activist - Transgressions

Unless otherwise specified all quotes are from Miss Major’s personal website, which you can find here: missmajor.net

For those of you who aren’t aware of her, Miss Major’s website really says it best: “Miss Major is a Black, transgender activist who has fought for over fifty years for her trans/gender nonconforming community.”

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was born on October 25, 1940 on Chicago’s South Side, where she participated in the drag scene in her youth. I appreciate that she has pointed out that she and her contemporaries were unaware that they were exploring their personal gender identities through drag, as the current vocabulary around gender identity simply did not exist back then.

[Author’s aside: I grew up in a conservative Christian household from the American South, so this explanation resonated with me on a personal level.]

Miss Major came out as a trans woman in the late 1950s, after which she was ostracized and routinely assaulted by her peers. Through the ensuing years Miss Major was on the ground during the Stonewall Riots, and survived both Dannemora Prison and Bellevue Hospital’s “queen tank.”

These experiences continue to inform her “work to uplift transgender women of color, particularly those who have survived incarceration and police brutality.”

Miss Major’s personal and professional accomplishments are next to innumerable, so I will attempt to portray the highlights:

She worked directly with people with HIV/AIDS in New York during the early 80s
This helped her create and drive the first mobile needle exchange in San Francisco
She is the former leader of the TGI Justice Project, which works “to end human rights abuses against transgender, intersex, and gender-variant people, particularly trans women of color in California prisons and detention centers.”
She now runs House Of GG, an educational leadership retreat primarily aimed at Black Trans women who live in the Southern U.S., which you can learn more about at their website: houseofgg.org
Her recent creative work includes “executive producing the series Trans in Trumpland (now streaming everywhere), and a book on her life’s activism, a collaboration with Toshio Meronek”

No amount of explanation or bullet points can accurately convey the impact that the incomparable Miss Major continues to have on the lives of the most marginalized and brutalized members of our society. She continues this valuable work to this day, including the upcoming publication of her autobiography Miss Major Speaks which you can pre-order from Verso Books.

Born Ernestine Delois Eppenger in 1941, Ernestine Eckstein would become one of the most important activists in both the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the nascent LGBTQ+ movement of the 70s.

Her civil rights activism began during her time as a student at Indiana State University, as an officer of a chapter of the NAACP. But her progressive ideas eventually brought her to the more progressively minded Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), which she joined upon moving to New York City in 1963 at the age of 22.

Shortly after this move to New York City, Ernestine Eckstein also became involved in the Daughters of Bilitis, the first known lesbian civil rights group in the United States. When she was appointed as Vice President of the New York chapter of the DOB, she came to represent the desire of the younger generation of lesbian and gay activists to see the movement’s strategy move away from private negotiations with doctors and psychologists (in an effort to end the practice of trying to “cure” homosexuality), towards a tactic of more direct action, such as political lobbying and public demonstration. In this attitude, she was on the forefront of strategic thinking around civil rights, and she is quoted as having said that, “Picketing I regard as almost a conservative act now. The homosexual has to call attention to the fact that he’s been unjustly acted upon. This is what the Negro did”.

Eventually, Ernestine moved to the west coast and joined the progressive activist group Black Women Organized for Action (BWOA). This group was one of the first Black feminist groups in the country. The organization was known for it’s conscious inclusivity of all Black women and it’s unique lack of a hierarchical internal structure. Unfortunately, this organization dissolved after members decided that Reagan-era conservative sentiments rendered their 1960s style strategies ineffective.

Not much is known about Ernestine’s life post-BWOA but she is recorded in the Social Security Death Index as having passed away on July 15, 1992.

Complement this with learning more about other activists such as the incomparable Miss Major Griffin-Gracy.

Tag: activist

LGBT+ Figures in History #3: Miss Major

LGBT+ Figures in History #2: Ernestine Eckstein