Episode 227: A Brief Note Written After Learning the National Parks Service Removed the word Transgender from Stonewall's Webpage
the memory palace
Nate DiMeo
4.8 • 7.2K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Order The Memory Palace book now, dear listener. On Bookshop.org, on Amazon.com, on Barnes & Noble, or directly from Random House. Or order the audiobook at places like Libro.fm.
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Music
- Pockets of Light by Ludomyr Melnyk
- All in Circles and Janvie by Shida Shahabi
- Between Trees by Akria Kosemura
Notes
- There are a million things to read about Stonewall, but the thing that I feel like deepened my understanding enough was The New York Public Library's The Stonewall Reader. Particularly the audiobook. Couldn't recommend it enough.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMayo. A brief note after learning that the National Park Service |
| 0:05.9 | has removed references to transgender people from the official web page of the Stonewall National |
| 0:10.7 | Monument in New York. I am reading this aloud on the 10th of March 2025. The timestamp is important, |
| 0:19.1 | I think, so that you listening to it, whenever you are listening |
| 0:22.4 | to it, can do your best to contextualize or pinpoint or maybe recover the meaning of these words, |
| 0:29.1 | how they were first spoken. |
| 0:31.2 | There was I read them now, mere days after I first started to write them, I can feel that |
| 0:35.8 | that meaning has shifted somehow already. |
| 0:38.7 | Has been changed by circumstances that seem to be changing so quickly these days in this |
| 0:43.5 | particular historical moment, in ways that might not make sense to someone listening to this in the |
| 0:48.3 | future. And if you are listening in the future some years from now, just trust me. Time feels |
| 0:54.0 | strange right now somehow, at least here in the United States. |
| 0:57.3 | And I suppose I'm saying all this in this odd way, probably off-putting way, because I want |
| 1:03.1 | you to know that language changes, the words we use, how those words get used, by whom, |
| 1:08.7 | and to what ends, which I assume you know, but I want you to know, |
| 1:12.9 | no, no, to hold on to that idea and keep it with you, floating vaguely in that space that |
| 1:18.9 | thoughts occupy when you really think about thoughts. And I want you to know that this language, |
| 1:24.1 | the words that the Trump administration has targeted here is part of a broader project, |
| 1:29.3 | a political project, a historical project, a whole thing that I could talk about for something |
| 1:34.3 | like forever, but I don't want to. I want to keep the focus tighter on one word, transgender, |
| 1:40.2 | that has been removed from this one webpage. On February 12, 2025, that page read, I quote, |
| 1:47.1 | Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, |
... |
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