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Miss Major made money, she says, "hooking and turning tricks, working with girls who boosted, and stuff like that." She would take advantage of shop owners' racism by entering stores with a white friend, knowing the proprietor would watch her so closely that her partner could get away with stealing anything. Then they would go to the park, sell the goods, and split the money. Sex work in New York City was a constant, but led to constant police harassment and, at times, violence from johns.
An overnight in the Tombs or a brief stretch at Sing Sing, where she knew exactly how to survive the psych exam ("We knew what to tell those doctors: 'Oh, I have to sit and pee and I always thought I was a woman' — just standard bullshit to get through it so it can end") were the costs of survival. But the safe-breaking jobs in upstate New York led to a five-year sentence at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, known as "Little Siberia" for its remote location just 20 miles south of the Canadian border.
During her years in Dannemora, Miss Major met Frank "Big Black" Smith and some of the other leaders of the prison riot at Attica, in northwestern New York. Big Black encouraged her to read books, learn about African-American history, and develop a political understanding of the world. She also spent considerable time in solitary confinement, because whenever conflict arose between male inmates and the trans women who were incarcerated alongside them, the women would be sent to the hole.
"It's hard to exist alone, in this vacuum of just you," Miss Major says. "You really gotta fight to hold onto who you are."
It was a difficult fight, waged against an unscrupulous and powerful opponent that aimed straight at the essence of what Miss Major knew herself to be: a woman. The first time she was released on parole, she went home and did something she'd been dying to do for years: "I took a nice long bath in Calgon, got to shave really close, put on a little makeup, dyed my hair, got my nails done. The next day I went to report to my parole officer, and they violated me and sent me back to prison that night."
The reason? The parole officer claimed she had "changed her appearance in order to abscond from parole." She was flabbergasted. "There was no acknowledgment of the fact that I was a girl who just needed to arch my eyebrows and change my hairstyle." It wasn't as if the authorities did not know she was transgender. She'd seen the giant red stamp reading "DEVIANT" that marked all of her paperwork.
The second time she was released on parole, she stayed out for a few months before an officer claimed to have seen her going into a so-called "deviant bar" and sent her back to prison. After that, she served out the rest of her sentence.
When Miss Major was finally freed, she was in a state not unfamiliar to Janetta Johnson. Miss Major began questioning her gender identity, and trying to convince herself that being transgender was wrong. "All I could think about was, 'Oh god, technically I'm a guy. I really shouldn't be wearing dresses,' even though that's who I really am." It took her a year to get back to herself and go back outside dressed the way she wanted to dress.
"After you come out of those places, you're not the same as you were when you went in. It chips away at you," she says now. "You go through this battle with yourself, and you either win or lose, and winning is getting what you need to do, and losing is doing what they want you to do. I finally cut that string and got a chance to go back to being who I was."
Indeed, the feelings of despair and disillusion Miss Major and Johnson experienced after being released from prison are dismayingly common among transgender people. A staggering 41 percent of transgender people in the U.S. have attempted suicide, according to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, with even higher rates for those who have been harassed by law enforcement officers. Poverty, racial discrimination, violence, and housing insecurity are all factors that increase transgender people's risk factors for suicide. Organizations like the National LGBT Health Education Center now encourage health care workers and other service providers to pursue "transgender-affirming" policies that respect an individual's gender identity, but such efforts are far from being universally adopted by government institutions, let alone the general population.
Today Miss Major is comfortable being unequivocally and unapologetically herself. She owns her sexuality ("There may be snow on the roof, honey, but the fireplace is on and the bedroom is hot") and her gender queerness with pride. "There are days I don't feel like shaving," she tells me, on a morning in her apartment when she hasn't felt like putting on a wig or a set of fake teeth. "I don't want to pass. I want people to look at me and realize I am a transgender person."
And she has little interest in the priorities of the mainstream LGBT movement. She's not particularly excited about same-sex marriage. She questions whether the money that funded the campaign for marriage equality could have been better spent supporting trans youth and expanding drug treatment programs. Nor was she especially moved by SF Pride's selection of her as a community grand marshal or by the growing recognition from LGBT organizations of her lifetime of activism. She compares the mainstream LGBT movement's newfound embrace of transgender people and advocacy to a weak hug and an air kiss. "If you can't kiss me," she says, "then don't fucking hug me."
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