As historians who have contributed our expertise on the history of sexuality and gender to National Park Service (NPS) publications, we denounce the federal government’s politically motivated and partisan-driven falsification of the well-documented and accurately interpreted LGBTQ history and, in particular, the contribution of transgender and gender non-conforming people. We denounce the erasure of trans and gender-variant people who were centrally involved in the Stonewall Rebellion, which have been deemed worthy of the country’s highest historic designation. And we denounce as well the unapproved alteration of historical scholarship that we and our colleagues have provided in good faith to help tell the textured stories of our past.

As George Orwell noted in 1984: whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past. We understand the petty attempt to erase the existence of trans people to be part of a broader Orwellian effort to literally rewrite the past, with utter disregard for empirical evidence.

The NPS is one of the government’s most powerful conveyors of our collective history. We are among a group of historians who were invited by the NPS to contribute to an LGBTQ history theme study and related offshoots. Among our contributions, we produced a 1,600 page report, several new nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and new National Historic Landmark designations, and additions and amendments to existing historic sites. This work also helped lead to the creation of the Stonewall National Monument to better document and represent the historical contributions of LGBTQ people to this country. Published in late 2016, the LGBTQ Theme Study was one of several first-of-their-kind studies conducted during this period, marking a new chapter in the NPS’s mission to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the NPS for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” Through these efforts, the NPS provided the American public with tools to grapple with some of the most difficult lessons of our collective past to imagine and build a better future.

We participated in this effort because we know that LGBTQ history has always been American history, despite the fact that it has historically been misrepresented, marginalized, or entirely erased. For many of us, working with an agency of a government that has exploited, oppressed, and repressed us was a challenge. It was by design that the first LGBTQ archives and museums were created at the grassroots level by members of our community and not entrusted to the government. We cautiously set aside our concerns because of the importance of recognizing the role of LGBTQ people in our national history. Government recognition of the Stonewall Inn, among other sites, was symbolically important. Recognizing the historic importance of that site also acknowledged the role of police abuse, harassment, violence, and government repression. In setting aside our concerns, we were and remain insistent that the NPS truthfully place transgender and gender non-conforming people–several of whom were people of color–at the center of the story. To do so is to faithfully honor the evidence in the historic record.

Last week, many NPS websites began to undergo strategic editing and erasure in order to comply with President Trump’s flurry of executive orders, several of which attempt to impose new and repressive gender, racial, and sexual ideologies. These erasures included the removal of transgender people from the collective history the NPS tells us about our nation. 

We see this not just as an attempted erasure of trans existence, but also an attempt to divide the LGBTQ community, a tactic that has been disgracefully successful before in the larger struggle for civil rights and protections for sexual and gender minorities. If lesbians, gays, and bisexual people take comfort under the false notion that their continued recognition as “LGB”--the acronym the NPS adopted in its editing of our research in order to comply with Trump’s executive orders–renders them safe from similar erasure or the harassment and violence such erasure invites, it would not be the first time. We implore the larger LGBTQ community, as well as all those invested in telling accurate history, not to fall for this ruse again. 

We plead for our history, our present, and our future so that people both within and beyond the LGBTQ community see this for what it is: the silencing of our past and the politically motivated manipulation and distortion of factual history with the intent to embolden those who seek to harm us. Our history has taught us to resist this.

Katie Batza

Julio Capó

Susan Ferentinos

Marc Stein

Susan Stryker

Tracy Baim

Drew Bourn

Gail Dubrow

Steve Estes

Jack Gieseking

Christina Hanhardt

Emily Hobson

Loraine Hutchins

Ellie Hernandez

David Johnson

Gerard Koskovich

Mark Meinke

Leisa Meyer

Will Roscoe

Wendy Rouse

Katie Schweighofer

Jay Shockley

Shayne Watson