The Trump administration continues to rewrite history, scrubbing official websites of any mention of transgender, queer and gender nonconforming people and causes. Critics have called its efforts a digital book-burning, reminiscent of the public bonfires staged by the Nazis in the 1930s. The latest target of this growing right-wing cancel culture is Pauli Murray, a pioneering human rights leader whose childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, is a National Historic Landmark.

I visited the home site recently to learn more about the government’s efforts to deny Murray’s queer identity.

Historian Angela Thorpe Mason, executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, told me the National Park Service has sanitized several of the web pages it maintains to promote the landmark, and has even removed a biography of Murray because it discussed Murray’s fluid gender identity.

In response, Mason issued a media release, criticizing the government’s effort to discount Murray’s life and legacy. “We equally condemn the federal government’s actions, and stand firm in ours,” Mason said. “The Pauli Murray Center will be a space for us to continue to articulate what we know to be true.”

The truth is that Murray, who died in 1985 at the age of 74, sought but was denied hormone therapy and other gender affirming care in the 1930s. By obscuring the truth of Murray’s lived experience, the government seems to think it can wish away Murray’s accomplishments — if not their very existence.

But Murray’s contributions to human rights are too important to whitewash.

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As I detail in my feature, Murray was “a pioneering Black legal scholar whose ideas laid the foundation for Supreme Court decisions overturning segregation and outlawing discrimination based on sex; a pioneering feminist and cofounder of the National Organization for Women; and a pioneering spiritual leader — the first queer saint in the Episcopal Church.”

Visit the Pauli Murray Center to learn more about Murray’s life and work, which continues to this day.