Protesters Rally Against Deletion of Transgender on Stonewall Website

A day after the National Park Service deleted the word “transgender” from prominent spots on its Stonewall National Monument website, hundreds of people rallied at the monument site on Friday to protest the move and what they feared might come next there.It was unclear whether federal officials planned to make physical alterations to eliminate references to transgender people at Stonewall, the first historic site in the United States devoted to the country’s gay rights movement.The Park Service, which had cited a presidential order as the reason for the website changes, did not respond to a request for comment.So on Friday, at least, a pink, blue and white flag representing the transgender community continued to fly on the flagpole in Christopher Park in the chilly sunshine, and plaques and photo displays honoring well-known transgender activists continued to hang on a park fence.Still, Jay Walker, a protest organizer, said he was “not sure how long that would last.”The sudden elimination of the words “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall website on Thursday — part of a larger Trump administration campaign to challenge the legitimacy of transgender identity — struck members of New York City’s L.G.B.T.Q.

community and others as a chilling attack on the symbolic heart of the gay rights movement.“The removal of references to transgender people from federal websites and even from this monument’s history is an act of deliberate erasure,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat, told the crowd.“It’s an attack on the truth.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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