A day after the National Park Service deleted the word “transgender” from prominent spots on its Stonewall National Monument website, hundreds of people rallied at the monument site on Friday to protest the move and what they feared might come next there.
It was unclear whether federal officials planned to make physical alterations to eliminate references to transgender people at Stonewall, the first historic site in the United States devoted to the country’s gay rights movement. The Park Service, which had cited a presidential order as the reason for the website changes, did not respond to a request for comment.
So on Friday, at least, a pink, blue and white flag representing the transgender community continued to fly on the flagpole in Christopher Park in the chilly sunshine, and plaques and photo displays honoring well-known transgender activists continued to hang on a park fence.
Still, Jay Walker, a protest organizer, said he was “not sure how long that would last.”
The sudden elimination of the words “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall website on Thursday — part of a larger Trump administration campaign to challenge the legitimacy of transgender identity — struck members of New York City’s L.G.B.T.Q. community and others as a chilling attack on the symbolic heart of the gay rights movement.
“The removal of references to transgender people from federal websites and even from this monument’s history is an act of deliberate erasure,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat, told the crowd. “It’s an attack on the truth.”
Chloe Elentári, a transgender woman who lives in Manhattan’s East Village, was among the protesters at the Stonewall site. She said the move was a reminder that the city might be less of a haven than some residents think.
“People say that you know you’re in a safe state, you’re in a blue state, but we’re not,” Ms. Elentári said. “We can’t live under the illusion of thinking that we’re safe just because we’re in New York.”
The Stonewall Inn, a bar on Christopher Street, has been seen as a cradle of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement since a police raid in June 1969 set off three days of protests and riots on the surrounding Greenwich Village streets.
Today, the riots are commemorated with Pride marches in New York City and around the world, and many gay rights organizations and venues in other countries use “Stonewall” in their names.
President Barack Obama established the 7.7-acre Stonewall monument, which includes the bar, Christopher Park and several other nearby streets and sidewalks, in 2016. Parts of the site have also been designated as a city landmark and a state historical site.
The Park Service said on Thursday that it had removed references to the transgender community to comply with an executive order signed by President Trump on his first day in office that was described as “restoring biological truth to the federal government,” and with a second order signed by the acting secretary of the interior last month.
The website changes also included the virtual elimination of a page listing interpretive flags associated with the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, including the pink, blue and white one representing transgender people, and the times when the flags typically fly in Christopher Park.
That the executive orders would affect even just the monument website was an indication of how the Trump administration’s antipathy toward transgender rights is affecting the L.G.B.T.Q. community in New York, a liberal bastion.
In recent weeks, transgender New Yorkers and health care professionals in the city have faced executive orders that seek to bar hospitals from providing certain kinds of care for transgender youth. The orders have caused fear among transgender people and their families, at least one lawsuit and protests outside hospitals.
On Wednesday, the Stonewall website had included introductory text that said, “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.”
By Thursday afternoon, the word “transgender” had been removed, along with the letter “T” from the community acronym. By the evening, the word “queer” and “Q+” had also been deleted.
Erik Bottcher, the City Council member who represents the neighborhood that includes the monument, said the removal of some words and letters but not others was an attempt to divide and weaken the community.
“We are here to send a message to Donald Trump,” he said to the protesters. “We will not let you erase the existence of our trans siblings.”
Transgender people played a central role in the Stonewall riots, and two transgender women in particular, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are celebrated at the site with photo displays and plaques. (As of Friday, biographical pages for Ms. Rivera and Ms. Johnson on the Park Service website still described them as transgender women.)
The displays paying tribute to Ms. Johnson and Ms. Rivera remained in place while the protest proceeded. The two women, and generations of activists like them, were on the minds and the placards of many of those in the crowd.
“The first people that threw the brick at Stonewall, that led the charge at Stonewall, were women of color, trans women of color,” said Eli Shirk, a 19-year-old transgender student at Pace University. “Are we seriously trying to erase, like, entire history?”
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