US government wants to delete trans people from travel information website.
The relentless march of Trump's administration changes government websites by deleting references to trans people. The Internet Archive shows us what's missing.
There's a USA State Department webpage for "travelers with special considerations" that until a few days ago had a page dedicated to LGBTQI+ travelers. Now, the page is for "LGB" travelers.
Thanks to the archival work by the Internet Archive we can see what the changes are:
🇮🇹 You can find my Italian content on oradecima.com.
This is the previous version from Jan 12:
This is the the initial section: the paragraph about having X Gender Marker on your passport has been deleted.
The current version mentions that many countries may not recognize it, but doesn't say you can select it:
In the "while you're there" section, the paragraph about conversion therapy has been deleted, and if you look closely they kinda botched it.
There's literally a bullet point with a blank line, and then the ending of a sentence was clumsily put back by switching "LGBTQI+ youth" with "LGB youth"
By the way, for my EU friends, you know we don't have a ban on conversion therapies in the EU? There's an European Citizen's Initiative about it that you can support, you can check it out here:
Finally, in "Other useful links" two links have been removed:
one points to this webpage on transequality.org, and the other is a now deleted TSA page:
You can find the archived version of the page here.
and of course, the page is now no more.
This is...kinda scary. And it's just one of the examples of what the new Trump administration is doing about the US digital infrastructure; it's relentless and overwhelming, and it hits marginalized people the most. At the same time, as if it wasn't enough they use marginalized people as a scapegoat.
Martin Pengelly
On the other hand, I think it shows once again how precious and useful the work of the Internet Archive is. It's worth noting they actually specifically do an End of Term crawl to preserve the websites of previous US administrations:
End of Term Web Archive
This one has begun on May!
The purpose of the End of Term Web Archive is to preserve a record of government websites for historical and research purposes. It is important to capture these websites because they can provide a snapshot of government messaging before and after the transition of terms. The End of Term Web Archive preserves information that may no longer be available on the live web for open access.
The stuff that's happening is not completely surprising, unfortunately, but it is shocking and tiring and overwhelming. Take care.