On Feb. 13, 2025, the National Park Service is reported to have removed references to transgender people from its Stonewall National Monument website. The opening of the site now reads, “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal,” excluding its previous mentions of the transgender community. What used to be listed as “LGBTQ+” on the site, now only mentions “LGB.”
The uprising at Stonewall Inn was the spark of the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. After the gay bar was raided by police in 1969, people took to the streets and rioted. Stonewall Inn became the first national monument for gay rights on June 24, 2016, under the Obama administration. Former president Barack Obama commented that the monument would “tell the story of our struggle for LGBT rights.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul commented regarding the removal of transgender references on her X account, stating, “This is just cruel and petty. Transgender people play a critical role in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights — and New York will never allow their contributions to be erased.”
A report from ABC News shares that Angelica Christina, the Board Director of Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, insists, “In this fight, in this movement, it was also trans people, especially trans women of color, like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Black and brown trans women that stood at the forefront of this movement. We would not have pride as we know it today without trans people, without trans women.”
In the front lines of the Stonewall Inn riots was Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender woman. Johnson, an outspoken LGBTQ+ rights activist and advocate for queer of color, was a key figure not only in the riots, but in also advocating for resources to combat the AIDS epidemic.
The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) released a press statement responding to the removal of trans contributions at Stonewall National monument. Timothy Leonard, the Northeast Program Manager for the association, shared, “Erasing letters or webpages does not change the history or the contributions of our transgender community members at Stonewall or anywhere else.”
In the same press release, Mark Segal, an LGBTQ+ activist and NPCA Ambassador for Change stood firm in the belief that the spirit of Stonewall is to be visible and fight against oppression and that “this petty, vindictive action is an attempt to not only erase trans people from public view, but also the entire LGBT community. Stonewall, including all of us in the LGBT community who fought back that historic night and have continued to fight for 55 years, cannot and will not be erased. We will continue to fight, we will continue to be visible and persevere, and I urge all in our community to remember this day as the beginning of the second Stonewall rebellion.”
