is good. They have a right to live happily and not be judged and excluded from society. And they have a right to be loved and adored not just by me.
I think it's worth noting that this is driven by both simple cruelty and by Trump's embrace of White Christian Nationalism and American evangelical fundamentalism as a political strategy and to build the MAGA coalition. Trump has no religious convictions whatsoever. Indeed, he considers his religious supporters "dupes" and "weak-minded" people. But he is willing to cater to them in social policy because it builds and secures his political power.
To recap this evil: certain Christian fundamentalists read The Bible in a selectively literal way to assert that God (please substitute the word or phrase for God that is right for you) created only strictly binary, heterosexual men and women. Because God only created straight, strictly binary men and women, these fundamentalists believe (reality is not in play) that any other sexual orientation or gender identity is chosen or a sickness. Either way, it's an affront to God and God's Created Order. Since anyone other than a strictly binary heterosexual person is actively opposing God by choice or is sick, that person should be corrected or cured, shamed, shunned, driven out, and even eradicated if the person cannot conform as a strictly binary straight person.
The violence inherent in these beliefs is real. "Pray away the gay" involves not just the infliction of psychological trauma and violence, it can and has involved physical violence, as well. Moreover, the deployment of state and non-state violence to enforce this very narrow White Christian Nationalist and Christian fundamentalist social order and worldview is very much in play now.
If you voted for Trump because you wanted lower grocery prices, you're not going to get that. Instead, you're going to get an authoritarian theocracy, with social policy reflecting the beliefs of a small minority of mostly White, mostly evangelical, and very fundamentalist Christians.