Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was a Black, transgender activist who fought for more than fifty years for her trans and gender-nonconforming community.
She was a veteran of the historic Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a survivor of Dannemora Prison and Bellevue Hospital’s “queen tank.” Her global legacy of activism was rooted in her own lived experiences, and she devoted her life to uplifting transgender women of color, particularly those who had survived incarceration and police brutality.
Miss Major’s fierce commitment and intersectional approach to justice led her to care directly for people with HIV/AIDS in New York in the early 1980s, and later to help launch San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange. As director of the TGI Justice Project, she returned to prisons as a mentor to her “gurls” inside.
In her later years, she founded and led House of GG, a center for trans and gender-nonconforming leaders from the Southern U.S., based in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her creative work also included serving as executive producer of the series Trans in Trumpland (now streaming everywhere) and co-authoring Miss Major Speaks, a book on her life and activism, with Toshio Meronek.
