At a moment of intensifying hostility toward transgender people, the need for visionary figures like Miss Major has never been clearer.
By: Audrey Cole/The Rainbow Times
A Loss That Reverberates
The transgender liberation movement has lost one of its founding figures. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy — the well-known Black trans activist who stood on the front lines of the Stonewall uprising and mentored generations of trans women — died Oct. 13, 2025, at her home in Little Rock, Arkansas. According to CNN, the 78-year-old activist passed away from complications of a urinary tract infection that had entered her bloodstream. Her family and her chosen community were with her in those final days.
Her passing, as The Washington Post observed, comes at a time when the urgency of her life’s work has resurfaced with haunting clarity. Nine months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the federal government has issued an array of executive orders that advocates say threaten to erase transgender identity from public life.
From Stonewall to the Streets
Miss Major was born Oct. 25, 1946, in Chicago, and, as she often recounted, knew who she was long before she had language to name it. According to The 19th News, she found her footing in the trans community of New York City, where she became a frontline participant in the 1969 Stonewall uprising — an event long mythologized as the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.
But Miss Major refused to let Stonewall be romanticized. The Bay Area Reporter quoted her saying simply: “We were tired, and we fought back.” She later lamented that the queer political establishment that emerged from those riots frequently excluded the Black and brown trans women who had helped ignite them. It was that exclusion that directed her toward decades of organizing for those the movement left behind.
A Life Built from Survival
Her politics were forged through hardship. After years of sex work and incarceration in men’s prisons, she met Frank “Big Black” Smith, a leader of the 1971 Attica prison rebellion. That encounter radicalized her understanding of power and punishment. Upon her release, she began advocating for incarcerated trans women and became the first executive director of the Transgender Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Project, or TGIJP, in San Francisco.
Janetta Johnson, her successor and one of her “daughters,” told The Washington Post that Miss Major “turned pain into purpose,” shaping generations who saw liberation not only as protest but as care.
Caring Through Crisis
According to CNN, Miss Major became a lifeline during the AIDS epidemic, founding Angels of Care, a home health agency in San Diego for people living with HIV. When her partner, Joe-Bob Michael, died in 1995, she relocated to San Francisco, where she launched the city’s first mobile needle exchange and GiGi’s Place, a drop-in center for trans women.
Her work blurred no boundaries between caregiving and activism. “She met people where they were,” one colleague said. “That was her genius.”
Building Sanctuaries in the South
When Miss Major moved to Little Rock in 2016, she saw the South not as a retreat but as a new front in the fight. In 2019, she founded the Griffin-Gracy Educational and Historical Center, known as the House of GG. “A space for our community to take a break, swim, eat good food, and recharge for the fight for our lives,” she told KATV in 2020. According to the Little Rock ABC affiliate, she attended state court hearings in 2021 when Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming care for minors, standing outside with trans teens whose access to treatment hung in the balance.
A Government Erasing Its Citizens
On inauguration day this year, President Trump signed Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order, as the White House and Human Rights Watch detailed, directs all federal agencies to define sex strictly as male or female and roll back recognition of gender identity across all programs.
Subsequent directives have barred transgender service members from the military, prohibited trans women and girls from participating in women’s sports, removed gender markers from passports, and forced trans women in federal custody into male facilities. The National Women’s Law Center noted that these decrees align closely with Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint — written mostly by the Heritage Foundation — designed to reverse decades of LGBTQ+ protections. Such words have been taken by governors of Fla. and Texas as a green light to further ostracize and cause harm and suffering to transgender and nonbinary Americans. In 2023, a law known as the “Safety in Private Spaces Act” (HB 1521) requires individuals to use bathrooms and changing facilities that correspond to their biological sex at birth in certain public, private, and state-licensed buildings.
Legal challenges are mounting, with Lambda Legal and the ACLU arguing that the orders violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection.
As It Happened in Los Angeles, Calif.
In this climate, the Trump administration’s aggressive tactics have extended far beyond policy. As The Rainbow Times reported in June, Pres. Trump deployed Marines to Los Angeles “without consultation with California officials,” sparking what the outlet called a “gross abuse of power that strips this state and its people of the constitutional protections they are guaranteed.” California Governor Gavin Newsom warned that “this is not law and order — this is martial law in disguise.”
Miss Major knew this pattern well: state-sanctioned power turned violently against the powerless. It’s the very system she spent her life teaching others to resist.
The Human Toll
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, transgender youth have expressed growing fear about their safety and access to care under the Trump administration’s policies. Psychologists warn of rising suicide risk amid clinical closures and documentation crackdowns.
Miss Major’s lessons feel newly urgent now. She understood that justice required both policy and presence—that revolution existed not only in crowds but in kitchens, hospitals, and prisons. “Take care of each other,” she often told those she mentored. “Because the system never will.”
Enduring Faith in the Future
Advocates across the country have echoed her rallying cry. Lambda Legal tweeted that “the best way to honor Miss Major is to keep fighting for the world she imagined.” And The Washington Post quoted her final public remarks at last year’s Democratic National Convention: “I’m not going back. I refuse to go back.”
Now, as the federal government works to limit trans visibility and rights, her voice resounds as both prophecy and command. According to The 19th News, Miss Major viewed her work as “a love letter to the girls who will come after me.”
Her message was simple: love as defiance, community as survival.
A Legacy of Revolutionary Love
Miss Major taught her followers that liberation was not an abstract demand but a daily practice. She insisted that chosen family could be stronger than blood. Her legacy endures through her sons — Christopher, Asaiah, and Jonathon — her long-term partner, Beck Witt, and the innumerable “daughters” she mothered through movement work.
“She lived for all of us,” Janetta Johnson said. “Now we live for her.”
