‘Resistance Rangers’ Safeguard LGBTQ+ History As Government Efforts To Erase It Intensify
The Resistance Rangers are doing the quiet work of protecting our truth and refusing to be silenced.
There’s a quiet revolution unfolding, and yes, the good kind. It’s not in the halls of Congress or the streets of protest, but in the archives. This revolution is being led by a group of over a thousand off-duty, fired, and retired National Park Service employees who call themselves the Resistance Rangers. Their mission? They are reclaiming the stories this administration wants us to forget. Specifically, the contributions of queer and trans people to the fabric of American history. As this fight to rewrite LGBTQ+ history intensifies, the Resistance Rangers are holding the line for truth and memory.
When the Trump administration returned to office in 2025, they wasted no time stripping words like “transgender’ and “queer” from National Park Service websites. Even references to sites like the Stonewall National Monument (the epicenter of the 1969 uprising that catalyzed the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement) vanished overnight. So did the acknowledgment of trans women of color, like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, whose work helped define an era.
Related: Behold The Spectacular Incompetence Of The Government’s Stonewall Fumble
The Resistance Rangers have other plans. In response, they launched Rangers “Uncensored”, a digital archive to restore what was lost. They’re not just reposting information, they are completely reconstructing the record. They’re telling the stories of figures like Jack Bee Garland, a trans man and Spanish-American War medic, whose biography offers a more honest picture of who helped build this country. In addition to preserving and restoring historical content, they offer resources for public action, current updates on policy threats and ways to support their effort to keep the true, diverse narrative of America both accessible and intact.
Welcome To The Resistance. “We preserve and protect public lands; we are America’s history keepers and storytellers. Some of us have been illegally fired. Some of us are retired. All of us are determined to continue.” -Homepage of Resistance Rangers
What’s most powerful about their work is not just the rebuilding of history itself, but the act of remembering in the face of deliberate forgetting. It’s a correction, but also an act of defiance. They are treating memory preservation as a form of protest. It’s not loud or glamorous work, but it’s essential.
Because in the end, they are not just preserving the past. They’re protecting the future by refusing to let the truth disappear.
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