'You’ve got to fight for what you want:’ Miss Major on the future of trans liberation

“Of course I have regrets – who doesn’t have regrets? But I’ve out­lived them. I’m still fuckin’ here,” Miss Major says.

Miss Major’s life is a sto­ry of strug­gle and sur­vival. A Black trans elder and activist for more than five decades, she’s been through it all, from being arrest­ed for sex work to steal­ing cars and protest­ing against police vio­lence at the 1969 Stonewall riots, to car­ing for gay men aban­doned by their fam­i­lies dur­ing the 1980s AIDS cri­sis. Along the way, she’s become a moth­er and men­tor to count­less queer and trans peo­ple. And after a life­time of fight­ing for jobs, health­care and safe­ty for trans women of colour – or ​“the gurls,” as she calls them – Miss Major is now right­ly regard­ed as a liv­ing legend. 

In her new book, Miss Major Speaks: Con­ver­sa­tions With a Black Trans Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, she is out­spo­ken about the fail­ures of the mod­ern LGBTQ+ move­ment to improve the lot of trans women of colour, and the need for trans peo­ple to fight for lib­er­a­tion by any means nec­es­sary. The book traces Miss Major’s life path over three-quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry, from a mid­dle-class child­hood to a polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion in soli­tary con­fine­ment, and offers – with sage wit – advice to younger gen­er­a­tions of mar­gin­alised peo­ple fight­ing for liberation. 

Speak­ing to Huck over Zoom from her home, the House of GG – the Grif­fin-Gra­cy Edu­ca­tion­al Retreat & His­tor­i­cal Cen­ter – in Lit­tle Rock, Arkansas, Miss Major says she wrote the book part­ly because she felt that younger trans peo­ple ​“need the oppor­tu­ni­ty to get to know me,” and hopes that read­ers will ​“come to their own con­clu­sions, and then call me, you know?” Friend and co-author Toshie Meronek, who’s sit­ting beside Miss Major on the call, asks if we should print Miss Major’s phone num­ber. The two erupt into laugh­ter. Before she became ill fol­low­ing two strokes in 2019, Miss Major spent ​“most of the time talk­ing on the phone” to peo­ple she freely gave her num­ber out to – her gurls – pro­vid­ing love and sup­port, or email­ing them. The book’s title is cribbed from her old email address, missmajorspeaks@​gmail.​com, which is wide­ly avail­able and was often pub­lished in queer media sto­ries about her.

The book takes the form of an inti­mate back-and-forth fire­side chat. ​“I had been record­ing her con­ver­sa­tions with oth­er peo­ple for a long time, and final­ly just start­ed record­ing ours – some over the phone and some when she moved to Arkansas from Oak­land,” Meronek explains.

“I love Arkansas,” Miss Major adds. ​“It’s a red state but they mind their own busi­ness with peo­ple here, so they don’t give me any has­sle. I’m very com­fort­able here. And now I have the grounds set up and I have flow­ers all over, I’m going nowhere.”

Born in Chica­go in 1946, Miss Major Grif­fin-Gra­cy was sent to a pri­vate col­lege in Min­neso­ta after grad­u­at­ing high school at 16. She left a few months lat­er when her roo­mate dis­cov­ered her suit­case of femme cloth­ing and returned to her par­ents in Chica­go, leav­ing again at 19 when her moth­er declared the city wasn’t big enough for both of them. Miss Major and a friend stole a car and head­ed for New York, but were arrest­ed for speed­ing before leav­ing Chica­go. She spent six months in prison, though that wouldn’t pre­vent her love of cars from becom­ing a life­long obses­sion. Today, she has a 70 Cadil­lac that’s cur­rent­ly ​“in a shop get­ting fixed up.”

When Miss Major final­ly arrived in New York, she got a job in a morgue. ​“The expe­ri­ence didn’t go to waste,” the book notes, ​“as her famil­iar­i­ty with make­up increased with the body count.” She even­tu­al­ly wound up work­ing at the Jew­el Box Revue, a drag col­lec­tive, meet­ing oth­er trans women who showed her how to nav­i­gate sex work. It was a more viable finan­cial option than per­form­ing, but came with its own draw­backs: name­ly, police vio­lence and harass­ment. Miss Major is frank about the choice they often made between spend­ing a night in a cell or suck­ing off a cop, and even more so when she com­pares sex work to LGBTQ+ non-prof­its: ​“There was a lot more hon­esty in hook­ing than in the last cou­ple of Gay Prides I did.”

Miss Major is a sur­vivor of Belle­vue Hos­pi­tal, a psy­chi­atric asy­lum that many trans women of colour were dumped in dur­ing the 1960s after being picked up by the cops for the crimes of being gen­der non-con­form­ing or sell­ing sex to sur­vive. She writes in the book about how the trans women inmates would share tips for count­ing the num­ber of books on a shelf while their gen­i­tals were hooked up to elec­tri­cal probes – a crude ear­ly form of con­ver­sion ther­a­py that attempt­ed to iden­ti­fy and then erase same-sex sex­u­al desire. Miss Major also spent five years inside the Clin­ton Cor­rec­tion­al Facil­i­ty at Dan­nemo­ra for a bur­glary con­vic­tion. It was there she met Frank ​“Big Black” Smith, a Black Pan­ther who’d been one of the lead­ers of the Atti­ca Prison Riot in 1971 (a thou­sand-pris­on­er strong, four-day rebel­lion that end­ed with the high­est num­ber of pris­on­er fatal­i­ties in the his­to­ry of US pris­on­er upris­ings). She describes Big Black in the book as ​“My men­tor. My love”. The two man­aged to become friends through their cell walls in the soli­tary con­fine­ment block, and Big Black gave Miss Major the oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn about the sys­tems of pow­er that she had been fight­ing against her entire life. 

“The sta­tis­tics prove that we suf­fer hard­er than any­one else in the prison sys­tem,” Miss Major says. ​“Can’t have trans lib­er­a­tion with­out prison abolition.” 

Big Black also showed her the impor­tance of role mod­els and how she could help ​‘the gurls’ – trans women of colour who’ve been incar­cer­at­ed, suf­fered police bru­tal­i­ty, or both – fight oppres­sion by lead­ing them. This for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence shaped the rest of Miss Major’s life.

Miss Major has her­self has been a cru­cial source of hope and sup­port to many trans peo­ple. ​“I want to hold them and let them know that there’s some­body who cares about whether they make it or not, whether they sur­vived or not, whether they have the things they need to con­tin­ue on,” she says. ​“That’s the most impor­tant.” But, since becom­ing ill, it’s been hard­er for her to talk on the phone. In some ways, this book is a new ver­sion of the com­mu­ni­ty build­ing and emo­tion­al sup­port that is Miss Major’s life’s work.

Although the stroke, and grow­ing old­er, has changed the way she com­mu­ni­cates, Miss Major is sur­round­ed by vis­i­tors and friends at the House of GG. When asked her favourite thing about age­ing, she responds, ​“Noth­ing! It’s not favourable at all. But we have to [grow old­er]. I can’t think of any­thing favourable about it, oth­er than, well, I’m com­fort­able, I don’t leave this house that I have here, so that’s nice. And peo­ple have a ten­den­cy to like me, so they take care of my needs.”

In Miss Major Speaks, she out­lines how younger gen­er­a­tions of trans peo­ple can fight the Pow­ers That Be, from build­ing com­mu­ni­ties by and for trans peo­ple of colour to vot­ing out Repub­li­cans in Wash­ing­ton. ​“What good are they doing?” she says. ​“They’re not doing any­thing to help our com­mu­ni­ty to sur­vive and now they decide to attack the younger kids. That’s just wrong.”

“You’ve got to fight for what you want,” Miss Major tells Huck. ​“This stuff isn’t free, it doesn’t come from divine inter­ven­tion. You’ve got to work for it, and in some cas­es it means you’ve got to fight.”

The open­ing chap­ter of Miss Major Speaks offers a refresh­ing­ly damn­ing indict­ment of the LGBTQ+ non-prof­it sec­tor, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Human Rights Cam­paign (HRC), the largest LGBTQ+ lob­by­ing organ­i­sa­tion in the US. HRC did some­thing ​“that won’t be soon for­got­ten among trans peo­ple,” Miss Major explains, and for the first time in our con­ver­sa­tion, which has been punc­tu­at­ed with laugh­ter and her beam­ing smile, she is solemn. ​“In the ear­ly 2000s, HRC was doing all this work on an unem­ploy­ment non-dis­crim­i­na­tion bill, and then, at the last minute, dropped trans peo­ple from the bill,” she says. ​“It just showed that, for this organ­i­sa­tion – which was, of course, run by most­ly white gay men – trans peo­ple were dis­pos­able when it felt like it wasn’t polit­i­cal­ly pop­u­lar to include them.”

While it’s struc­tured as a wide-rang­ing series of con­ver­sa­tions, cov­er­ing her thoughts on vis­i­bil­i­ty pol­i­tics, cops at Pride, prison abo­li­tion, Mar­sha P John­son and Sylvia Rivera (“we looked up to them because they were try­ing to get all the gurls to unite”) and the AIDS epi­dem­ic, the book is also a his­to­ry tour through mod­ern Black and queer his­to­ry from some­one who lived – lives – through it. When it comes to lib­er­a­to­ry strug­gles, ​“it’s not a sit­u­a­tion of win or lose,” she tells Huck. ​“You have to deal with things as they are and get over it.” Refer­ring to the Stonewall riots and the gay movement’s fail­ure to help trans women, she adds: ​“Did we win in ​’69? No, we didn’t win in ​’69. Those moth­er­fuck­ers took it from us.”

Against seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able odds, both inside and out­side of the move­ment, I ask how it is that Major man­ages to keep hold of hope. ​“I nev­er let it go,” she replies. In the face of all the hard­ships life can throw at you, hold­ing on to hope ​“depends on some­thing inside [you],” she adds. ​“For me, it was when I first got my son. Now I have anoth­er son, and he’s two years old. That keeps me going.”

“What real­ly brings me joy is the sound of my laugh­ter,” she con­cludes. ​“And that lit­tle kid, Asi­ah. He just fills my heart up with hope and belief that this will work out. And walk­ing in the park and being bare­foot and feel­ing the grass and see­ing my toes. Those kinds of things. Stuff that you can’t buy. A sense of free­dom that you have to feel your­self, enjoy yourself.”

Although her life has been one of endurance, it’s also filled with love and hope. Sit­ting next to Toshio for this inter­view, the sound of Miss Major’s laugh­ter was fre­quent and joy­ous. While she’s clear in her role as a trans elder impart­ing wis­dom for younger gen­er­a­tions, she doesn’t let this respon­si­bil­i­ty weigh her down. It’s an hon­our, she says, that younger trans women trea­sure her so much.

But when it comes down to it, Miss Major is very clear that what peo­ple must do is to fight against their oppres­sion and that of oth­ers. The cru­cial thing, she says, is to act – in the ​“hope that you can make things a lit­tle bit bet­ter for the girl after you.”

Miss Major Speaks: Con­ver­sa­tions with a Black Trans Rev­o­lu­tion­ary by Miss Major and Toshio Meronek is out now with Ver­so Books.