Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (October 25, 1946 – October 13, 2025), often referred to as Miss Major, was an American author, activist, and community organizer for transgender rights. A witness to the Stonewall Riots, she participated in activism and community organizing for a range of causes, and served as the first executive director for the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project.

Griffin-Gracy contributed to oral history collections, including Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, The Stonewall Reader, and The Stonewall Generation: LGBT Elders on Sex, Activism, and Aging. Her memoir, Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, was released by Verso Books in 2023.

Biography Chicago Griffin-Gracy was born on October 25, 1946, in Chicago. She was raised on the South Side, while her father worked for the post office and her mother managed a beauty shop. She also described the influence of Christine Jorgensen, who became well known in the 1950s for having gender-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.

Griffin-Gracy said she was expelled from college for having feminine clothes, and she lost her home with her parents after they refused to accept her gender. She was a regular patron of the Stonewall, and was there on the first night of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion.

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.

Griffin-Gracy spent years in prison and on parole, She described Frank "Big Black" Smith, a leader of the 1971 Attica Correctional Facility riots, as a mentor, after meeting him while incarcerated at the Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora. She became the executive director of the organization, which is focused on providing support services to transgender, gender variant, and intersex people in prison. Her work included visiting trans women and men in California prisons to help coordinate access to legal and social services, and testimony at the California State Assembly and United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva about human rights violations in prisons.

While she was the executive director, she gave an interview to Jayden Donahue that was published in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, and described in a review by Arlen Katen in the Berkeley 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."

In an interview with Jessica Stern published in a 2011 Scholar and Feminist Online article, Griffin-Gracy described a sense of exclusion from the broader LGBT movement, described by Stern as for "herself and others, especially transgender people who are low-income, people of color, or have criminal records." In 2014, when she was honored as a community grand marshal for the San 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."

Griffin-Gracy was also the subject of the 2016 film Personal Things, by Tourmaline. She was an executive producer for the 2021 docu-series Trans in Trumpland. In the memoir Griffin-Gracy reflected on her early life, education, experience as a sex worker, the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, According to Vic Parsons in Huck, "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."

Miss Major Speaks won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.

Personal life and death Griffin-Gracy had five children. Her eldest son was born in 1978, and she later adopted three more sons.

Griffin-Gracy died on October 13, 2025, while she was under hospice care at her home in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was 78.

Selected works

Honors and awards 2013 Social Justice Sabbatical Award, Vanguard Public Foundation 2014 Bobbie Jean Baker Memorial Award, Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center 2014 San Francisco Pride Parade, community grand marshal Women of the Year 2021, The Advocate 2023 José Esteban Muñoz Award, CLAGS (The Center for LGBTQ Studies)