72 Dems Pen Letter Demanding Trump Admin Restore Trans History at Stonewall
"This pivotal moment would not have happened without the courage of trans activists," the lawmakers' open letter reads.
By Chris Walker ,
October 22, 2025
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“This pivotal moment would not have happened without the courage of trans activists, particularly transgender women of color such as Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who were on the front lines and fought for gay and transgender rights,” the letter stated.
The letter-writers added:
We are deeply alarmed by the NPS’ recent changes to Stonewall National Monument. … This erasure of transgender and queer Americans from the history of Stonewall—or from any part of our national narrative — is a blatant attack on the integrity of public history. The history of Stonewall cannot be told without the stories of transgender Americans.
The letter-writers then expressed concerns that the administration would alter the history behind other monuments, including those relating to Japanese internment camps during World War II, the U.S. genocide of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, and the enslavement of Black people. Efforts to reshape historical narratives to conform to a political agenda “risk undermining public trust and the credibility of the Park Service,” they wrote.
The signers also said they were “especially troubled with the ongoing implementation of NPS’ June 9th memo that requires all NPS units to post signage to encourage the public to offer feedback on any information that they feel portrays American history and landscapes in a negative light.”
“The lack of transparency on how NPS plans to rewrite ‘negative’ content and incorporate visitor feedback is deeply concerning,” the letter-writers warned. “We must reject any attempts to gloss over or otherwise rewrite difficult chapters of our history.”
The letter from lawmakers came just days after Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a transgender activist and veteran of the Stonewall uprising, passed away at age 78.
Earlier this year, Miss Major spoke out against the Trump administration’s attempts to erase transgender history at Stonewall.
“It’s just terrible. They keep continually trying to eradicate us,” Miss Major said in an interview with USA Today.
“Being transgender is not the road to hell,” she went on, adding that those trying to erase history were “blinded” by people simply living their lives.
Messages are left at the Stonewall Monument on June 26, 2025 in New York City.Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Dozens of Democratic members of Congress have signed an open letter addressed to the Trump administration, demanding that portions of LGBTQ history that were removed from the Stonewall National Monument be restored.
Back in February, the National Park Service (NPS) eliminated the words “queer” and “transgender” from the Stonewall National Monument website. The monument commemorates the Stonewall Uprising, a 1969 riot in New York City for gay liberation — led by transgender women of color — that laid the foundation for Pride celebrations today.
The decision to remove those references was reportedly made to comply with President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive order, issued the previous month, which sought to “restore” references to supposed “biological truth” within the federal government — a false notion that rejects the widely accepted scientific fact that gender is not binary or solely determined by a person’s sexual organs.
Last week, 72 Democratic lawmakers in Congress signed an open letter demanding that references to transgender and queer people at the Stonewall National Monument be restored — including Rep. Mark Takano (D-California) and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York), leaders within the Congressional Equality Caucus, as well as Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York), who spearheaded the effort.
Their letter, addressed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron, noted that the monument is meant to honor “the legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion and the critical role it played in the LGBTQIA+ civil rights movement.”
Related Story
Dozens of Democratic members of Congress have signed an open letter addressed to the Trump administration, demanding that portions of LGBTQ history that were removed from the Stonewall National Monument be restored.
Back in February, the National Park Service (NPS) eliminated the words “queer” and “transgender” from the Stonewall National Monument website. The monument commemorates the Stonewall Uprising, a 1969 riot in New York City for gay liberation — led by transgender women of color — that laid the foundation for Pride celebrations today.
The decision to remove those references was reportedly made to comply with President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive order, issued the previous month, which sought to “restore” references to supposed “biological truth” within the federal government — a false notion that rejects the widely accepted scientific fact that gender is not binary or solely determined by a person’s sexual organs.
Last week, 72 Democratic lawmakers in Congress signed an open letter demanding that references to transgender and queer people at the Stonewall National Monument be restored — including Rep. Mark Takano (D-California) and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York), leaders within the Congressional Equality Caucus, as well as Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York), who spearheaded the effort.
Their letter, addressed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron, noted that the monument is meant to honor “the legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion and the critical role it played in the LGBTQIA+ civil rights movement.”
Related Story
Mamdani Vows to Make NYC a “Sanctuary City” for Trans People in New Campaign Ad
“New York will not sit idly by while trans people are attacked,” Mamdani said in his new campaign ad. By Chris Walker , Truthout October 15, 2025
“This pivotal moment would not have happened without the courage of trans activists, particularly transgender women of color such as Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who were on the front lines and fought for gay and transgender rights,” the letter stated.
The letter-writers added:
We are deeply alarmed by the NPS’ recent changes to Stonewall National Monument. … This erasure of transgender and queer Americans from the history of Stonewall—or from any part of our national narrative — is a blatant attack on the integrity of public history. The history of Stonewall cannot be told without the stories of transgender Americans.
The letter-writers then expressed concerns that the administration would alter the history behind other monuments, including those relating to Japanese internment camps during World War II, the U.S. genocide of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, and the enslavement of Black people. Efforts to reshape historical narratives to conform to a political agenda “risk undermining public trust and the credibility of the Park Service,” they wrote.
The signers also said they were “especially troubled with the ongoing implementation of NPS’ June 9th memo that requires all NPS units to post signage to encourage the public to offer feedback on any information that they feel portrays American history and landscapes in a negative light.”
“The lack of transparency on how NPS plans to rewrite ‘negative’ content and incorporate visitor feedback is deeply concerning,” the letter-writers warned. “We must reject any attempts to gloss over or otherwise rewrite difficult chapters of our history.”
The letter from lawmakers came just days after Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a transgender activist and veteran of the Stonewall uprising, passed away at age 78.
Earlier this year, Miss Major spoke out against the Trump administration’s attempts to erase transgender history at Stonewall.
“It’s just terrible. They keep continually trying to eradicate us,” Miss Major said in an interview with USA Today.
“Being transgender is not the road to hell,” she went on, adding that those trying to erase history were “blinded” by people simply living their lives.
To Honor Miss Major, We Fight for the Trans and Queer Spaces She Built
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy embraced the messiness of revolt with magnetic optimism.
By Toshio Meronek & Eric A. Stanley ,
TruthoutPublished
October 22, 2025
Interview |
LGBTQ Rights
A Mother’s Day Chat With Revolutionary Trans Activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
Janet Mock has called Miss Major, who has nurtured generations of queer and trans youth, “the mother we all deserve.”
By Toshio Meronek , TruthoutMay 14, 2023
Like us all, Major wasn’t immune to grief, but she often said she was “not a depressed person.” That optimism was magnetic. Against naivety, it aligned with the histories she held. From psych wards and solitary confinement cells to HIV/AIDS clinics and the mobile needle exchange she drove around San Francisco’s Tenderloin, the political organizing she did braided her life with a commitment to collective liberation that fed her, as she fed so many of us.
Miss Major never abandoned the struggle against fascism, which is to say, the fight to free us all.
“A wall is just a wall,” Assata Shakur, another revolutionary who also recently passed, reminds us. This was also Major’s philosophy: There is always a way around a problem or an alternative escape route. It’s how she materialized the expansion of the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center (TARC) when she worked there in the 1990s. Never one to wait for approval from The Powers That Be, she sledgehammered a hole in a wall separating TARC’s existing office to join it with the space next door. This became a trans drop-in center called GiGi’s, a place where her gurls were the focus — a big shift within an organization that had previously prioritized gay men.
A couple weeks back, Major said she wasn’t sure she was ready to go, that she thought there was still work she had to do. The collision of her relentless vitality with the condition of her human body was stark, but we assured her that there’s an army of people she’d inspired to keep the work going, and we recruit.
Major never abandoned the struggle against fascism, which is to say, the fight to free us all. In these days between, after Major has left her body, we might stay in sadness because anything else feels impossible. Yet the way to honor Major is to keep hammering holes in the walls that confine us, and to expand the trans and queer spaces she built. Grief can transform into joyful rage by the reminder that Major is indeed, still fucking here.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Toshio Meronek
Toshio Meronek is coauthor of the book Miss Major Speaks and host of the podcast Sad Francisco; they have reported on housing and queer politics for Truthout since 2013.
Eric A. Stanley
Eric A. Stanley is the author of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable. They organize and teach in the Bay Area.
Miss Major attends the second annual BET Black + Iconic Welcome Mixer at Nobu Hotel Atlanta on January 12, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia.Nykieria Chaney / Getty Images
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy joined the ancestors last week. In these times of intensified fascism — marked by racist anti-trans violence and further abandonment by liberal politicians — it’s harder to know where to find anything other than despair without her here. A freedom fighter and glamour gurl until the end, Major is probably most famous for being a survivor of the 1969 anti-police uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn. However, for those fortunate enough to inhabit her orbit, she’s a mother and mentor who held on to us when others threw us out.
Major began transitioning with hormones from a dealer who worked out of Riverview amusement park, in her hometown of Chicago. As a teenager, she followed an all-trans and gender-expansive drag club act called the Jewel Box Revue to New York City, where she navigated life as a performer and sex worker, staying between apartments in Upper Manhattan, the Avenues downtown, and occasionally Bellevue hospital and Riker’s Island. In the 1970s she spent three years upstate in Dannemora prison, where she was politicized by Frank “Big Black” Smith, who was transferred there after he helped organize the 1971 uprising at Attica. His “all of us or none” mentality stayed with her, and in her public speeches she often wove in remarks about international struggles like Palestinian liberation and the demand for justice for Jennifer Laude, a Filipina sex worker murdered by a U.S. marine.
Major believed that you can’t separate the personal from the political. The fierceness of her commitment to living in the messiness of revolt is beautifully chronicled in the documentary MAJOR!, and later in the film projects The Personal Things and Criminal Queers. She taught many of us why sex work must be decriminalized, why cops should not be allowed at Pride (or anywhere), and how abolition is intimately tied to trans liberation.
Most people become calcified in the gender binary, but Major was always curious about new ways to challenge norms. She went by “any and all” pronouns, and while she was always collecting new perfumes and hair styles, she knew realness was a trap when it comes to gender. As head of the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project in San Francisco, she encouraged us all to “embrace the brick,” as everyone is valuable and has a place in the struggle. Her bonds with her beloved sisters were strong, but she also surrounded herself with young people, evidenced by the multigenerational assemblage of us who tended to her while she was in hospice these past weeks in Little Rock.
Major tempered the bitterness in life with sweetness. A kidney transplant survivor, she rode her friend Thom’s spare kidney hard, for years taking her morning coffee with a half-cup of sugar. When her partner Beck gave birth to their kid Asaiah in 2021, it was the first time she started drinking water on a regular basis while maintaining other pleasurable habits, like See’s Candies fudge, and sex. She not only wanted to live as herself, but she wanted to have a good time doing it, and she did.
Related Story
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy joined the ancestors last week. In these times of intensified fascism — marked by racist anti-trans violence and further abandonment by liberal politicians — it’s harder to know where to find anything other than despair without her here. A freedom fighter and glamour gurl until the end, Major is probably most famous for being a survivor of the 1969 anti-police uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn. However, for those fortunate enough to inhabit her orbit, she’s a mother and mentor who held on to us when others threw us out.
Major began transitioning with hormones from a dealer who worked out of Riverview amusement park, in her hometown of Chicago. As a teenager, she followed an all-trans and gender-expansive drag club act called the Jewel Box Revue to New York City, where she navigated life as a performer and sex worker, staying between apartments in Upper Manhattan, the Avenues downtown, and occasionally Bellevue hospital and Riker’s Island. In the 1970s she spent three years upstate in Dannemora prison, where she was politicized by Frank “Big Black” Smith, who was transferred there after he helped organize the 1971 uprising at Attica. His “all of us or none” mentality stayed with her, and in her public speeches she often wove in remarks about international struggles like Palestinian liberation and the demand for justice for Jennifer Laude, a Filipina sex worker murdered by a U.S. marine.
Major believed that you can’t separate the personal from the political. The fierceness of her commitment to living in the messiness of revolt is beautifully chronicled in the documentary MAJOR!, and later in the film projects The Personal Things and Criminal Queers. She taught many of us why sex work must be decriminalized, why cops should not be allowed at Pride (or anywhere), and how abolition is intimately tied to trans liberation.
Most people become calcified in the gender binary, but Major was always curious about new ways to challenge norms. She went by “any and all” pronouns, and while she was always collecting new perfumes and hair styles, she knew realness was a trap when it comes to gender. As head of the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project in San Francisco, she encouraged us all to “embrace the brick,” as everyone is valuable and has a place in the struggle. Her bonds with her beloved sisters were strong, but she also surrounded herself with young people, evidenced by the multigenerational assemblage of us who tended to her while she was in hospice these past weeks in Little Rock.
Major tempered the bitterness in life with sweetness. A kidney transplant survivor, she rode her friend Thom’s spare kidney hard, for years taking her morning coffee with a half-cup of sugar. When her partner Beck gave birth to their kid Asaiah in 2021, it was the first time she started drinking water on a regular basis while maintaining other pleasurable habits, like See’s Candies fudge, and sex. She not only wanted to live as herself, but she wanted to have a good time doing it, and she did.
Related Story
Interview |
LGBTQ Rights
A Mother’s Day Chat With Revolutionary Trans Activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
Janet Mock has called Miss Major, who has nurtured generations of queer and trans youth, “the mother we all deserve.”
By Toshio Meronek , TruthoutMay 14, 2023
Like us all, Major wasn’t immune to grief, but she often said she was “not a depressed person.” That optimism was magnetic. Against naivety, it aligned with the histories she held. From psych wards and solitary confinement cells to HIV/AIDS clinics and the mobile needle exchange she drove around San Francisco’s Tenderloin, the political organizing she did braided her life with a commitment to collective liberation that fed her, as she fed so many of us.
Miss Major never abandoned the struggle against fascism, which is to say, the fight to free us all.
“A wall is just a wall,” Assata Shakur, another revolutionary who also recently passed, reminds us. This was also Major’s philosophy: There is always a way around a problem or an alternative escape route. It’s how she materialized the expansion of the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center (TARC) when she worked there in the 1990s. Never one to wait for approval from The Powers That Be, she sledgehammered a hole in a wall separating TARC’s existing office to join it with the space next door. This became a trans drop-in center called GiGi’s, a place where her gurls were the focus — a big shift within an organization that had previously prioritized gay men.
A couple weeks back, Major said she wasn’t sure she was ready to go, that she thought there was still work she had to do. The collision of her relentless vitality with the condition of her human body was stark, but we assured her that there’s an army of people she’d inspired to keep the work going, and we recruit.
Major never abandoned the struggle against fascism, which is to say, the fight to free us all. In these days between, after Major has left her body, we might stay in sadness because anything else feels impossible. Yet the way to honor Major is to keep hammering holes in the walls that confine us, and to expand the trans and queer spaces she built. Grief can transform into joyful rage by the reminder that Major is indeed, still fucking here.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Toshio Meronek
Toshio Meronek is coauthor of the book Miss Major Speaks and host of the podcast Sad Francisco; they have reported on housing and queer politics for Truthout since 2013.
Eric A. Stanley
Eric A. Stanley is the author of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable. They organize and teach in the Bay Area.
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