Miss Major Griffin-Gracy | |
|---|---|
 Miss Major atSan Francisco Pride in 2014 | |
| Born | (1946-10-25)October 25, 1946 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | October 13, 2025(2025-10-13) (aged 78) Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Activist and author |
| Organization | Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project |
| Known for | Transgender rights activism |
| Notable work | Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary |
| Children | 5 |
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (October 25, 1946 – October 13, 2025), often referred to asMiss Major, was an American author, activist, and community organizer fortransgender rights. She participated in activism and community organizing for a range of causes, and served as the first executive director for theTransgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project.
Griffin-Gracy contributed tooral history collections, includingCaptive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex,The Stonewall Reader, andThe Stonewall Generation: LGBT Elders on Sex, Activism, and Aging. Her memoir,Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, was released byVerso Books in 2023.
Griffin-Gracy was born on October 25, 1946,[1] inChicago.[2][3][4] She was raised on theSouth Side, while her father worked for the post office and her mother managed a beauty shop.[5][3] She had two siblings, Cookie and Sargeant.[1] She has said after shecame out as trans to her parents around age 12 or 13, they responded by enrolling her in psychiatric treatment and taking her to church.[5][3]
Griffin-Gracy came out publicly as trans in Chicago in the late 1950s, and describeddrag balls at the time as places where "You had to keep your eyes open, had to watch your back, but you learned how to deal with that [...] We didn't know at the time that we were questioning our gender. We just knew it felt right".[6] She also described the influence ofChristine Jorgensen, who became well known in the 1950s for havinggender-affirming surgery; according to Griffin-Gracy, "After Christine Jorgensen got her sex change, all of a sudden there was a black market of hormones out there", and she was familiar with how to obtain illicit hormones in Chicago.[5]
Griffin-Gracy said she was expelled from college for having feminine clothes,[4] and she lost her home with her parents after they refused to accept her gender.[5] She worked as ashowgirl at theJewel Box Revue in Chicago and New York,[3] and added "Griffin" to her name to honor her mother.[5] She became asex worker, a job which provided the steadiest available income.[5][4] After an incarceration in a psychiatric facility in lieu of jail in Chicago, she moved to New York.[5]
In a 2014 interview with theBay Area Reporter, Griffin-Gracy said that after moving toNew York City, she found theStonewall Inn "provided us transwomen [sic?] with a nice place for social connection" and that fewgay bars otherwise allowed entry totrans women at the time.[7] She was a regular patron of the Stonewall, and was there on the first night of the 1969Stonewall rebellion.[7][5] As she recalled, Police raids were common for LGBT bars, but "This one night, though, everybody decided this time we weren't going to leave the bar. And shit just hit the fan."[7]
Griffin-Gracy was heavily impacted by the death in 1970 of her friend Puppy, a trans woman who was determined by authorities to have died by suicide while Griffin-Gracy strongly suspected she was murdered by a client.[2] She said, "Puppy’s murder made me aware that we were not safe or untouchable and that if someone does touch us, no one gives a shit. We only have each other. We always knew this, but now we needed to take a step towards doing something about it. [...] We girls decided that whenever we got into a car with someone, another girl would write down as much information as possible. We would try not to just lean into the car window but get a guy to walk outside the car so that everyone could see him, so we all knew who he was if she didn’t come back. That's how it started. Since no one was going to do it for us, we had to do it for ourselves."[2] She described this event as the start of her activism.[8]
Griffin-Gracy spent years in prison and onparole,[3][5][7] including after Stonewall, when she received a five-year sentence following a robbery arrest.[9] She described Frank "Big Black" Smith, a leader of the 1971Attica Correctional Facility riots, as a mentor, after meeting him while incarcerated at theClinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora.[5][3] She said he encouraged her to learn aboutAfrican-American history and politics,[5] organizing,[3] and theprison industrial complex.[4] She was released from prison around 1974.[5]
Over twenty years, Griffin-Gracy also experienced homelessness, received welfare, and mostly found hormones through the black market.[2]
Griffin-Gracy began work in community services after moving toSan Diego in 1978.[7] She worked at afood bank and then in direct community services for trans women.[7] Her work expanded into home health care during theAIDS epidemic in the United States.[7] In the 1990s, Griffin-Gracy moved to theSan Francisco Bay Area, and worked with multiple HIV/AIDS organizations, including the City of Refuge in San Francisco and the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center.[7][5]
In 2004, Griffin-Gracy began working at theTransgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP),[2] shortly after it was founded by Alex Lee.[10] She became the executive director of the organization, which is focused on providing support services to transgender, gender variant, and intersex people in prison.[2][5][11] Her work included visiting trans women and men in California prisons to help coordinate access to legal and social services, and testimony at theCalifornia State Assembly andUnited Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva about human rights violations in prisons.[2][12]
While she was the executive director, she gave an interview to Jayden Donahue that was published inCaptive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, and described in a review by Arlen Katen in theBerkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice as "bluntly and powerfully stat[ing] that being trans* is an extension of the prison-industrial complex; even if not all trans* people end up in prison, their gender identities are constantly policed through other social and state mechanisms."[13]
In an interview with Jessica Stern published in a 2011Scholar and Feminist Online article, Griffin-Gracy described a sense of exclusion from the broaderLGBT movement, described by Stern as for "herself and others, especially transgender people who are low-income, people of color, or have criminal records."[2] In 2013, she was part of a campaign to revise wording on a Stonewall commemorative plaque; she advocated for "inclusive language to honor the sacrifice we as trans women displayed by taking back our power."[14] In 2014, when she was honored as a community grand marshal for theSan Francisco Pride Parade, she said, "We're finally getting some recognition. I'm proud it finally happened and I'm alive to see it because a lot of my girlfriends haven't made it this far. I'm trying to get as many girls as possible together at the parade so people can see we're a force to be reckoned with; we're not going anywhere."[7]
Griffin-Gracy moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, after visiting the city for a screening ofMAJOR!, the 2015 documentary about her.[4] She developed a property she initially called the House of GG into an informal retreat center for trans people.[4][3] The property includes a guest house, pool, hot tub,merry-go-round, various gardens, and over 80 palm trees.[4][3] In 2023, she renamed the property to Tilifi, an acronym for Telling It Like It Fuckin' Is.[3]
A documentary titledMajor! was released in 2015 and portrays Griffin-Gracy's role as an activist and mentor in the transgender community since the 1960s.[15][16][17]
Griffin-Gracy was also the subject of the 2016 filmPersonal Things, byTourmaline.[18] She was an executive producer for the 2021 docu-seriesTrans in Trumpland.[8]
In May 2023,Verso Books publishedMiss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, a memoir composed of interviews with Griffin-Gracy by journalist Toshio Meronek. Meronek is Griffin-Gracy's former assistant and also wrote a biographical overview of her for the book.[19][20] In the memoir Griffin-Gracy reflected on her early life, education, experience as a sex worker, the 1969Stonewall rebellion,[19] incarcerations, knowing Frank "Big Black" Smith as a mentor, and her years of activism and community organizing, including during theAIDS epidemic in the 1980s, as well as her work as the director of theTransgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP).[3][20][19]
In a review forGender & Development, Haley McEwen writes, "Beyond an opportunity to learn about the life of a leader and elder in the Black transgender community through vivid personal accounts of activism and survival, listening to Miss Major speak is to subvert systems that have worked to erase and silence Black transgender women throughout history and in present reality."[21] According to Vic Parsons inHuck, "Miss Major has herself has been a crucial source of hope and support to many trans people. [...] In some ways, this book is a new version of the community building and emotional support that is Miss Major’s life’s work."[22]
Miss Major Speaks was shortlisted for the 2024Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.[23]
Griffin-Gracy had five children. Her eldest son was born in 1978, and she later adopted three more sons.[5] In January 2021, Griffin-Gracy and her partner announced the birth of their fifth child.[24]
Griffin-Gracy died on October 13, 2025, while she was under hospice care at her home inLittle Rock, Arkansas. She was 78.[25]
In "Cautious Living: Black Trans Women and the Politics of Documentation," a conversation between journalist Toshio Meronek, Stonewall veteran Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and trans activist CeCe McDonald, Major puts the "transgender tipping point" into succinct and unsettling perspective.
Both this roundtable and the conversation between Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, CeCe McDonald, and Toshio Meronek in "Cautious Living: Black Trans Women and the Politics of Documentation" reveal the collection's strong abolitionist leanings and show how the politics of visibility shape the lives of trans people — particularly trans women of color.
In the wake of the riots, the question soon became a matter of how to maintain the energy and focus. "What do we do to keep this going?" asked Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a trans woman, in an interview. As we now know, the momentum did keep going.
Even more striking are the interviews featuring the real voices of notable figures such as Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who memorably declares that "history is one big lie."
It was not only rights those involved were fighting for, though; Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a trans woman now 79 and a participant in the riots, remembers, "We were fighting for our survival."
The resistance to harassment that began as what Black transgender activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy called a fight for survival empowered a whole generation to work to make things better.
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