Thousands of people gathered around near the Stonewall Monument in New York City’s Christopher Park this afternoon to protest the National Park Service (NPS) removing all mentions of transgender and queer people from the webpage for the monument commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Riots.
The NPS did this to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting any official recognition of transgender people within U.S. departments, agencies and workforces.
The outrage from this action sparked a demonstration near the memorial scheduled for February 14 at 12 p.m. local time.
An estimated 1,000 protestors assembled at the Stonewall Monument at around noon with the crowd continuing to grow.
A quick history of the Stonewall Riots & its notable trans veterans
The Stonewall Riots were a series of protests in New York City from June 28 to July 3, 1969. At the time, homosexuality and gender nonconformity was illegal throughout the nation, and locations where LGBTQ+ people congregated were subjected to police raids.
One such meeting place was the Stonewall Inn, a gay tavern in Greenwich Village. During one of these raids, patrons decided they had enough of being harassed and criminalized by law enforcement and began to fight back sparking a six-day riot that became a turning point for LGBTQ+ rights and marked the start of the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.
It is widely held believed that the two main participants of these riots were Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera, along with Zazu Nova who is believed by many to have thrown the legendary “first brick” — all three individuals are transgender women.
Found on mainstream news.