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Plan to Make Stonewall Inn a National Monument Puts Focus on Trans Issues

 The first transgender person of color given the opportunity to speak at the hearing, Mariah Lopez, pushed the federal officials to designate Pier 40
The first transgender person of color given the opportunity to speak at the hearing, Mariah Lopez, pushed the federal officials to designate Pier 40 "as a memorial site to the people of color and trans communities of New York."
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DNAinfo/Danielle Tcholakian

WEST VILLAGE — A public hearing on a plan to make the park across from the Stonewall Inn a national monument was the jumping off point Monday night for a discussion of issues facing transgender people of color.

Community volunteers and local elected officials worked for two years to build support for federal recognition for the bar that's regarded as the birthplace of the gay rights movement. It will be the first national monument dedicated to LGBT rights.

President Barack Obama recently threw his support behind the initiative, after highlighting the bar's historical significance alongside Selma and Seneca Falls — major sites for the black and women's civil rights movements — in his 2013 inaugural address.

"We have made a lot of progress since 1969," Hayley Gorenberg, deputy legal director at gay and transgender rights organization Lamda Legal, said at the hearing. "But our struggle for freedom is far from finished."

An effort by North Carolina to force transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate, for example, has put the focus on transgender rights.

"Many of the people who led the rebellion against police misconduct at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 were transgender and gender non-conforming people," Gorenberg said. "Forty-seven years later, transgender and gender non-conforming people are under attack by hostile elected officials in states across the country, and LGBT people and all people of color are still fighting bias and unfair treatment by the police."

The hearing was held by Rep. Jerry Nadler at P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village so that Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis could hear from the local community in advance of making concrete plans for the monument.

Mariah Lopez, the first transgender person of color who spoke at the hearing, pushed for federal officials to designate Pier 45 "as a memorial site to the people of color and trans communities of New York."

She acknowledged that Stonewall had a "huge significant place" in the gay community, but "people of color communities do not look at Stonewall as the beacon of trans history and gay history of color. They look at the pier."

"It’s the nature of being marginalized," said Lopez, 31, of Inwood. "We’re literally pushed to the water. No one knows we were there."

Other trans attendees of color stood in support as Lopez spoke, and she said she planned to write Obama a letter asking him to extend the Stonewall designation to include the pier "or just designate the pier on its own."

Most of the speakers came out in support of making Christopher Park, the plot of green across from Stonewall, into a national park. Plans for the monument are undetermined as yet, but are likely to include a special website and signs and Park Service staff on the ground to provide translation and information.

Nadler promised that no one would forget that it was first and foremost "a neighborhood park" and Jarvis promised that once NPS takes over the park, they can be counted on to care for it no matter what.

"We're in the business of perpetuity," Jarvis said. "We're here forever."