US: This trans activist was there at the start of the modern LGBTQ movement

”That was three nights of terror, ” is how Miss Major Griffin-Gracy describes the Stonewall riots. She should know. After all, she was there.

”I’m nothing special,” she also says describing herself, ”I’m just one of the girls.” But Miss Major is anything but ordinary.

Not only was Miss Major there at the beginning of the movement, but she’s worn many hats since then: organizer, activist, sex worker, prison abolitionist, transgender elder, and a voice for the most marginalized members of the community.

She’s been fighting for the rights of trans women of color — who have survived police brutality and internment in men’s jails and prisons — for more than 40 years.

Miss Major is the former long-time executive director of the San Francisco-based Transgender Gender-Variant Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), which advocates for trans women of color in and outside of prison. Read more via LGBTQ Nation

THU | AUG 18 | 630pm | GCA | 14A MAJOR! | Annalise Ophelian | USA | 2015 | 91 min Skype Q&A with Miss Major and director Annalise Ophelian to follow Remember when that fictional movie about Stonewall came out starring a white cisgender lead from the American Midwest and activists railed in all caps about the trans* women of colour the film had excluded from history?