As I write this column, the news has broken that Miss Major Griffin-Gracy has passed after a short stay in hospice care. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, she was a trans activist who was part of the Stonewall riots in 1969.
That sentence though is a woefully poor summation of her revolutionary and colorful life that included being a college student, morgue employee, sex worker, mobile needle-exchange innovator, prisoner, drag performer, safecracker, AIDS activist and caregiver, airport suitcase pilferer, inspirational speaker and founder of trans institutions. And yet, when I found out she passed, my first thought wasn’t about a life well-lived, but about the release of death from the struggle against a system that was designed to erase and hold trans people down through laws and lack of opportunity.
A system that she felt was so alarming in its strengthening recurrence that she was compelled to come out of retirement in her final years to inspire a new generation. I am somewhat ashamed that I find the idea of lying down next to her more attractive right now than ever before.
I realize that feeling is likely a partial product of my depression, and I am seeing my therapist once a week, but it is also something more than that. It is an exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix. An exhaustion not just from the dizzying array of attacks that are meant to drain our will from a government hellbent on making trans lives as difficult as possible, but from the frustration of knowing that no matter how much trans people plead for help from our natural cisgender allies, they are turning their backs one-by-one.
I find it ironic that the very same progressive cis people who scream about imagined threats to marriage equality or the real threat of rising sea levels, have largely ignored the firestorm happening all around them in the trans community.
Perhaps that can be understood as they have been lulled to sleep by their subconscious sense of safety in the last decade compared to trans people who have taken the brunt of the bile spewed from conservatives who have given up on a frontal assault on gay rights. They have remained in their comfortable slumber as trans kids have had to flee red states for blue ones to get gender affirming care, only to see even those blue states deny that care under federal funding pressure.
They have barely stirred as fines of $100K or more and threats of arrest have become law for trans people using bathrooms aligned with their gender identity. They have dreamed away as the federal government has publicly floated the idea of taking away the second amendment rights of trans people, scapegoated us for every recent mass shooting, launched sham HHS investigations into our necessary medications possibly causing violent behavior, and considered labelling us as terrorists.
Has this been the case for all cis people? No, but enough that I no longer have any faith that they will wake up in time to put any real muscle to stop what is happening to their trans brethren.
What I have seen though is more concern for rainbow painted brick, mortar and asphalt than real people suffering under federal executive orders and state laws. I have seen people make excuses that they don’t know what to do to help without ever thinking to actually ask trans people what they need. Even worse, I have seen suggestions of how to help ignored or followed with defensive replies that essentially boil down to #NotAllCisPeople. My reply to that is #TooManyCisPeople.
I would love to see cis people respond as if the government was threatening to take their kids away for being “abusive” parents for the sin of simply supporting their trans kids or being trans themselves as is happening in Texas.
I want the big gay nonprofits to funnel some of the thousands they are fundraising back into grassroots trans orgs struggling to get by on pennies and dimes as they help trans people to secure accurate ID documents or flee to safer environments. What I don’t want to feel is that trans people are in this fight alone and that dying would be a relief from the constant soul-crushing denigration of being treated like pariahs as we are labeled the preeminent threat to our society.
So I apologize to you, Miss Major for not having the strength that you did in very tough times, but I am helping every trans person I can get the healthcare they need, the accurate documents they require, or flee the country if need be. That is much more than even our cis queer contemporaries who are mostly sitting this one out, or our Dem politicians who are actively throwing us under the bus.
I know you would understand how tired it has made me to have us treated like outcasts by people who owe us so much and speak the names of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson every Pride as if merely recognizing they existed can correct decades of ostracism.
For it is you who wrote in your 2023 memoir, “I don’t give a shit whether they acknowledge or know about me, but those gays and lesbians were ashamed to be seen with us, and they still want us erased. So, for my gurls, it’s as if Stonewall never happened because it didn’t change anything for us.”
That is part of your legacy they will not engage as they whisper your name with reverence and stand aside to let it all happen again.
Melody Maia Monet has her own trans lesbian themed YouTube channel at YouTube.com/MelodyMaia.
