NPS takes down web pages dedicated to transgender activists

Just weeks after references to transgender people vanished from the website for the Stonewall National Monument, National Park Service web pages once dedicated to figures such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera have now disappeared.

Both were transgender activists and key figures in the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. That protest against police during a raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar became a flashpoint in the struggle for LGBTQ civil rights (A photograph of Johnson remains on the NPS site, but with no mention of her role.)

This is part of an ongoing move by the federal government to remove and alter National Park Service webpages related to LGBTQ history.

Much of the censorship appears to be slipshod. Some links to a “theme study,” containing dozens of pages of research about LGBTQ U.S. history, are now dead; others work fine. The letters “T” and “Q,” standing for “transgender” and “queer,” have been excised from the LGBTQ acronym on some NPS webpages but remain on others. And an NPS page dedicated to the achievements of Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist and an Episcopal priest, and that discusses her gender identity, no longer works, but a link that shows her family home remains active.

The NPS has completely shut down several sites including one about Philadelphia gay history, one that commemorated a now-closed Black LGBTQ bar in Washington D.C. and a page about an eighteenth century American preacher who appears to have been gender nonconforming.

“These efforts to tamper with our history set an unacceptable precedent,” said Alan Spears, a senior director at the National Parks Conservation Association, in a statement. “LGBTQ+ history is history, period. It should remain represented at national parks and on the National Park Service website, so that people all over the world can learn about it from the best of the best in the history preservation business.”

“As mandated by law, dedicated National Park Service staff have poured more than one hundred years of work into preserving, protecting, and interpreting the stories that built our nation,” the statement continued. “By removing these educational and historical materials from public access, the administration is making it harder for National Park Service staff to fulfill their obligation to tell the stories of all Americans and maintain an accurate account of history.”

The National Parks Conservation Association is a nonpartisan group established in 1919 to help protect the national parks. It called on the federal government to immediately restore the deleted material. In response to NPR’s request for comment, an NPS spokesperson emailed, “The National Park Service is implementing Executive Order 14168 and Secretary’s Order 2416:  Federal Register: Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government [and] SO 3416 – Ending DEI Programs and Gender Ideology Extremism.”

Michael Bronski, a Harvard University history professor, noted that a disproportionate number of the erasures affected webpages about Black activists and spaces. And he ruefully pointed out that one of the NPS sites that deleted references to queer and transgender Americans was about Cold War attempts to purge LGBTQ people from the government.

“I really see this as a symbolic attack,” said Bronski, who authored the 2011 book A Queer History of the United States. “The impulse behind it is to symbolically eradicate all of this progress: all of the government recognitions, gay rights, the presence of gay pride, flags on government buildings.”

“Since you can’t get rid of transpeople or gay people, or bisexual people, or queer people, you can try to get rid of documentation about us,” he added. “That means you’re trying to rewrite history.”