The world lost one of its most powerful and loving revolutionaries this week. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a pioneering voice for transgender rights and prison justice, passed away at age 78 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her loss has left an enormous void in the LGBTQ+ community, but her words and wisdom live on through Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, a book that captures her unfiltered truth, humor, and humanity. Co-written with journalist Toshio Meronek, this 2023 release feels even more vital now, a living record of her voice and her fight for trans liberation.
Structure and Style
Rather than a linear narrative, the book unfolds as recorded conversations. Meronek and Miss Major move through topics like memory, place, loss, and strategy with the improvisational rhythm of real talk. This format echoes Major’s own politics: she favors dialogue over lecture and connection over performance.
Because of that, the chapters feel a little loose. Topics drift, jump, and return. For some readers, that might feel messy; for others, it’s part of the book’s charm, capturing what it means to tell a life out loud rather than neatly package it.
Themes and Highlights
The Limits of “Stonewall History”: One of the boldest moves in Miss Major Speaks is its insistence that “Stonewall never happened,” or at least not in the way mainstream LGBTQ narratives have framed it. Major critiques how history erases trans women of color and how Pride and nonprofit institutions often sanitize or misrepresent the legacy for mass appeal.
She forces readers to reckon with who gets center stage in queer memory and demands we see the omissions as deliberate, not accidental.
Survival, Incarceration, and Political Education: A large part of the memoir is spent in the terrain of pain and punishment: psychiatric institutions, prisons, and solitary confinement. In those places, Major describes how she encountered mentors such as Frank “Big Black” Smith, engaged in self-education, and came to see collective liberation as inseparable from the fate of the incarcerated.
Her journey through the criminal legal system is not framed as a detour or shame but as a crucible through which her analysis, strategy, and care practice were forged.
Community Care, Mentorship, and Trust: Throughout the book, Major’s tenderness and fierce loyalty to “her gurls,” the younger trans women she loves as kin, is palpable. She critiques respectability politics, philanthropy, and the traps of nonprofit careerism, insisting that building mutual care systems is more radical and necessary than institutional validation.
Her establishment of TILIFI (Tell It Like It Fuckin’ Is) stands as both a symbolic and literal space for rest, skill-sharing, resistance, and sanctuary.
Humor, Voice, and Accountability: Even when covering trauma, the book is infused with Major’s wit and refusal to sanitize. She swears, jokes, gets petty, and engages in self-critique. She retains humility and a living capacity to change. Many reviewers note that her personality is so vivid you can almost hear her voice through the pages.
Strengths and Limitations
Strengths
- Radical honesty: Major’s life is not rendered as myth but as flesh and contradiction.
- Political depth rooted in experience: Her analyses don’t come from ivory towers but from survival.
- Mentorship as method: The book doubles as legacy work, passing tools to younger generations.
- Accessible to multiple readers: Activists, scholars, and curious outsiders will all find entry points.
Limitations or Challenges
- The conversational format sometimes leaves contextual gaps that may require background reading.
- The narrative isn’t always cohesive; thematic threads can feel scattered.
- Readers unfamiliar with trans history or prison literature might find some references opaque.
The Bottom Line
In the wake of Miss Major’s passing, Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary (affiliate link) is a rare and necessary text. It doesn’t offer easy inspiration or hero worship. Instead, it gives us everything: the hard edges, the love, the critiques, and the persistence. It demands listening, reflection, and a reorientation of how we think about movement, memory, and who deserves generational recognition.
If you come to this book as a student of queer and trans history, as someone active in movement work, or simply as a person seeking to understand what it means to live and survive as a Black trans woman through decades of violence and change, read it. Then reread it. Let its fire, tenderness, and truth reshape how you see the world.
