A Legacy of Black Trans Excellence, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

Background for Miss Major's Celebration of Black Trans Excellence on Dec 6th

For more than 18 years, The Miss Major Alexander L Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center has been dedicated to ending human rights abuses against transgender, gender-variant, and intersex people in California prisons and beyond. Our office has long served as a community hub—a place where our people can walk in, connect with staff and one another, and access housing, healthcare (including peer-to-peer mental health support), financial resources, and more—all within a safe, nurturing, and culturally affirming environment.

Miss Major Griffin Gracy was a Black trans woman activist and community leader for trans women’s rights. She was a leader in the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, along with Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. She is also a survivor of Attica State Prison and a former sex worker. She was the Executive Director of the Miss Major Alexander L Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center, which she founded with Alexander L. Lee in 2004 as the Trans Gender Gender Non-Conforming Intersex Justice Project. Miss Major served as the first Executive Director of our beloved organization and she maintained a leadership and advisory role in our work up to the day she transitioned from this planet.

She built TGIJP to be an organization working “against imprisonment, police violence, racism, poverty, and societal pressures” for transgender women of color and their families.

Miss Major’s call to activism and abolition is rooted in our hearts and reflected in the work of our hands. Her ascension and her legacy are honored through the work we continue to grow, evolve, and expand.

At the Miss Major Alexander L. Lee TGIJP Black Cultural Center, we seek to create a world rooted in self-determination, freedom of expression, and gender justice.

Miss Major’s first daughter is our CEO, Ms. Janetta Johnson. Miss Janetta is a formerly incarcerated Black Trans Woman, who, even before being mentored by Miss Major, dedicated whatever resources she had to help her sisters back in Tampa, Florida. Miss Major recognized Janetta’s innate talent for leadership and activism by politicizing and mentoring her in San Francisco as a community organizer in the 1990s.

Miss Major taught Janetta by recruiting her to do outreach and HIV testing for Black Trans Women in San Francisco at Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center in 1998. The organization refused to provide a separate space away from all the cisgender gay men, so one week while the boss was traveling, Miss Major took a sledgehammer and busted through a wall to create a safe drop-in space for Trans people. This was the first drop-in space for Trans people in San Francisco.

This moment—and the intentions and vision behind it—are the very actions that built the ground we stand on today. Mama Major stood on business, and everyone around her took heed.

When Mama met Alexander L. Lee in 2004, they created a safe space once again—this time as a support group for Trans people in prisons. Years later, after cultivating TGIJP into a community of Black and Brown abolitionists practicing care and collective liberation, Mama Major handed Miss Janetta her letter of hire, WHILE SHE WAS STILL IN PRISON! Mama knew that Miss Janetta—her first daughter, a Black Trans Woman who had witnessed and fought against the human rights violations she endured in a men’s prison—was the one destined to succeed her at TGIJP.

This move of healing yourself by working with your sister to create a safe space for more sisters is repeated again and again and again.

In 2014, we convened the first Black Girlz Rulez (BGR), TGIJP’s national convening of Black TGI grassroots leaders and Black Trans-led organizations. Now in its twelfth year, BGR brings together Black Trans leaders to develop a national organizing campaign that addresses the intersections of racism/anti-Blackness, criminalization, and transphobia impacting the Black Trans Femme/Masculine and Nonbinary communities.

In October 2025, BGR convened 60 Black Trans community members and organizers from the South and across the country in New Orleans. The gathering focused on political and organizing strategies while also fostering healing, connection, and community care. TGIJP provided travel funds, luxury accommodations, and daily stipends to all participants, recognizing their low-income status and many with prior incarceration statuses as well.

By 2017, we had created so much safe space that our girls were strong enough and loud enough to make the San Francisco Board of Supervisors pass the world's first Sexual Orientation Gender Identity (SOGI) Data Collection Legislation so that we could begin to illustrate the violence we face at every turn in the social service ecosystem. This Legislation gave us more ground to stand on and continues to be replicated in cities and states throughout the U.S.

In 2019, with Miss Major”s blessing and support, Miss Janetta delivered a letter of hire to Zy’aire Nassirah, a Black Trans Man serving time in a California women's prison. Zy-aire received his letter of hire WHILE HE WAS STILL IN PRISON! Zy’aire brought 30 years of direct experience organizing against human rights abuses in the carceral system, where our own Alexander L. Lee mentored him.

Mama Major taught us to make safe space, to reach back into the most violent spaces our people inhabit (prisons, jails, detention centers, and other locked facilities), and to do whatever it takes to bring them out of that hell and into the safe space we created.

Zy’aire worked at TGIJP as a Reentry Case Manager and Legal Assistant, creating opportunities for his clients rooted in self-determination, freedom of expression, and gender justice. Zy’aire is also a long-time member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and centers his system change work on the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming people impacted by imprisonment. Zy’aire’s lived experience, skilled leadership, seasoned organizing, and voice in the global struggle to educate humanity about gendered violence in the US carceral system made him the perfect person to take on the Co-Executive Director Position at TGIJP when Miss Janetta was promoted to CEO.

Mama Major taught us that you don’t leave a position of leadership in this movement until you train another comrade to take your place! She taught us to always be mentoring our replacements! In this manner, by 2016, we built the Melenie Eleneke Grassroots Reentry/Socioeconomic Justice Program. This is the only reentry program for Trans people in the State of California that does not collude with the carceral system.

To this day, Trans people in California have the possibility of being picked up at the prison gate by a Trans person from their community. TGIJP’s Reentry program provides independent, zero-surveillance housing for three to six months post-release and a job at TGIJP that pays a living wage in San Francisco. That is what Mama Major taught us: Reentry must come with a paycheck!

By 2018, our organizing and dedication to the lessons Mama taught us resulted in the creation of the world's first Office of Transgender Initiatives in a major US city, followed by the first Transgender Business District in the US, both in San Francisco.

In 2022, during a global pandemic, we secured Black Trans ownership of a three-story, 10,000-square-foot commercial property in the heart of San Francisco, not too far from the spot Mama and Janetta freed up at TARC back in 1998. Miss Major has been a leading force behind our work since its inception. When we made this tremendous accomplishment we named the building and also renamed the organization to uplift and amplify the power and legacy of her work. Black Trans Ownership, Legacy, and Excellence!

In 2025, we are thriving and growing – still working in community and with leadership in the San Francisco government to provide and maintain a robust social service structure in our city to help our community heal from centuries of violent policies and practices that continue to harm us.

Today, Miss Major Alexander L. Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center provides case management to hundreds of mostly Black and Brown Trans women in San Francisco. We provide support with care services and rent vouchers that can be used in mainstream housing throughout the Bay. At The Miss Major Alexander L Lee Black Trans Cultural Center, we also offer a free clothing closet, a food pantry, a wellness center, culturally specific programming, Black Trans History Gallery, letter writing to incarcerated community members, reentry services, legal advocacy, the Niomi Jenkins Community Care Freedom School, and a community space dedicated to uplifting and celebrating our lives, loves, and lived history of radical joy and resilience.

Our message to amplify is this…The antidote to fascism is community care. Build a beloved community by transforming harm in service of our collective liberation. Abolition begins at home, decolonize your mind, connect with people and the land, and honor Indigenous wisdom.

Healing yourself, your community, and the land is a radical act of resistance. If you are not in an authentic, loving friendship with at least one Black Trans Woman, ask yourself why, interrogate the spaces you inhabit, and work to disrupt systems of surveillance, coercion, and oppression even and especially when they are served up to you as a new convenience to make your singular experience more comfortable.

None of us are free until all of us are free. Our movement for abolition in the US is inextricably linked with all global struggles of indigenous peoples to be able to live sovereignly in harmony with their land. No human is illegal on stolen land. Free your mind, Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine. We will see you in the streets!

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Dates and timeline and power of Mama Major’s legacy of abolition power-building on the West Coast.
1998 - Miss Major and Miss Janetta broke down a wall at Tenderloin Aids Resource Center (TARC) in San Francisco to create the first drop-in service center for trans people
2004 - Miss Major and Alexander L. Lee created the first Trans-specific Formerly and currently incarcerated support space in the California prison system called Trans In Prison Committee (TIP) - TGIJP was born from this
2006 - Bobbi Jean Baker, Melenie Elenke, and Miss Major began expanding TGIJP services in the Bay Area
2012 - TGIJP’s Sista’s Doin It for Themselves - Miss Jannetta and Miss Major founded the first Black Trans-led retreats for the TGIJP community in the Bay Area
2013 - TGIJP celebrated the naming of Silvia Rivera Law Project’s new building in New York, named after Miss Major and Jay Toole, and announced their support of the California prisoner hunger strike with a press release demanding an end to human rights abuses
2014 - TGIJP founded Black Girlz Rulez, the first Black Trans Femme-focused national convening of abolitionist leaders
2015 - Miss Major names Miss Janetta as the new Executive Director of TGIJP and immediately began negotiations to purchase a building
2015 - Co-found the Transgender Advocates for Justice and Accountability Coalition (TAJA)
2016 - Founded the Melenie Eleneke Grassroots Reentry/Socioeconomic Justice Program
2019 - TGIJP hires Zy’aire Nassirah as he is released from California prison, where he worked with CCWP. TGIJP and Janetta co-founded the Transgender Cultural District
2019 - TGIJP organized and supported the community in demanding that San Francisco funds Trans housing through the Office of Trans Initiatives (OTI)
2019 - TGIJP convened and supported incarcerated and formerly incarcerated TGI leaders in drafting and passing the California Transgender Dignity Act
2020 - Raised $2 million dollars of seed money for the Building for Resilience, Resistance, and Reclamation, paving the way for TGIJP to own 131 Franklin Street three years later
2020 - Helped in the development of the first TGI-run Access Point for the City of San Francisco's Coordinated Entry Housing Service (through HSH)
2020- Re-Began negotiations to purchase a Building for Resilience, Resistance, & Reclamation at 131 Franklin
2021 - Brought on Black Trans elder and activist Sharyn Grayson as TGIJP’s new Co-Executive Director
2021 - TGIJP obtained 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in California
2023 - Finalized purchase of 131 Franklin and established the Black Trans Cultural Center. Promoted Zy’aire Nassirah to Co-Executive Director along with Sharyn Grayson
2024 - TGIJP survived the pandemic and opened the Niomi Jenkins Community Care Freedom School
2025 - Continues to successfully provide case management and mainstream housing vouchers to over 200 Trans and GNC people in San Francisco, many of whom have experienced incarceration and homelessness; hosts monthly letter writing events to continue and expand support services for Trans and GNC people in California prisons; convenes BGR in New Orleans in October (supporting over 60 Black Trans movement leaders with travel, accommodations, and three days of culturally specific programing and celebratory events); completes the first cohort of the Niomi Jenkins Community Care Freedom School, led by Janetta Johnson. Welcomed and housed, and employed returning family from California Prisons, and hosted a RE-Entry completion celebration for community members.

In San Francisco we will host the final Celebration of Life for Miss Major on Saturday, December 6, 2025, at Glide Memorial Church from 3 to 5 pm. This is being called a Celebration of a Legacy of Black Trans Excellence.