The Life And Legacy Of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

It’s Friday, Oct. 10, and I’m on a plane flying from Little Rock, Arkansas, rushing home to Atlanta, Georgia, as Pride weekend begins. I’m on my way to the TS Madison Starter House to meet with Kelly Nik and Torey from the Human Rights Campaign team — to sit with my sisters Monroe Alise and Toni Bryce, and to launch our new campaign together.

And although I’m excited — full of anticipation for what this next moment means — I am also grieving.

I’m grieving because I know I’ve laid eyes on Miss Major for the last time. I’ve held her hand for the last time. I’ve cried my tears. I’ve walked the yellow brick road at the House of GG. And I know, deep in my spirit, that when I return, her physical body will no longer be here.

There’s something poetic — and painful — about heading home for Pride, an activity that would not even be possible without her leadership, power, and sacrifice. Every flight I take, every panel I speak on, every program I build is standing on the ground she cleared for us.

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When I think about Miss Major’s transition, I don’t just think about the loss of a woman or an elder — I think about the setting of a North Star that guided generations of us toward freedom.

For many, the headline will say she was a trans icon, a Stonewall veteran, a trailblazer. But for me — for us — Miss Major was a guiding light in the galaxy of Black leadership. She was as essential to our movement as Dr. King, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, or Fannie Lou Hamer. She was our revolutionary mother — the woman who proved you could survive a world not built for your body and still choose to love it enough to fight for everyone else in it.

What happens when the last North Star from the beginning of our revolution transitions — right when we need another one?

At 7:02 PM Eastern Standard Time, Muriel Tarver, Executive Director of The House of GG, one of Miss Major’s closest confidants and my big sis, sent me a text message that simply said:

“She’s gone, Lady.”

And with that, the journey of official grieving began — a process that would unfold not only in my body, but within the broader queer, trans, and most importantly, Black community.

She Was Never Just A “Queer Icon” — She Was A Black Revolutionary

To tell Miss Major’s story only through the lens of queerness is to make her smaller than she ever was. She did not simply lead a movement for trans people; she led a movement for freedom.

Her life stretched across every era of Black resistance — from civil rights to prison abolition, from the AIDS epidemic to Black Lives Matter. Miss Major stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the same moral power that fueled the sermons of Dr. King and the marches of John Lewis. She showed us that resistance wasn’t only in policy or protest — it was in care, in community, in the audacity to still show up when the world didn’t.

If Martin showed us how to march, Miss Major showed us how to mother a movement.

Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, I didn’t have the experience of being connected to that constellation of Black revolutionaries who gave their lives so that I could live freely. For a long time, those names and faces felt distant — people in books, not people in rooms. So when I opened Lydon House, the first housing program in the country for queer and trans people returning from incarceration, Miss Major’s presence needed to be visible in that space.

When I served as Executive Director of Black and Pink National, I wanted everyone who walked through our doors — especially the Black trans women — to see her and know what was possible. Because Miss Major’s journey to leadership reflected my own: a formerly incarcerated Black trans woman who was told, at every step, that what she believed her people deserved was unrealistic, inappropriate to desire, or a waste of time to fight for.

And yet, in the face of that disbelief, Miss Major made it unequivocally clear: Black trans women deserve the kind of love, care, and investment that gives us purpose — that sparks our will to live and our right to celebrate life.

The Revolution She Built — Brick by Brick, Body By Body

Born in 1946 on the South Side of Chicago, Miss Major learned early what it meant to live outside society’s approval. She was expelled from college for expressing her truth. She spent years surviving criminalization and incarceration — systems that have always targeted Black trans women for simply existing. Yet even in those spaces, she was leading.

Inside Attica Prison, she began organizing. On the streets of New York after Stonewall, she was protecting her community. Through the Transgender Gender Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) and later House of GG, she built sanctuaries when the world offered none.

Miss Major’s leadership was never theoretical — it was physical, tangible, and often risky. Her daughter in the movement, Janetta Johnson, now the Executive Director of TGIJP, once told me a story that stays with me.

Miss Major was working at an agency in San Francisco that claimed to serve the LGBTQ+ community. She saw that the building had unused space that would have been perfect to house programming for Black trans women — the same women being pushed to the margins by everyone, including some of their own. But the agency’s leadership, mostly white and Black gay men, refused to share the space.

So when one of those leaders went on vacation, Miss Major took matters into her own hands. She paid local construction workers to come in and literally break down the brick wall separating that space. She worked alongside them — moving debris, directing the redesign, and decorating the rooms that would soon serve her people.

When Janetta asked her about it, Miss Major laughed and said,

“They’re gonna fire me, but you’re gonna stay here and make sure the girls get what they need.”

That story defines who she was. Miss Major didn’t wait for permission to do what was right. She built freedom with her own hands — even when it cost her everything.

I’ve always felt comfortable putting my body on the line and using whatever privilege I have to get my people what they need. What inspired me most about Miss Major was her unapologetic clarity about that. She knew that the accolades were nice, but the real reward lived in the lives of the people she served.

The revolution she built wasn’t crafted in conference rooms or think tanks. It was built in the rubble of a wall she refused to let stand between her people and their freedom.

The Blueprint She Left Us — The Galaxy She Formed

If you trace the light of our community, you’ll find that almost every beam leads back to Miss Major. Her fingerprints live in the programs, the art, the movements, and the audacity that define queer and trans life today. She wasn’t simply part of history — she was the soil, the seed, and the sunlight that allowed an entire ecosystem to bloom.

Without Miss Major, there is no me.

There is no Laverne Cox.

No TS Madison.

No MJ Rodriguez.

No Cherry The Boom.

No Bryanna Jenkins.

No Diamond Stylz.

No Iya Damons.

No Aria Said.

No Monroe Alise.

No Toni Bryce.

And beyond those of us directly in her lineage, her spirit reverberates through the broader fabric of culture — through the storytellers, visionaries, and creators who embody the freedom she fought for.

Lee Daniels. Coleman Domingo. Dylan Mulvaney. Jordan E. Cooper. Lena Waithe.

Every one of them exists in a world Miss Major helped make possible — a world where queer and trans brilliance can take up space in film, television, art, and storytelling; where we can build companies, lead movements, shape conversations, and celebrate our truth publicly.

What Miss Major began at Stonewall was never just a rebellion. It was an act of creation. She and her sisters broke the concrete, planted seeds in the cracks, and watered them with their own sweat, tears, and defiance.

Her legacy is not a straight line of succession. It’s a galaxy — Black, brown, queer, trans, radiant — spinning outward from one woman’s refusal to let any of us disappear.

She didn’t only leave us inspiration. She left us infrastructure — a way of building, loving, and leading that says: if the world won’t make room for you, make it yourself.

The Loss To The Whole Black Community

Miss Major’s passing is not just the loss of a trans elder — it is the loss of one of our great Black revolutionaries. Her work was not a sidebar to the story of Black liberation; it is one of its central chapters.

For decades, she moved through the world in a body that was both sacred and politicized — a Black woman, a trans woman, a survivor, a leader. She built structures of care and protection while the rest of the world debated whether her existence was even valid. She didn’t just teach trans people how to survive; she modeled for all of us what it looks like to love our people so fiercely that you build freedom from the ground up.

When we lose someone like Miss Major, we lose more than a person — we lose a blueprint for how to be human while building revolution.

Her energy can be felt in the ways Black culture has evolved. The unapologetic self-expression we see in music videos, on stages, and in fashion — the boldness of Black joy, the refusal to shrink — all of it carries her imprint. When we celebrate the rise of ballroom culture, when Beyoncé fills a stadium, when Lil Nas X dares to be fully himself, when a Black child puts on glitter and feels divine — Miss Major’s spirit is there.

And yet, our collective memory often forgets to say her name. We lift up our heroes — Dr. King, Malcolm, Rosa, John — but too rarely the women like Miss Major who built the emotional and spiritual infrastructure that held us all together.

If our history can hold Malcolm’s anger and Martin’s dream, it can also hold Miss Major’s care — the revolution of a Black woman who refused to stop loving her people, even when they wouldn’t love her back.

Her legacy reminds us that Black freedom cannot be selective. A liberation that excludes Black trans women is not liberation at all.

Miss Major’s death asks us to stretch our mourning wide enough to include the mothers of movements we were too afraid to claim. To say her name not just in queer spaces, but in every room where Black freedom is being planned, preached, or performed.

Because she was there first — loving us before we knew how to love ourselves.

The Loss To Black Trans People

When the world loses a leader, it holds press conferences and writes headlines. But when we lose a mother, we feel it in our bones.

For Black trans people, Miss Major’s passing is not just a historic loss — it’s a personal one. She wasn’t an icon from afar; she was our elder, our protector, our blueprint for surviving and still laughing.

The broader world will remember her as a pioneer. We remember her as the woman who showed up with food, with rent money, with hugs and hard truths. We remember the way she looked at you — seeing your pain, yes, but also your possibility.

Miss Major’s existence dismantles one of the most dangerous lies about Black trans people — that we are new, that we just “appeared,” that our presence in Black life is a modern anomaly or a brand. Too often, people inside and outside our community speak about us as if we’re the shiny ornamentation of Black culture rather than its architects.

But Miss Major is data. She is evidence. She is an 80-year living record of the truth that Black trans people have always been here — shaping the rhythm, language, and survival strategies that define who we are as a people. She’s proof that our bodies and brilliance have long been part of the machinery that moves our culture forward.

Her transition changes something in the proof. Without her physical presence, many will now look to the next most visible names — Laverne Cox and TS Madison — as the face of Black transness. Laverne’s breakout on Orange Is the New Black and Madison’s groundbreaking reign on digital platforms flipped the world’s understanding of what trans visibility could look like. But those moments stand on Miss Major’s shoulders. She built the possibility for that level of visibility, power, and cultural respect to even exist.

The loss of Miss Major shifts the evidence that so many people ask for when we talk about the importance of Black trans lives — not just our importance as human beings, but our importance to the culture itself.

A changemaker who lived and led on this land for more than eight decades has transitioned. That means our collective grief and loss now transforms into obligation — into movement, into the second revolution Miss Major spent her life preparing us for.

The Second Revolution

The first revolution — the one that carried us through civil rights, through Stonewall, through the AIDS crisis — taught us how to fight. It gave us our voices, our marches, our movements, and our visibility. But this next one — the one Miss Major left in our hands — demands something deeper. It asks us to fight not only for survival, but for safety. Not just to be seen, but to be sovereign.

Miss Major used to say that visibility without protection is just exposure. She knew that the world can watch you and still want you gone. The second revolution requires us to build what she built: networks of care, systems of mutual aid, communities that love people in real time, not in memoriam.

This revolution will not be televised, not because it isn’t happening, but because it’s already underway — in our homes, our art, our organizing, our insistence on joy. It’s happening in the way we refuse to abandon one another, the way we create safety in cities that never planned for our survival.

The second revolution looks like Black trans women leading organizations, building schools, writing policy, producing films, raising families. It looks like community refusing to trade visibility for safety. It looks like all of us — queer, trans, cis, straight, Black — realizing that our collective future depends on protecting the people this world has made most vulnerable.

If the first revolution got us seen, the second must make us safe.

And Miss Major has already drawn us the map. It’s in the programs she built, the people she mentored, the courage she taught us to carry.

This is the revolution of care — the one where we don’t wait for permission to build freedom, the one where we mother the movement the way she mothered us.

The Constellation She Leaves Behind

The sky looks different now. The brightest star has set — but stars like Miss Major don’t simply disappear. When a star reaches the end of its life, it erupts in a supernova — a burst of energy so powerful that it releases stardust across the universe. That stardust becomes the raw material for new stars, new light, new worlds.

That’s what Miss Major has done. Her transition isn’t an ending; it’s an expansion. Her brilliance didn’t dim — it multiplied. The force she carried in her body, her words, and her work has been released into all of us.

Right now, her light is still moving — scattering through our communities, through our conversations, through the spaces we build and the ways we love each other. This is the moment for us to pause, to feel it, to absorb what it means for her star to change form. Because this energy — her energy — is not meant to be mourned quietly. It’s meant to be activated.

This is our call to action: to coalesce as a community and become the supernova that takes us into the next phase of freedom and liberation — not just for Black queer people, not just for Black trans people, but for Black people, period.

Miss Major didn’t just show us how to survive oppression. She showed us how to transform it — how to turn pain into possibility, and loss into legacy.

She didn’t leave us in darkness. She left us in orbit, illuminated and ready.

The North Star has set, but the galaxy she created still glows — brighter, wider, more infinite than before.

If you look up tonight, you’ll see her there — not watching, but working — scattering her light so that every generation that follows can find its way home.

Miss Major taught us how to survive.

Now it’s our turn to become the explosion that births the next generation of stars.

Dominique Morgan, Sexual Health Expert, Adolescent Health Educator and Advocate, is an award-winning artist, philanthropist, and the Founder & CEO of Starks & Whitiker Consulting. Her work has been featured in Forbes, MTV, Essence, and more. Follow her on TikTok @thedominiquemorgan.

SEE ALSO:

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When The Last North Star Sets: The Life And Legacy Of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy  was originally published on newsone.com