I initially wrote ”The Very Queer History of the Suffrage Movement” in 2020, at the request of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission (WSCC). The article was based on my extensive research on the topic, which was later published in Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022). In late 2020, officials from the National Park Service (NPS) requested to host the article on their website. I granted them permission to do so.

            Five years later, on February 13, 2025, in response to orders from the Trump administration, NPS began to erase all references to transgender and queer people from its websites and replace the acronym LGBTQ+ (for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, plus) with LGB. Changes to the Stonewall National Monument website in particular ignited public uproar, culminating in protests at the site of the Stonewall Inn the following day.

            On February 14, 2025, I noticed that my article on queer suffragists had also been altered. All references to gender and the specific words transgender, non-binary, gender-fluid, and butch had been removed. These revisions were made without my knowledge and consent, distorting the original thesis of the article and reflecting an inaccurate and incomplete view of history with the intent of erasing transgender and gender-queer people from the historical record. 

            The erasures by the NPS are especially troubling given that my research was an attempt to counter the erasure of the queer history of the suffrage movement. Many of the suffragists I studied had same-sex intimate relationships and might have defined themselves as lesbian or bisexual in today’s terms. Some also had sexually radical politics, which makes them queer. Others challenged conventional gender norms in ways that make them recognizably trans. The pathologizing of same-sex relationships, transness, and gender non-conformity, especially in the homophobic and transphobic post-World War Two era, led to attempts to obscure the queer lives of suffragists. Some suffragists, fearing government persecution and retribution during the era known as the Lavender Scare, hid their own queer and gender-nonconforming past. Those that refused to conceal their histories sometimes nevertheless found their stories obscured by others. Descendants destroyed evidence by burning photographs, letters, and diaries. Biographers further sanitized the lives of queer and trans suffragists, erasing their history from the public memory of the women’s suffrage movement. My research on this subject was an attempt to meticulously reconstruct this lost history from what little remained.

            In this context, the recent attempt by the Trump administration to erase selective aspects of the queer and trans past is simply reprehensible. Reducing the complexity of their social identities and lived experiences is at odds with both the historical record and the ways that we talk and think about LGBTQ+ issues today. I contacted the NPS and objected to the unauthorized edits, insisting on the restoration of the original version of the article. I was told that NPS staff were complying with “policies outlined in recent Executive and Secretarial Orders.” They then informed me that they would remove my article entirely from the website rather than alter my original work. OutHistory quickly offered to host the article on this site. Here, you can compare the original version of the article as written in 2020 with the version edited by the government in 2025.

            The Trump administration has continued its purge of the NPS and other governmental websites.  Government officials have removed all materials that reference transgender and gender-queer history, including LGBTQ America, the important 2016 theme study on LGBTQ history written by over thirty historians and published by the National Park Foundation. This suppression of scholarly research has occurred within the much larger historical context of the Trump administration’s repugnant campaign to dehumanize transgender and gender-queer people and deprive them of their basic civil rights.

For the original 2020 version, which was posted on the National Park Service website for five years, click here.

For the altered 2025 version, which later was taken down from the National Park Service website, click here.

Wendy L. Rouse is a Professor of History at San Jose State University. Her scholarly research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality and she has published three books based on her research. Her most recent book, Public Faces, Secret Lives: The Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022) was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award and earned an Honorable Mention for the Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. Research for the book was supported by a Mellon-Schlesinger grant from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. Rouse’s scholarly research has also been published in the Pacific Historical Review, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Western Historical Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and Girlhood Studies.