I don't know! They have issued this statement:
"We understand and empathise with the upset the wording has caused to a number of lesbians and thank Kit for his helpful response as a member of the team behind this project. We also thank those who have made respectful and entirely reasonable contributions on this post, and are confident the team behind the plaque take such comments seriously and are listening to your feedback.
However we absolutely do not condone transphobia and anti-trans ideology, sentiment and discourse. York LGBT History Month was founded and has been almost consistently led by trans individuals, including trans women, trans men and non-binary folk, and we seek to represent the breadth of our community. From the very start we have stated that while the LGBT in our name stands for lesbian, gay, bi and trans, we take it to include all non-normative/marginalised gender, romantic and sexual identities and intersex.
We have deleted a number of comments on this post that are either explicitly transphobic or that strongly echo anti-trans discourse, and in some cases have blocked individuals from continuing to comment on this or any other of our posts. As such, some of the comment threads on this post are now half conversations. We will continue to monitor the post and will delete any further comments of a similar nature in the interests of safeguarding our trans followers and not enabling a platform for transphobia and trans hatred.
A quick note on terms and history: trans people can be lesbian, and lesbians can be trans. They are not mutually exclusive: we do not accept the viewpoint that to be a lesbian you must be assigned female at birth, nor that to be a lesbian you must only be attracted to women assigned female at birth. Perhaps more importantly and more pertinent to some of the comments raised here, both terms have taken on their current meaning since the time of Anne Lister. Both are therefore applied retrospectively, based on a resemblance between what Anne did in life and what those terms mean today, and so neither term can be claimed to be a perfect fit. "Gender non-conforming" can be used to describe a broad range of identities, expression and behaviours that are non-normative and/or marginalised by a particular society or culture at a particular moment in time. When the term "gender non-conforming" is used to describe people who are alive today, it's often used to describe non-binary and/or genderqueer people, which might be the root of some of the issues here. In fact, gender non-conforming is used on the plaque as a description of how Anne Lister lived. It's a term that can be used to describe a range of LGBT and queer identities, including but not limited to non-binary people."