The National Park Service has erased references to transgender people from its website for the Stonewall National Monument, a historical site in lower Manhattan where a series of 1969 police raids on the gay bar Stonewall Inn sparked riots and demonstrations.
The protests reinvigorated the gay rights movement of the late 1960s, making Stonewall one of the most famous sites in the country for both gay and transgender history.
References to transgender activists’ role in the Stonewall riots were scrubbed Thursday from the NPS website for the monument and the NPS phone app. The umbrella abbreviation for queer people — LGBTQIA+ — was also shortened to LGB or LGBQ across the website, erasing the letters that represent transgender, queer, intersex and asexual people.
“Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal,” the website now states. “The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.”
