Legendary Transgender Activist Miss Major Dies at 78

This story was originally reported by Orion Rummler of The 19th. Meet Orion and read more of his reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a legendary transgender activist, was known for many things in her community. As a caretaker, she was known for getting Black trans women off the street and housed when they faced poverty and violence. As a fierce advocate for trans rights, she was known for demanding that LGBTQ+ people focus on protecting the most vulnerable among them, like women being policed and incarcerated for trying to survive. And as a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New YorkCity, she was known as a queer elder who did not want the past to be used as an excuse for inaction. 

Her nonprofit retreat for trans leaders, The House of gg—the Griffin-Gracy Educational and Historical Center— announced her death in an Instagram statement on Monday night. She died at home on October 13 in Little Rock, Arkansas, surrounded by loved ones, the statement said. She was 78, according to the statement, although she doubted official records of her birth and believed she was in her 80s. She was hospitalized twice this year and was recently in hospice care, following a bloodstream infection. She suffered her second stroke in 2019. 

Miss Major is survived by her longtime partner, Beck Witt Major, with whom she had a child, Asiah Wittenstein Major, in 2021. She raised other children during her life, through adoption and through relationships with former partners — including Deborah Brown, who gave birth to their son, Christopher, in 1978. But her family relationships extended beyond blood; according to the House of gg, she is also survived by Janetta Johnson, successor of the Miss Major Alexander L. Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center, and her sisters Tracie O’Brien and Billie Cooper. 

She was born in Chicago and grew up with two siblings, Cookie and Sargeant. Sheloved her parents, “despite their recurring attempts to smack the queen out of her,” according to her memoir.

In the last years of her life, Miss Major felt called to fight back against the rising tide of anti-trans legislation. She wanted to talk directly with young LGBTQ+ people and encourage them to take action. She met with them at protests and at local gay bars, at the Democratic National Convention in 2024 while campaigning for former Vice President Kamala Harris, and during her third visit to the White House in 2023. She relied on motorized scooters and wheelchairs to travel across states, by car, by plane and by Amtrak, to have those conversations. She felt called to keep going for the cause, even as traveling became difficult for her. 

“We’ve got to stand up and fight,” she said at one of those intimate gatherings in 2023. At one of Washington, D.C.’s most beloved queer bars, she spoke to a roomful of Black transgender women from her own generation and young trans activists who felt awed in her presence. She was there to motivate them to act and to take care of each other — and to press upon them just how perilous the political moment had become for trans people in the United States.

“Don’t be complacent now,” she told the group. “Don’t step back and be in the shadows … you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to, because I can’t do it alone. And I decided to come around and let you know, you’ve got to stand up and you’ve got to move on this. We can’t afford to not move.”

Ultimately, Miss Major was in that room because of the anti-trans legislation that was, and still is, sweeping across state politics. Republicans in seven states have passed laws banning trans people from using bathrooms that match their gender identity in all government-owned buildings, including K-12 schools. Sixteen states now narrowly define sex to exclude trans people, enabling further discrimination. More states are banning trans people from updating their birth certificates and driver’s licenses with the gender that they live day-to-day as. And 26 states have banned gender-affirming care for trans youth. As Miss Major watched the legislative onslaught, she decided that she couldn’t take it anymore. So she hit the road. 

“I said, ‘Oh God, another law, they’re out to get us.’ And I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I got up. I walked around the house, I sat down. And I said, ‘Well, this has fucked up my Fourth of July,’” she told The 19th in a 2023 interview. “And that’s when I decided, well, someone’s got to do something. And then it dawned on me, well, no one’s going to do it but me.”

That sense of urgency fueled Miss Major’s activism well into her later years. She frequently said that not enough has been done to protect trans people, especially Black trans women, from being killed, harassed or discriminated against. Cisgender gay men and lesbians had not stepped up as true allies, she said. She saw major historical events in LGBTQ+ history as more symbolic than anything else—including the Stonewall riots. 

“We were fighting for our lives. They’re still killing us; they’re still not giving us the respect we’re due for putting up with their shit all these years,” she said in her 2023 memoir. 

She continued: “When a parade happened the year after Stonewall, I couldn’t find us anywhere. Not one of my gurls.… I don’t give a shit whether they acknowledge or know about me, but those gays and lesbians were ashamed to be seen with us, and they still want us erased. So for my gurls, it’s as if Stonewall never happened because it didn’t change anything for us.”

She published that memoir in 2023 with the writer Toshio Meronek, a longtime personal friend. It sought to capture the depth of her life experiences as an activist, an outlaw, a former sex worker and a trans person who endured near-constant police scrutiny in her younger years as she tried to survive and live authentically as herself. Trans women were routinely rounded up from gay bars and dumped at police stations or at Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric wing, where they were subjected to inhumane tests. Miss Major spent time there, as well as incarceration at Attica Correctional Facility and the Clinton Correctional Facility in New York, which were foundational to her views as an activist in opposition to the prison-industrial complex. 

In the words of her memoir, “you don’t get to be seventy-something as a Black trans person without breaking a law.” The society that she grew up in—which, she argued, still exists today—was designed to keep people like her underground, their existence made illicit and illegal through a lack of legal protections and upward economic mobility. Often, whenever Miss Major got a so-called “legitimate” job, like working at a clothing boutique, she was fired simply for being transgender. With few jobs available to Black trans women, she and her peers turned to sex work, drag performances, odd jobs and side hustles to survive—robbery included. At one point, a young Miss Major and her then-boyfriend got busted on a safe-cracking spree through upstate New York. A few times, she and some other girls stole suitcases from John F. Kennedy International Airport to sell whatever they could find. 

Her memoir aimed to guide young trans people of color toward collective liberation. She wanted trans girls to put up a “united front” against what she described as “the powers that be”—meaning the government, the police and the state—for their allies to be more visible, and for trans people to know that whatever it is they’re asking for, to always ask for more. Throughout her life, she felt the need to make connections with young trans people. She wanted to share the lessons she had learned the hard way. 

“When younger people call me mother, or grandmother, I feel as though it’s an honor. To them, it’s like, ‘Here’s an older trans woman who survived, and who’s out there still raising hell.’ Elders can teach the younger people to pick up the fight. In my mind it’s what they must do,” she told Meronek in one of their interviews for her memoir. “When you are constantly under attack, especially if you’re in this community, you can’t just retire and walk off into the sunset. You’ve got to stay and teach young people to fight.”