I'm surprised that they bothered to replace the sign at all. I'd expect them to just remove it, the way they've eliminated all mention of homosexuality in other parts of the government.
I suspect that the monument itself will be disestablished, as soon as they get around to it.
This isn't just a "monument" in the sense of a statue. It's a National Monument, like Devils Tower or the Little Bighorn Battlefield.
But yes, they absolutely could decide that LGBT history is not worth celebrating in the same way we've decided that treason and slave-owning isn't worth celebrating.
But it's a little unclear on why they decided that quite so much of our history should be about those particular people. They never seemed to want to supplement other statues to remember more of history.
> When describing the Stonewall Uprising, the website now reads: "Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal, but the events at the Stonewall Inn sparked fresh momentum for the LGB civil rights movement!"
Were there any laws that affected trans people at all, though? There were laws against homosexual sex (covered by LGB), but I don't recall any laws about expressing gender identity.
Yes. Raids on queer bars would round up people up, and arrest any gender non-conforming people wearing fewer than three articles of clothing of their assigned sex. Terminology was different at the time, but people we would probably now describe as trans men or trans women were some of the main targets of those arrests.
There were laws in many places in the states that banned "crossdressing" which was applied to trans and gay people alike. While the specific term "transgender" hasn't been around very long, the gay community has always included a lot of gender-nonconformity. It's part of the reason gender is lumped in with sexuality in the first place. Anti-homosexuality laws would've applied to trans people as well. I still remember how in the 90's trans women were considered feminine gay men by people outside the community. I can look up the sources if you like, but that's my understanding.
In that case, yes there were. They were generally worded as anti-crossdressing laws, but that is what they were. Here's a quick excerpt from the wikipedia article on cross-dressing that sums it up well:
> The birth of anti-cross-dressing laws (also known as masquerade laws and the three-article rule)[31] stemmed from the increase in non-traditional gender expression during the spread of America's frontier, and the will to reinforce the two-gender system which was threatened by those who deviated from it.[32] Some of the earlier cases of US arrests made due to cross-dressing are seen in 19th century Ohio. In 1848, Ohio passed a law which prohibited its citizens from publicly presenting themselves "in a dress not belonging to his or her sex," and during the 1850s, over 40 cities in the US went on to pass anti-cross-dressing laws.[33] By the time the US entered WWI, over 150 cities had passed anti-cross-dressing ordinances.
The most obvious example is the "Three Article Rule" that enforced that you must wear at least 3 articles of clothing that "match" your assigned sex at birth. These were easy rules for police to use to justify arresting people. I'm sure others more in the know can provide similar laws and ordinances that affected trans and cross dressing people.
> The problem is, the law technically never existed. Instead, accounts suggest that police generally used old, often unrelated laws to target LGBT people throughout the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.
I never said it was a law, it's a rule of thumb used by police to harass and arrest gender non-conforming people. You seem determined to find some formal law that made their existence illegal, and I'm curious why.
> Anti-cross-dressing laws were the exclusive province of local governments, and no state or federal legislature directly outlawed this type of dress. Several states did, however, pass anti-disguise or masquerade laws that encompassed cross-dressing when enforced. In 1845, for example, New York’s state legislature passed an anti-disguise law that made it a crime to appear in public with a painted face or when wearing a disguise designed to prevent identification. Passed in response to rural workers who wore women’s dresses and masks while participating in anti-rent protests, the law was later used to criminalize a wide range of cross-dressing practices.
> Similarly, in 1874, California’s state legislature passed a masquerade law in response to gambling saloon dealers who wore disguises to avoid identification by undercover police. As with New York’s anti-disguise statute, local police repurposed California’s masquerade law to arrest multiple people for public cross-dressing over the next one hundred years.
Directly? Nothing. Indirectly, it is raising awareness of what the current administration is either doing or enabling. It is also raising awareness of the Stonewall riots.
Let me ask a related question, how does employing the power of the federal government to do the reverse manually and at genuine cost to the taxpayer help anyone?
> I know, Marsha did not throw the first brick at Stonewall.
I assume that the intention is to confuse people. They at some point found out that Johnson wasn't at Stonewall until it was over, but still for some reason need that name to continue to be associated with the event. I assume the next extension will insert mentions of Saddam Hussein around any mention of 9/11, but include a disclaimer that says "I know Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11."
Except they are. The US Federal Government is actively erasing this group of people from all official web presence. It's literally why this Chrome extension exists at all.
I know that on HN it is discouraged to say things like “did you even read the page?” But I feel it’s apt — not only will you see it’s an unsigned extension (so not on the Chrome Web Store, meaning the extension itself isn’t the channel for activism; the GitHub page’s README.md does that all on its own) but they provide examples of the trans erasure, particularly heinously by the US federal government.
The erasure you claim isn’t happening is right there, plain as day.
When you are not personally affected by something, clearly having no stakes in the matter, I borrow another example of what we generally avoid on HN but feels so apt: sit down.
Trans is an umbrella term that can be used to refer to anybody who does not identify with or express the gender they were assigned at birth (https://www.hrc.org/resources/sexual-orientation-and-gender-...). Having surgery and/or always presenting as a gender you weren't assigned at birth is not a prerequisite to being trans. "Transvestite" is a somewhat dated term that is considered offensive in some circles, though either way, a transvestite would by definition be "trans".
Wording has changed throughout history as has our understanding of gender and sexuality. While the specific word "transgender" may not have existed, it's still true that she lived as a woman at the time. At the very least, you can't argue that there's gender-nonconformity going on there. The fact that the Stonewall monument was targeted for removing references of "trans" should hint at why the author of the extension named it this way.
Sure, but there's a clear difference between a man who dresses feminine sometimes but otherwise still prefers being referred to as a man and Marsha Johnson. She moved to a new town, changed her name, went by feminine pronouns, and pretty much exclusively dressed as a woman. That's what I meant by my comment, but thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt.
Vote me down but I think adding more stripes to the rainbow flag is harmful.
It erases different communities that have different interests. I was a fan of Trotskyism in the early 1990s (even slummed a bit with Stalinists and met Gus Hall) and saw first hand how raising the highest and most radical flag meant that fewer and fewer people showed up at each protest, it was only when a black nationalist put the smackdown on my vanguardist nonsense that I understood, everybody else was too polite.
L and G folks have always wished B people would make up their minds. LGB people want to be accepted, Q people aren't going to stop until they aren't accepted. A appeals to people who are shopping for the identity of the day. A crazy high percentage of young women think they are B but maybe it's because they heard a certain Katy Perry song. I people feel they were violated by the same medical procedures that T people believe help them feel whole. When I first saw I added I thought it meant incel because those people sure are dissatisfied with the cishetreonormativepatriarchy.
If T people are going to overcome the stereotypes that are rapidly diffusing over the population (including myself, who was T positive for a long time because a T person made a huge positive impression on me in college) they've got to erase the idea that 99.4% of the population isn't allowed to have any interests.
Allowing people to draw a line in the sand for an acceptable level of deviation from the normal leaves you open to them nudging that line just a bit further to ostracize more and more of the vulnerable. I've never been the biggest fan of the progress flag, but because I think the basic rainbow already includes all of those groups. I've never loved it more than I do now that I've heard the idea that people prefer the rainbow flag because it actively excludes the people the progress flag was created to actively highlight.
That's the kind of black and white and moralistic thinking that are causing people to distance themselves from today's ideological transgenderists.
I can support your right to be safe as a person but not believe everything you say or state that your ideology and tactics are wrong. You get ahead in this world and gain acceptance through practical thinking, not moralistic thinking.
I grew up in a lily-white city, some of the first black people I met were a couple where the man was an engineer at the Raytheon plant that made Patriot missiles. My family was out riding our bikes and one of us got a flat, they helped us fix it and gave us some lemonade in my kitchen. After that I wanted to see more black people move to my town.
The first transgender person I met was a great engineering student, amateur astronomer, and science fiction fan. I found out all those things before I found out she was transgender. She got kicked out of the air force academy but our nation's loss was my gain.
When I got on Mastodon I was just shocked with how many transgender people were sharing hateful image memes, complaining about everybody else and insisting that everybody else's thoughts and feelings were wrong, like all the rest of us didn't have the right to make any decisions at all. If that was the first thing I'd ever seen of transgenderism I'd think it was a disease.
Alright, sure, some of the flag designs are not well done, but I doubt you're talking about vexillology.
Queer just refers to "not straight". It's a general term. Bisexual people have made up their minds, they like more than one gender. Asexual people face stigma just the same as gay and lesbian people do. They're all just different sexualities that differ from the norm, so why not include them together? It really doesn't erase any individual community in my experience.
As far as intersex and trans people are concerned, maybe you just haven't thought it out that much. Of course intersex people would feel differently about surgeries performed on them than trans people would. The former had a surgery forced on them without consent. The latter choses (or not) to have something done. Incels very clearly have nothing to do with "cis-het" discourse.
Even if I was to disregard all of that, trans people still belong in the community for the simple reason that they're a large part of how the modern queer community has formed. They've faced the same stigmas as lesbian and gay folks. Even within lesbian and gay communities, there's been quite a lot of gender-nonconformity (look into lesbian movements in the 70's for example).
Trans people exist and have for much longer than you probably realize. Maybe you need to go back to your roots and actually talk to some trans people. You might realize that the popular caricature isn't as accurate as you seem to think.
I'll happily vote you down because political power is formed by collaboration. Excluding trans people from the liberation movement makes the gay community weaker against attacks, not stronger.
The trouble with that argument is if you consistently take the most radical position on every issue, people will leave. Either they leave outright or they just check out emotionally. That's not the same as excluding trans people. [1]
Myself I have gone out in drag in the past and seen for myself from people's microexpressions that it is not entirely safe. I think people should be safe to express whatever gender characteristics they wish whenever they want to express them. In the past 15 years the T community went through a sharp ideological bend that is reducitivist and deliberately polarizating that is making it less safe to be different from other people, not more safe. Just because I practice Foxwork and channel an entity which might be a different gender than myself means I need to endorse the self-described 'egg-hatcher' who persuaded a neurodivergent friend of my son to go down a path that hasn't solved his [2] real problems but has added more problems.
[1] speech is free, listening is priceless; want to be part of a movement, understand that movement in all its diversity, don't make a black-and-white there-is-no-alternative declaration that other people have no choice in the matter
[2] he says we can call him 'he' at this time even though she goes by 'she' at work
> don't make a black-and-white there-is-no-alternative declaration that other people have no choice in the matter
say the person who quite literally can't accept that there can be more than three letters in an acronym, less the entire world order be thrown to the wind
