Marsha P. Johnson’s family and Garden State Equality are speaking out against the Trump administration’s erasure of transgender people from LGBTQ+ history.
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Activists protested Friday against the National Park Service's removal of the "T" from the "LGBTQ+" acronym as well as any references to transgender people from the official Stonewall National Monument website on Thursday. The erasure follows Trump's executive orders denying the existence of trans people and removing them from other government websites along with LGBTQ+ resources.
The Marsha P. Johnson Family Foundation and New Jersey-based Garden State Equality — Johnson was from New Jersey — released statements on the erasure.
“This is not just an erasure of words — it is an erasure of history,” said Johnson’s cousin James Carey, president of the Marsha P. Johnson Family Foundation. “The Stonewall Uprising was led by trans and queer people of color, including my cousin, Marsha P. Johnson, alongside Sylvia Rivera and countless others whose courage sparked the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. Stripping trans and queer identities from the narrative of Stonewall is a deliberate and dangerous attempt to rewrite history.
“Marsha fought for a world where no one had to live in fear because of who they are. Her legacy, and the legacy of the trans community, is inseparable from Stonewall. We call on the National Park Service and the Trump administration to immediately restore accurate, inclusive language to the Stonewall National Monument webpage.
“Our history will not be erased. Our community will not be silenced. And our fight, in honor of Marsha P. Johnson and so many others who came before, continues.”
“The erasure of transgender and queer people from this pivotal moment in the fight for lived and legal equality is disgraceful,” added Aedy Miller, communications manager for Garden State Equality. “Shamelessly attempting to remove transgender and queer people from the historical narrative does not change the fact that they were there. It does not change the fact that transgender and queer people were often the leaders of the fight. And it does not change the fact that the rights and protections we enjoy today are the direct results of decades of activism by transgender and queer people — both those whose names we know, like New Jersey’s own Marsha P. Johnson, and the countless whose names we’ll never know but whose legacy we honor nonetheless.”
Johnson died under mysterious circumstances at age 46 in 1992. She disappeared July 4, 1992, and her body was pulled from the Hudson River two days later. She had a wound in the back of her head, according to eyewitness accounts, so it is unlikely she died by suicide. No one has ever been held responsible for her death.
