Pioneering transgender rights leader Miss Major Griffin-Gracy passed on October 13, 2025, leaving behind an unparalleled legacy of over five decades of nationwide advocacy for the transgender community, the overall LGBTQ+ community, and in tireless support of numerous other social and racial justice efforts. She had been in home hospice care due to complications from a urinary tract infection.
Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, she lived an openly LGBTQ+ life since adolescence. With other early community leaders such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, she was present during the 1969 Stonewall riots that further galvanized the burgeoning queer community.
Over the next few decades, she worked in community services, including for trans women and for a food bank. She also did compassionate home health care during the HIV/AIDS pandemic before moving to San Francisco in the 1990s. Some of her first positions in the city were at the City of Refuge and at the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center.
Beginning in 2005, Griffin-Gracy became a leader of the San Francisco-based Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project, and was named the organization’s first Executive Director in 2010. She retired in late 2015, the same year that a documentary film about her life, MAJOR!, was released (https://www.missmajorfilm.com/). After moving to Arkansas, she founded the Griffin-Gracy Educational and Historical Center, fondly known as the House of GG.
In 2023, she co-authored (with Toshio Meronek) the book Miss Major Speaks: Conversations With a Black Trans Revolutionary. During her later years, she also was interviewed by Kin Folkz for the San Francisco Bay Times. Folkz is an artist, activist, and the Founder and Executive Director of both the Queer Healing Arts Center and Spectrum Queer Media.
When Kin Folkz asked “Mama Major” how she continued to remain focused and encouraged despite political backlash, Griffin-Gracy replied, “Oh, honey, we’ll always be the ones to survive. I’m not afraid, because I know that we’ve gone through much worse—especially us poor, Black TLGBQIA+ folks. We weren’t supposed to survive the trauma and the torture. We’re strong because they couldn’t break us; honey, we know how to bend. Our oppressors can’t. They’re hard-hearted and that makes them fragile. I know how valuable we are. They fear us—not because we’ve done anything to harm ’em—but because we’re a peek into the future, one that won’t include their dusty old asses. Their fear makes them lie to themselves, makes them pretend to be more than they actually are. They are proven, pathological liars. They’re more than weak-hearted; they’re weak-minded. They’re bullies. And there aren’t a whole bunch; they’re just very loud. They’re arrogant and stuck in time, like dinosaurs in tar pits. And, like the dinosaurs, their way of thinking is becoming more obsolete each day.”
To read the full interview, go to: https://bit.ly/4oxU005
Legacy Remembers reports that Griffin-Gracy is survived by her longtime partner, Beck Witt Major; three sons, Asaiah, Christopher, and Jonathon; her sisters; and many “daughters” and chosen family. The guestbook at Legacy may be signed at https://bit.ly/47139sd
In Memoriam
Published on October 23, 2025
Recent Comments