Trans women Of Color are not expected to live beyond 35. At the intersection of racism, transphobia and misogyny, these women experience disproportionate rates of fatal violence. Few trans women Of Color survive mass incarceration, the (ongoing) HIV/AIDS crisis, and transfemicide to become an elder in and for the trans community, guiding us, specifically our siblings Of Color, in a time when we do not have many transcestors to turn to. When I stumbled upon the memoir of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, an American pioneer for trans liberation, who looks back on her remarkable life in her late seventies, I felt a shimmer moving through my body. I had encountered something special. Indeed, the memoir turned out to be a critical source of trans wisdom and a unique piece of life writing.

Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, published by Verso – the self-proclaimed “largest independent radical publishing house in the English-speaking world” – traces the life of Miss Major and records the lessons she has learned along the way. Born in the 1940s, Miss Major is an activist, community organizer and former sex worker who not only participated in the Stonewall Rebellion but also lived through incarceration, admission to a psychiatric hospital and the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Somewhat deviating from the genre conventions of memoir, Miss Major’s life is presented in the form of a conversation between the trans activist and her former assistant, the writer Toshio Meronek. Thus, as the title of the memoir already suggests, Miss Major speaks rather than writes. The dynamic between the two, specifically the way in which Meronek turns Miss Major’s speech into script, is reminiscent of how philosophy is traditionally recorded through students. In that sense, Miss Major might actually be a trans Socrates or Wittgenstein, whose spoken wisdom is preserved in written form for future generations.

Indeed, it would not be amiss to classify Miss Major Speaks as a philosophy, providing insight through experience and age that elucidates not only what it means to persevere as a Black trans woman in the United States but also what it means to build community and move fiercely toward trans liberation. The act of sharing is important to Miss Major. As she argues toward the end of the memoir, elders should teach “younger people to pick up the fight. When you are constantly under attack, especially if you’re in this community,” she explains, “you can’t just retire and walk off into the sunset. You’ve got to stay and teach young people to fight.”

In the introduction, parts of which feel like an unnecessary summary of the text to come, Meronek shares that a conversation has always been Miss Major’s preferred form of address, since it “has the potential to cement connections more than a monologue”. Considering that Miss Major’s activism has always centered connections and communities, the memoir’s conversational form is fitting. It also heightens the intimacy between Miss Major and the reader, who feels more like a listener, gathering at the trans elder’s feet to listen to her stories.

And these stories are vibrant. Meronek has done a great job capturing Miss Major as she is. Absorbed in their conversation, I did not merely read Miss Major’s words, I could hear her speak. She was in the room with me. While I am familiar with Miss Major’s voice, having come across videos of her circulating online, I am certain readers who have not heard her speak before clearly feel her presence accompanying them as they move through the memoir. The phrasing, the wit, the honesty, the warmth permeating the text is distinctly Miss Major. After a while, you, too, begin to relocate the T to the front of the acronym TLGB, and recognize the significance a change in vowel makes (girls and gurls).

At times, the conversation is messily presented on the page, questions and answers haphazardly stitched together, compiled under the title of a chapter that does not always correspond to its content. Perhaps its slight chaos is the charm of the memoir, as it represents how spoken conversations move from one thought to another without always making complete sense. It certainly does not take away from the strength Miss Major possesses as a storyteller.

Although she has been through enough suffering and injustice for multiple lifetimes, the memoir never turns bleak.  Miss Major’s voice brings a warmth and a brightness with it that reminds the reader to hold on to moments of light, no matter how weakly they flicker, even when someone finds themselves in “the deepest, darkest fuckin’ hole.” Before writing the book, she tells Meronek that she does not want it to be harsh: “I want it warm and embracing, like a big hug.”

This does not mean, however, that Miss Major glosses over the systemic inequity she observes affecting trans people, Black people, homeless people, poor people. She will tell it like it is. After all, she named her community center for trans people living in the South of the United States “TILIFI”: “Telling It Like It Fuckin’ Is.” This is a sentiment that travels throughout the memoir. For example, the first part of the book is titled “Stonewall Never Happened”, a bold statement that blossoms into a critical reflection on the rebellion, particularly the ways in which it has been and continues to be commemorated. For the queer community, specifically in the United States, Stonewall has long been seen as the catalyst for queer and trans liberation, a celebratory landmark in queer history. As such, Miss Major’s bold statement will definitely cause some commotion.

Stonewall is by far the main event people ask Miss Major to bring back from the dead. After all, she is one of the few people involved in the Rebellion still alive today, on top of being the most visible. As Meronek writes in the introduction, “in the years leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion … I must have booked her for more than a hundred events and press interviews.” After a while, Meronek started to decline all invitations to discuss Stonewall, since Miss Major has shared her reflections on numerous occasions. It might have made the memoir more powerful, then, if Stonewall appeared only as a single, fleeting sentence, refuting its significance for queer liberation since, according to Miss Major, it did nothing for trans women in general and for those Of Color in specific.

What stands out most in Meronek and Miss Major’s conversation on Stonewall is the emphasis on Miss Major not being “a single event.” In other words, her wisdom and influence extend far beyond the Stonewall Rebellion. Rather than conceiving of Miss Major as a single event and only thinking of her as a veteran of the Rebellion, the memoir redirects people’s attention to the comprehensiveness and complexity of Miss Major as a lifetime, as a force. With Stonewall out of the way, the rest of the memoir discusses how Frank ‘Big Black’ Smith, a crucial figure for the Black Panthers and the Attica prison uprising, mentored Miss Major in prison and showed her how radical inclusivity is integral to political action (“it has to include us all, or it’s not going to work”); how Black and Of Color sex workers came to bear more knowledge on the HIV/AIDS crisis than public health organizations and would eventually train doctors; how simply looking out for each other is the way to survival; how joining forces is ultimately the way to liberation.

What these shimmers of wisdom show is that so much knowledge and theory emerge from the streets. Most of the brilliant insights Miss Major passes on to the reader come from experience, from being a former sex worker, from having been incarcerated, from organizing a community center from the ground up. I recognize some of these insights from my training in gender studies, insights that now circulate in academia but arguably have been circulating on the streets and in practice much longer. Moreover, they are accessible to a much wider audience through this memoir. The length, humor (I keep thinking how Miss Major’s vanity plate application for TRNSGDR is still pending) and language of Miss Major Speaks should attract a wide range of readers, opening the eyes of cisgender readers and providing a guiding light for transgender readers, specifically those Of Color. “Our stories are not all the same,” Miss Major shares on the final page, “but the destination is.”