As many of you know, on February 13, 2025, claiming to be following recent discriminatory executive orders, the National Park Service (NPS) erased the words “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall National Monument website. Transgender people have always been at the heart of the LGBTQ+ rights movement — from the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, where transgender women fought against police harassment, to the 1969 Stonewall Riots, where transgender women of color Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — along with Black butch lesbian Stormé DeLarverie — were at the center of the riots that catalyzed the modern gay rights movement.

The History Project condemns these ahistorical changes and the erasure of trans contributions from gay histories.

However, as LGBTQ+ historians, we are not surprised. The first step in dehumanizing a group is erasing its memory, culture, and history. This playbook is not new: one of the first things the Nazi regime destroyed was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sex Research. Transgender people, alongside other marginalized groups, including Jewish and Roma people, threatened Nazi ideology by simply existing. The actions of the NPS are a blatant attempt to erase the contributions of transgender and queer people from American History in order to further villainize the trans community.

These government agency erasures are also happening on a local level. The NPS erased queer and trans narratives from the Boston National Historical Site, Boston African American National Historic Site, and the Longfellow House Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site websites. Projects like the Beacon Hill "Their Dreams, Their Rights, and Their Love" LGBTQ+ History Audio Tour, an LGBTQ+ guide to the Longfellow House, and "Gay and Lesbian Town Meeting," are now unavailable on the NPS website.

No government body can change the reality of queer and transgender people. As Boston’s queer community archive, we exist to protect and share our own histories. To that point, our events with Park Rangers exploring queer and trans narratives in parks are available freely and publicly on our YouTube channel. You can also find NPS queer history on the Internet Archive. 

We will not stand for a historical narrative that omits the reality of our existence, join us in protecting and sharing LGBTQ+ history:

• Demand Accountability: Contact the National Park Service and your elected officials to reinstate transgender and queer histories in our national sites.
• Support Community Archives like The History Project: Donate funds or historical materials, volunteer your time, and share the word with your networks.
• Combat Misinformation: Share this message, amplify trans and queer history, and fight erasure with facts.