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Erasing Stonewall’s Trans History Betrays a Losing Hand

Riki Wilchins

The National Parks Service has erased all mention of trans people from Stonewall National Monument, but erasure will not stop us.

[The following was originally published by AssignedMedia.com ]

Stonewall National Park Monument of Two Kinda Gay Guys

The spontaneous multi-day fight with the NYPD by thousands of LGBTQ+ New Yorkers that became known as the Stonewall Riot (aka the Stonewall Uprising) began on June 28, 1969, when the police carried out yet another anti-gay raid at the Greenwich Village bar.

Although it was preceded by the 1959 Cooper Do-nuts Riot in Los Angeles and the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the uprising at the Stonewall Inn is generally credited with launching the modern gay rights movement.

The Inn was, to put it bluntly, a dive bar that operated without a liquor license and was owned by the Genovese crime family. As one of the last survivors of that era would tell the Guardian : “The inside was mostly plywood and dark. The best thing in there was the jukebox. The walls were wet in there because the air conditioning didn’t work too well. And the place had a kind of stale beer smell going through it.”

It was known for it’s clientele of low-income hustlers, effeminate young gay men, butch lesbians, and of course Black and Latina drag queens and trans women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.

They were the kind of people unwelcome in the city’s few, less-seedy gay establishments. Their spontaneous explosion of anger at well-armed cops that night arose from a combination of desperation because they had no place else to go, and from resentment at being so regularly and casually abused by the NYPD. Despite its misportrayal in Roland Emmerich’s dismal 2015 movie Stonewall , the riot was not instigated by wealthy white men.

In 2016, President Obama officially designated the site as the Stonewall National Monument , with its centerpiece the tiny Christopher Street Park sitting between two narrow streets that run outside the location where the Inn used to be.

But on Thursday, following President Trump’s discriminatory orders that seek to make two sexes federal policy, the National Park Service’s website scrubbed all reference to the transgender people who launched the very uprising it commemorates.

Across the entire National Parks Service website, LGBTQ+ was reduced to LGBQ+. And then the Q+ was scrubbed as well, so that everything now reads “LGB.”

I know I’m supposed to be outraged here, and on some level I really am. I lived around the block from the park and went to the Duchess, a lesbian bar on the corner, for years.

But with outrage, I’m also mordantly amused. It is safe to say that scrubbing history is not a sign of holding a winning hand.

Like China forcing Google to delete all searchable references to Tiananmen Square, it displays the immediate, authoritarian power to censor — but it is not a move made out of confidence in one’s position. On the contrary, it is a move made out of fear of what knowledge can do, how it might spread and how seductive its truth is.

In sum, I think they are afraid of us.

The truth of every transgender body undermines their fictive ideal of two simple, binary sexes along with cisgender society’s endless fetishization of sexual dimorphism — and nothing is going to scrub that away.

How we might ask, can a truth of nature — like the speed of light or the existence of hydrogen — be so incredibly fragile that it demands the power of the federal government to intervene?

It cannot.

And bigots are right to be worried. First of all, our numbers are increasing.

According to a 2024 Gallup poll, 0.2 percent of my Baby Boomer generation identified as trans. Today, 2.8 percent of Gen Z identify as trans.

Just to put that in perspective, at 70 million people , Gen Z is the largest cohort alive and the biggest in US history: that’s nearly two million trans people. Does anyone think that number will be lower in Gen Alpha and Gen Beta?

Second, while it certainly doesn’t feel like it in important ways, we’re winning this fight. Before you prep that nasty flame-mail hear me out.

Trans people, once so obscure that a simple cover story in Time magazine about the “The Transgender Tipping Point” could make international headlines, are now on the front page of every newspaper nearly every day. The world is focused on trans people. Does anyone think a magazine cover would even generate a ripple anymore?

Second, while there are lots of people who may not know how they feel about strange bodies like mine, they do know they are repelled and sickened by the immense power of the federal government being brought to bear with such cruelty on a small, already beleaguered minority.

It once took the uncountable loses of the AIDS epidemic to put gay people front and center in the American consciousness, and to finally begin building public empathy for us. Call me crazy, but in my gut, I think somewhere, something like that may be going on with us right now.

Yes, we are being hurt, and yes we are losing people we love, because hurt and loss are the unavoidable consequences of being in a fight for your very life. I have no intention of covering that up or playing it down in the slightest.

But make no mistake, we are winning. Eventually people will be repulsed and tired of the ugliness, revolted enough by this hatred that they will put the country back on a path toward honesty and justice.

Transphobia like this is not our future, it’s our past.

So we walk through the pain while we try to keep our eyes on the horizon. Because as I recently wrote , you can take away my pronouns, my passport, my prison cell, my hormones, & my bathroom (and now my Park), but I’m still trans. I’m still here. We’re not going anywhere.

And tomorrow there will be more of me. I’m not scared, I’m fighting mad. You can’t have my life. It’s mine. Because we are #WhatTheFutureOfGenderLooksLike

Riki Wilchins writes a daily news ticker of trans stories as they break at @rikiwilchins.bsky.social and blogs on trans theory and politics at medium.com/@rikiwilchins. Her latest books are and BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens and WHEN TEXAS CAME for OUR KIDS: How Evangelical Extremists Launched a War on Transgender Teens.