- Born
- 25 OctoberChicago, USA
- Died
- 13 October 2025Little Rock, Arkansas, USA
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
She was at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 and spent the rest of her life fighting for Black trans women and trans people in prison.
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. She was expelled from two colleges for wearing women’s clothing and moved to New York, where she found community among the drag queens and trans women of the city.
In June 1969 she was at the Stonewall Inn on the night of the police raid that triggered the Stonewall riots. Shortly afterwards she was sent to prison, where she experienced the brutal treatment of trans women behind bars and witnessed the 1971 uprising at Attica prison. This experience shaped her life’s work.
In the 1970s she moved to California. She cared for people with AIDS, worked in food banks and for many years led the Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project in San Francisco, which supports trans women in prison and after their release. Many young trans women called her “Mama”.
In her later years she founded a retreat for Black trans people in Arkansas, the House of GG. The documentary “Major!” (2015) and her memoir “Miss Major Speaks” (2023) told her story. She died in Little Rock in October 2025. Sources differ on the year of her birth.