Donald Trump’s administration has been infamously transphobic. Back in January, Trump signed an executive order attempting to erase transgender and nonbinary people from legal existence. Now, we’re seeing federal actions to erase the very mention of trans individuals from a landmark of queer history: earlier in February, the National Park Service (NPS) removed every mention of the word “transgender” from its webpage for the Stonewall National Monument. Every “LGBTQ+” was edited to read “LGB.”

The Stonewall Uprising lasted nearly a week in 1969—a week of protests and rioting in response to the violent police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was the spark of the gay rights movement in the United States. 

Trans people were integral to this movement. The Stonewall Inn was frequented by trans folks and drag queens, in addition to gay men and butch lesbians. During the raid itself, cops performed genital checks on trans and cross-dressing patrons; anyone wearing clothes that didn’t align with the sex they were assigned at birth faced brutality and arrest. By most accounts it was Stormé DeLarverie, a butch lesbian and drag king, who incited the riot itself, but trans individuals, especially transgender women of color like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major Griffin Gracy, and Zazu Nova, were on the front lines, wielding Molotov cocktails and bricks. 

Stonewall was a cornerstone of the gay rights movement, and trans activists played a key role in the uprising and the subsequent protests. Within weeks of the Stonewall Uprising, Sylvia Rivera had co-founded the Gay Liberation Front; within a year, she and Marsha P. Johnson had co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) to help homeless transgender youth. Miss Major Griffin Gracy, now 84 years old, has been fighting for queer rights and Black liberation for 50 years. 

To erase trans people from Stonewall would be to erase the accomplishments of trans activists who dedicated their lives to the queer rights movement. There would be no LGB rights without the T. 

Trans People Have Always Been Here

We can’t erase trans people from history, including global history. Donald Trump may claim that transgender identities were “invented by the radical left,” but trans people have always existed—on every continent, in every time period throughout history. Consider, for example, the world’s first transgender clinic: The Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, which was founded by a gay Jewish doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld, in 1919 and was performing gender affirming surgeries as early as 1930. Although he didn’t use the terms we use today, Hirschfeld was supportive of transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and gender fluid identities.