As of Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website has scrubbed all mention of LGBTQ folks and trans health care. The State Department has removed the “TQ” in LGBTQ from its guidance page for LGBTQ international travelers. The White House removed pages honoring Nex Benedict and Matthew Shepard. The CDC also issued an order to rescind and rewrite unpublished research papers by their scientists that include the word “transgender.” (Not to mention curtailing information on climate and vaccines.)

The scrubbing effort targeting the LGBTQ+ community and trans health care has been equated by journalists and internet commentators to a virtual book-burning reminiscent of the Nazi era, specifically the world’s first trans clinic, The Institute for Sexual Research. “A generation of knowledge is being trashed at lightning speed,” wrote Dan Samorodnitsky for Sequencer.

That lightning-speed flurry of executive orders evokes history even as Trump attempts to erase it. In his recent order banning gender-affirming care for minors and 18-year-olds,  Trump calls transgender medical care a “dangerous trend” and a “stain on our Nation’s history.”

There is a common, ironic, and false justification for restricting transgender health care for youth: that it is “new” and “experimental.” Jules Gill-Peterson, historian of transgender medical care and an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, spoke with Mother Jones about how old gender-affirming medical care is—more than a century—and how that history informs the attacks we see today.

How far back in history does medical transition actually go?

Medical transition has a surprisingly long-lived history. It begins with surgical practices that, in different places of the world, historians have actually traced back centuries, if not thousands of years—in some cases where you find people obtaining historically appropriate forms of surgery that very obviously had a kind of transition importance, or a gender-affirming importance. But the modern gender-affirming care, transgender health care, that we’re most familiar with really has an early-20th-century history. It comes into being in the 1910s, 1920s, and 30s, around 100 years ago.

Read the full article about the history of trans health care by Henry Carnell at Mother Jones.