UPDATE 8:56 PM PST: I posted another article reporting on similar censorship from sexual abuse nonprofits here.
Over a thousand people protested in New York City against the removal of trans and queer people from the Stonewall National Monument webpage last week. According to research I conducted with my custom crawling tool, the Stonewall page is just the tip of the iceberg of LGBTQ+ erasure under Trump and Elon. (Methodology involved using the Wayback Machine to compare the latest archive with a previous archive).
Thousands of webpages across the federal government have had references to LGBTQ+ people removed since January 20th, including many on LGBTQ+ history, healthcare, and safety.
The complete list is massive and will take some time for me to sort through and validate for publication. Journalists, researchers, activists, and attorneys engaged with relevant legal cases can access the unverified list of over 2000 webpages by sending me your use case on Signal at madye2.39 or by email at [email protected]. The data will be released in the near future once it’s verified, and I am creating a Bluesky bot that will track additional webpage removals as they happen (follow it here!).
In the meantime, I’m publishing some of the most noteworthy instances of LGBTQ+ erasure in government webpages covering history or healthcare below. Some of the information may have been previously reported by other researchers (a librarian on Bluesky documented some of the NPS erasure), but this dataset was collected independently with my automated tool using the Wayback Machine and custom crawling tools.
This article serves to both document the erasure of this information, and also to provide easy access to archives of this information for LGBTQ+ people, historians, educators, and journalists who need it.
Censorship Statistics
Content warning: Mentions of suicide, hate crimes, child abuse, and HIV. Proceed with caution. LGBTQ+ friendly suicide hotlines are available here.
The below statistics are conservative estimates that have a generous margin of error (+30%/-5%), since the entire dataset has not yet been validated for accuracy.
Total number of websites censored: >2000
Government departments with the most censored webpages: youth.gov (website entirely offline), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Department of Education, the Office of Justice Programs.
Number of LGBTQ+ censored webpages mentioning specific terms:
“transgender” : >1500
“lesbian”, “gay” or “bisexual” : >1300
“pride” : >400
“suicide”: >350
“history”: >300
“hiv”: >300
“hate crime”: >100
“child abuse”: >30
National Park Service Erasure
The Furies Collective: Similar to the Stonewall page that has been heavily reported on, the webpage about this National Historic Landmark has had references to LGBTQ people replaced with “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer.” This appears to have been done automatically, as the wording is now awkward in various parts of the article. [Wayback Machine]
On a page encouraging Americans to help preserve historic places, the words “Transgender and Queer” were removed from the following sentence. [Wayback Machine]
The “LGBTQ Heritage Education Resources” page, which provided tools and materials for teachers and other people interested in learning about LGBTQ history, has been completely removed. In a sad twist of irony, one of the links on the erased webpage is unerased.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to preventing the erasure of LGBTQ history in education. [Wayback Machine]
The “LGBTQ Heritage Featured Places” page has been deleted. This page linked to several national places of interest that are deeply tied with LGBTQ history. [Wayback Machine]
A webpage celebrating the 5th anniversary of the Stonewall National Monument was removed. The webpage links to various videos posted on their YouTube channel. I have downloaded and uploaded all of these videos to archive.org, available here for viewing in case they are removed. [Wayback Machine]
The LGBTQ history of Eleanor Roosevelt has been completely erased. This page documented the little-known queer history of the first lady, and is now met with a 404 page. [Wayback Machine]
A page with information on locations that have social importance to history was not fully removed, but references to the ties each place has with LGBTQ history, women’s rights, or civil rights were removed. [Wayback Machine]
Other removals:
“Pride Guide: An Interactive Workbook”, a project that started and completed during Trump’s first term. [Wayback Machine]
The employee resource group page for NPS employees, which included an LGBTQ group. [Wayback Machine]
The pride flag page for Stonewall also had LGBTQ shorted to LGB. [Wayback Machine]
Other LGBTQ+ history erasure
A webpage documenting LGBTQ+ scientific contributions by Los Alamos National Laboratory was removed. This page documented LGBTQ+ scientists like Alan Turing, Margaret “Mom” Chung, and Dr Sally Ride. [Wayback Machine]
Two webpages discussing LGBTQ+ history by the National Endowment for the Humanities have been removed.
One webpage linked to this website on LGBTQ+ histories by City University of New York. [Wayback Machine]
The other webpage, “The LGBTQ Community in American History”, was a detailed educational resource for teachers to help students understand important figures in LGBTQ+ history. [Wayback Machine]
A webpage describing the history of the Pride movement written by an employee resource group of the Western Area Power Administration was removed. [Wayback Machine]
Vital LGBTQ+ health and safety resources removed
Content warning for suicide and child abuse. LGBTQ+ friendly suicide hotlines are available here.
The CDC’s suicide hotline website removed links to LGBTQ+ suicide hotlines from the webpage, such as The Trevor Project and Trans Lifeline [Wayback Machine].
One other government websites retained the links to LGBTQ hotlines but awkwardly removed mentions of LGBTQ people when describing them.
The TRICARE website for Brooke Army Medical Center, which provides healthcare to members of the military and their families, removed references to gender affirming care from their Endocrinology page. [Wayback Machine]
A webpage entitled [Improving the Response to Victims of [Child Sexual Abuse Materials]] was removed from the Office for Victims of Crime, possibly due to the fact this webpage originally mentioned LGBTQ+ child victims of online sex crimes. [Wayback Machine]
The website removals in this article represent just one percent of the webpages my tool has detected to have been censored of LGBTQ+ people in some manner. These webpages were not just created during the Biden administration; many are from President Trump’s first administration, President Obama’s administration, or even earlier.
The pure breadth and scale of this censorship represents the most wide-reaching government censorship effort of LGBTQ+ history since the Nazi book burnings of the Institute of Sexual Science, which studied transgender health science. Thankfully, today we are able to archive this information in a distributed manner and prevent the information from being lost forever.
Activists may consider want to consider additional protests based on the information released in this article. My recent interview with ACT UP activists illuminates helpful advice for those looking to recreate the successes of queer liberation movements from the past. You can check out other photos I took at the recent CHLA protest here.
If you want to stay updated on the webpages I will continue to verify and report on, you should subscribe with your email! This reporting required many hours of coding and years of expertise from working on similar projects to uncover. I also have a new Ko-fi with a lower monthly membership fee if you would like to support us that way. Ko-fi takes a smaller fee and doesn’t financially support the far-right the way Substack does, and I will comp certain subscriptions from Ko-fi onto Substack.
Contact me with tips or questions on Signal at madye2.39 or by email [email protected]