Greetings from New Orleans. I’m writing this at my dearest friend’s house in Algiers Point. I have to admit, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of getting on a plane with the looming prospect of Elon Musk and his Teen Fascism Brigade playing with the Federal Aviation Administration like a game of “RollerCoaster Tycoon.” But here I am!
And hopefully, I will make it home alive, because since I’ve gotten here, things with the FAA have only gotten worse.
There’s no aspect of life that the Trump-Musk Administration isn’t going to fuck up and make harder for literally every person in the U.S., including the dumb fucks who voted for Trump (mind you, no one voted for Musk, but joke’s on all of us, I guess!). This is especially true for people that Trump and Musk don’t like: Black, brown, indigenous and other people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, immigrants, asylum seekers, the poor, the mentally ill, unionized workers… The list goes on and on.
The damage that Trump and Musk are doing to this country and the speed at which they are moving is truly staggering. Every time I look at the news, I see another story that makes me want to cry and/or scream and/or puke.
But today, I want to talk about transgender erasure. And if you’re thinking, “Ugh. Another column about transgender people?” then you are more than welcome to fuck off.
Protesters gathered at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City on Valentine’s Day after all references to transgender people were removed from The National Park Service’s website.
“[T]he words ‘transgender’ and ‘queer’ had been deleted from text that had been on the site,” reports CBS News. “Also, the letters T and Q were cut from various references to the acronym LGBTQ and replaced with phrases like the ‘LGB rights movement’ or ‘LGB civil rights.’”
If you know anything about the Stonewall Riot, then you know that transgender people had a hell of a lot to do with this pivotal moment in LGBTQ+ history, especially Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Now, according to the federal government, Johnson and Rivera didn’t exist and do not matter.
“They’re trying to literally cis-wash, if you will, LGBTQ history by taking trans folks and saying they didn’t exist then and don’t exist now,” Stacy Lentz, CEO of The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative and a co-owner of The Stonewall Inn, told CBS News. “It is very alarming.”
Alarming is one word for it. We are literally witnessing the government erase trans people in the past and present, which certainly doesn’t bode well for the future. And let’s be clear, we’re talking about Republicans here. While there are some Democrats who are awful on this issue, trans erasure is a pivotal part of the Republican platform.
At the protest, people were bearing signs like “No T? All Shade!” and “Can’t spell HIS-ORY without the T,” according to author Hugh Ryan who was at the protest and wrote about it for Slate.
“[A]s a queer historian, I know that the erasure of history, while it might seem unimportant in the moment, is in fact always a crucial step on the road to autocracy,” wrote Ryan. “Indeed, the specific case of ‘deleting’ trans people from the record is an action with a deeply troubling, almost century-old precedent — one that should motivate us all to resist its repetition aggressively today.”
In other words, this is scary as hell. For everyone, not just trans people. Ryan also brings up the fact that there are people in the LGBTQ+ community who don’t actually want transgender people to exist, either.
“There is a contingent of people even in the gay community who are actively working to distance themselves from trans people and to erase our historical connections,” Hugh writes. “For them, ‘LGB’ is not vandalism, but a victory. However, let’s be clear here too: These people are absolutely wrong, and making this argument is a sign of their willful ignorance and transphobia. Because if there is one place in American history where trans existence has been well documented for decades, it’s Stonewall.”
And while willful ignorance and transphobia are all the rage in the U.S. right now, any “LGB” individual who thinks that this has nothing to do with them is sorely mistaken. If you aren’t standing up for transgender people right now, you’re complicit in this erasure effort.