Step Right Up, Folks!
Welcome to the newest game show in the grand political circus: The Great Erasure! Brought to you by the same fine folks who think banning books will somehow stop people from reading, and who swear history is best told by those who weren’t even there!
Our contestants today? The entire transgender and queer community, who, against all odds, somehow keep existing despite the best efforts of those who believe deleting words from websites is the same as deleting people from reality.
This week’s episode features a spectacular vanishing act: the U.S. National Park Service removing all references to “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall National Monument’s webpage [1]. That’s right, folks! The very site that commemorates the queer uprising of 1969—led in no small part by transgender activists—is now curiously absent of transgender people. It’s like talking about the Civil Rights Movement without mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., or the moon landing without acknowledging, well, the moon.
But fear not, dear reader! If you, too, wish to participate in the fine art of historical revisionism, here’s a foolproof three-step guide to making entire communities disappear—no magic wand required!
Step One: Pretend They Were Never There
Let’s start with a classic: just act like transgender and queer people never existed in the first place. Simple, right? Like a cheap knockoff magician at a children’s party, the trick is all about distraction.
Take, for example, the removal of “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall National Monument’s webpage. The government, in a move so bold it belongs in a history textbook (that they’ll later ban), decided that if they just scrubbed a few pesky words from a website, no one would notice!
Brilliant! It’s like pretending dinosaurs never existed by erasing them from the Museum of Natural History! Or better yet, like refusing to acknowledge the existence of gravity and then acting shocked when things still fall down.
But don’t stop there—why limit the fun to just Stonewall? Why not erase transgender and queer people from all historical narratives? Maybe rewrite the Renaissance to remove all the gay painters. Perhaps we pretend Shakespeare wasn’t at least a little fruity? The possibilities are endless!
Step Two: If You Can’t Erase Them, Rebrand Them
Okay, so let’s say the erasure plan hits a little snag—maybe people start asking pesky questions like, “Hey, wasn’t Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender activist, kind of important to Stonewall?” No problem! Just rebrand the movement as a vague, unthreatening struggle for “generic rights.”
Instead of acknowledging that queer and transgender people fought for liberation, just say it was a “local dispute over nightlife regulations.” Instead of discussing the HIV/AIDS crisis that devastated the LGBTQ+ community, just refer to it as “an unfortunate public health episode.” Instead of recognizing that queer people have existed throughout human history, simply say they are “a recent cultural trend.”
See? So easy! History is so much tidier when you vacuum-seal it for straight consumption!
Step Three: If They Still Exist, Make Them the Villains
Now, here’s where things get spicy. If Step One and Step Two fail (and let’s be honest, they always do because trans and queer people stubbornly refuse to stop existing), then it’s time for the final move: scapegoating.
We’ve already seen this tactic in full swing. Drag performers? Suddenly public enemy number one! Trans athletes? A national security crisis! Gender-affirming healthcare? A dangerous radical experiment, despite being endorsed by every major medical organization in the world!
Why let people live their lives in peace when you can manufacture moral panics for political gain? It’s the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook. Just find a marginalized group, whip up hysteria about how they are somehow a threat to the social order, and voila! You’ve successfully distracted from, oh, I don’t know, actual crises like poverty, climate change, or the ever-widening wealth gap.
The Grand Finale: Will It Work?
Now, here’s the fun part: none of this actually works in the long run.
You see, history has a funny way of remembering things. You can scrub the word “transgender” from a webpage, but you can’t erase Marsha P. Johnson from the streets of history. You can ban drag in Tennessee, but you can’t unmake RuPaul. You can pretend queer people don’t exist, but you can’t stop millions from living their truth every single day.
Much like how Prohibition didn’t stop people from drinking, and how banning books just makes people want to read them more, this grand erasure scheme is doomed to fail. Because queer people? We’re stubborn as hell. We’re not just part of history; we make history. And no amount of government-sanctioned white-out can change that.
So, What’s Next?
The question isn’t whether the erasure will succeed—it won’t. The real question is: How will we fight back?
Maybe it starts with something as simple as saying their names: Marsha P. Johnson. Sylvia Rivera. Audre Lorde. Bayard Rustin. Harvey Milk. Maybe it’s showing up for protests, calling out erasure when we see it, and making sure the next generation knows the truth that history books might try to hide.
Or maybe—just maybe—it’s about reminding those in power of one simple truth:
No matter how many words they try to erase, we’re still here. We’ve always been here. And we’re not going anywhere.
My Final Thought:
In the grand tradition of Stonewall, let’s make some noise. Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that silence is never the answer. And unlike certain government officials, we refuse to forget.
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