There’s a silence creeping into the system—not by accident, not by ignorance, but by design. Government agencies are no longer just failing to protect the marginalized; they’re actively scrubbing them from the record. What began as political rhetoric has become administrative erasure. The words that once identified whole communities—gender, woman, Black, LGBTQ+, poor—are vanishing from websites, policies, and public language. And if this continues, one truth remains: pretty soon, no one will matter.
This isn’t just about diversity programs or the reshuffling of federal paperwork. This is about identity being legislated out of existence. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removes information on HIV and contraception, when the Department of Defense deletes pages honoring Black soldiers and women in uniform, and when gender options disappear from passport applications, the message is not subtle—it’s clear and cold: “You are not supposed to be seen.”
This is erasure masquerading as order. It is policy sanitized of reality. Those in power claim to be streamlining, returning to tradition, simplifying—but what they are truly doing is deleting. Deleting the language that once gave people space to live and breathe within a system that barely acknowledged them to begin with.
We are told this is about neutrality. That’s a lie. You don’t achieve fairness by removing the names of those who’ve historically been silenced—you achieve oppression by pretending their experience doesn’t exist. When identity is erased from forms, protections vanish with it. Without naming “woman,” how do we protect reproductive rights? Without naming “Black,” how do we address centuries of systemic racism? Without naming “trans,” how do we defend lives under daily threat?
This isn’t the future. This is now. And if we don’t fight to remember, to record, to speak, then we will forget. Not by choice, but by force. They are counting on that.
So we remember. We write. We name. We resist.
Because the moment we stop doing that…
the moment we accept their silence as truth…
that’s when they win.
But not here. Not now.
Not on our watch.
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