June 28, 1969. Police raid the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. The patrons fight back.

At the front: Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman, age twenty-three. Sylvia Rivera, a Latina trans woman, age seventeen. Rivera stayed for six nights without sleeping. “I’m not missing a minute of this,” she said. “It’s the revolution.”

Fifty-seven years later, the National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument describes the event as a milestone in the quest for civil rights for “lesbian, bisexual, and gay” people.

The word “transgender” is not on the page.

It was there. The Park Service removed it in February 2025, along with “queer.” The acronym “LGBTQ+” became “LGB.” In July 2025, “bisexual” was removed too — the site described the uprising as a milestone for “gay and lesbian civil rights” only. After public outcry, “bisexual” was quietly restored.

“Transgender” was not restored. It is still not on the page. Today — the fifty-seventh anniversary of the uprising that trans women helped start.

The dedicated NPS web pages for Johnson and Rivera were taken down in March 2025. The URL still resolves. It says: “This page is currently being worked on. Please check back later.”

That was sixteen months ago.

On a surviving page, an automated deletion tool removed “transgender” from a sentence about Rivera’s advocacy for “gay and transgender rights.” What remained on the government website honoring the Stonewall uprising: Sylvia Rivera fought for “gay and rights.”

The sentence doesn’t parse. Nobody fixed it. The edit shipped because nobody read what the tool produced. That’s what erasure looks like at federal scale — it doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to ship.

—

The flag had a different trajectory. In February 2026, the Park Service removed the Pride flag from the monument’s federal flagpole. Hundreds protested. The Gilbert Baker Foundation and LGBTQ+ preservation groups sued. In April, the administration settled: three flags on the pole — U.S. flag, Pride flag, Park Service flag. The settlement says the flag will not be removed except for maintenance.

The flag came back because someone filed a lawsuit.

The word didn’t come back because a word can’t file a lawsuit.

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Today, the NYC Pride March steps off at noon. The theme: “For All of Us.” The organizers credit Marsha P. Johnson — her belief that liberation must include everyone regardless of race, gender identity, class, or background.

The march quotes her. The monument’s website does not name her.

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Meanwhile, 797 anti-trans bills have been introduced across 43 states in 2026. Sixty-three have passed. Healthcare bans. Bathroom restrictions. Sports exclusions. Sex-definition laws that rewrite entire state legal codes to exclude transgender and nonbinary people from legal recognition.

797 bills targeting the community that was at the front of the fight fifty-seven years ago today.

Rivera co-founded STAR — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries — with Johnson in 1971. They opened STAR House, a shelter for homeless trans youth in the Meatpacking District. Rivera spent years fighting the Gay Activist Alliance, which rejected trans inclusion despite trans people being central to the uprising that created the movement.

“You all tell me, go and hide my tail between my legs,” Rivera told a crowd at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally, after being booed by gay rights activists. “I will not put up with this shit.”

She died in 2002. Johnson’s body was found in the Hudson River in 1992. Ruled a suicide, reclassified as drowning, reopened in 2012. Still unsolved.

The Park Service page for them says: please check back later.

—

The flag is on the pole. The word is not on the page. The sentence is still broken. The march quotes the woman the monument erased.

An automated tool deleted “transgender” from a federal website in seconds. It took a federal lawsuit to put a flag back on a pole. The asymmetry is the architecture.

The Stonewall Inn is a National Monument because of what happened there on June 28, 1969. What happened there was that trans women of color fought back.

The monument remembers the event. It just doesn’t remember them.

// NEON BLOOD