10/14/2025
RIP to LGBTQ+ icon, Miss Major, heres why she should be your next rabbit hole.
Let’s talk about Miss Major, and why her life tells us so much about survival and activism:
✴️ Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (born 1946 in Chicago) was a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprisings and has been an organizer, elder, and “Mama” to generations of Black trans women. 
✴️ She came out early in her life, around ages 12–13. Her parents tried psychiatric and religious interventions; she was kicked out and lost her home. She was expelled from college for wearing dresses and publicly expressing her gender identity. 
✴️ To survive, she worked as a s*x worker, often in dangerous contexts. 
✴️ In the 1970s–80s she became deeply involved in trans, q***r, and HIV/AIDS activism (especially in San Francisco and California) providing direct care, mutual aid, community organizing, and working against criminalization of trans women in prisons. 
✴️ She was the first executive director of the Transgender Gender-Variant & Inters*x Justice Project (TGIJP), focusing on prisons, detention, and justice for trans and gender variant people. 
✴️ In 2023 she published “Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary”, a memoir born from interviews with her longtime aide. 
✴️ She founded the House of GG / Tilifi in Little Rock, Arkansas, a retreat, sanctuary, and community center for trans and gender nonconforming people. 
✴️ On October 13, 2025, Miss Major passed away at age 78 under hospice care. 
Why I think this is important:
Miss Major’s life is a map of what resilience looks like at the intersections and margins of race, gender, poverty, and state violence, a map erased by simplified narratives, but one we need to read.
She didn’t start with power. She built it from the bottom up. Her identity made her vulnerable, often invisible and criminalized and yet she turned her own survival into resources and Infrastructure for others.
Institutions often treat trans Black women as disposable. Miss Major reclaimed her life not by fitting into systems, but by creating parallel ones.
The activist world too often honors elder only in eulogy; Miss Major (and the lbgtq+ family system dynamic) made her eldership a daily practice. She was always “Mama”, materially giving shelter, mentorship, connection to younger trans women who face violence, homelessness, invisibility.
Her death is a call, not a closure. We live In a time where the very rights she fought for are being attacked and repealed.
What does it mean when a revolutionary elder leaves and the movement she shaped still struggles to center Black trans women? She forces us to ask: Who will keep her work alive? Who will hold her place?
That’s why Miss Major is your next rabbit hole.
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