Stonewall vet Miss Major Griffin-Gracy hospitalized

Longtime activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a veteran of the Stonewall uprising, has been hospitalized with a blood clot and sepsis, her partner, Beck Witt Major, posted on Facebook.

Miss Major, 84 has been in the hospital for 12 days. She has had ongoing health problems, having posted in January that she needed 24-hour nursing care after a recent hospitalization. She had a stroke in 2019.

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Miss Major, a Black genderqueer transgender woman, has dedicated the last 50 years to advocating for incarcerated trans people, particularly trans women of color, who are often housed in men’s prisons, as she was. She has worked for multiple HIV and AIDS organizations, and she was the first executive director of the Transgender Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Project, a role she held until she retired in 2015.

She delivered a powerful and passionate speech to the LGBTQ+ Caucus at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last year, urging attendees to “put on your best shit and get out there” to defeat Donald Trump.

“I’m not going back. I refuse to go back. And if [Trump] thinks we’re going back, fuck him in his ass,” she said to much applause. She endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

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She and her partner are parents of a son, Asaih Wittenstein Major, born in 2021.

Her other accomplishments include executive-producing the series Trans in Trumpland and writing Miss Major Speaks, a book on her life’s activism coauthored with Toshio Meronek. She also established House of GG-TILIFI, a retreat center for trans and gender-nonconforming leaders from the Southern U.S., in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was grand marshal of New York City's Pride march last year.

There is a crowdfunding campaign to help cover her health care expenses. Find out more at https://fundly.com/missmajor.