By OLIVIA Q. PINTAIR/ VTDIGGER
As candles flickered across the snow Friday afternoon in Middlebury, 20 community members gathered for a vigil to honor, mourn and celebrate transgender lives.
The vigil’s organizer, Elio Farley, a student at Middlebury College who studies sex education and works as a mentor for queer youth at the Middlebury Teen Center, said they planned the vigil to provide a space for people to come together after a particularly painful few weeks.
“I think that a lot of us—like trans people, genderqueer people and gender nonconforming people — have been mourning alone recently,” Farley said. “And if we can be in community and offer space to each other and time to each other and whatever we need, then that is really healing and wonderful.”
As community members arrived at College Park in town, Farley welcomed attendees, inviting them to share words, thoughts, poems or music to play over Farley’s portable speaker. While the group stood in a slowly widening circle, making room for those who joined late, voices poured into the center to speak.
The vigil took place amid a sharp rise in anti-transgender policy-making, rhetoric and fatal violence occurring across the United States. In February, the Human Rights Campaign reported tracking “340 anti-LGBTQ plus bills that have been introduced in state houses across the country. 150 of those would specifically restrict the rights of transgender people.” According to the Human Rights Campaign, this is the highest number on record of state level anti- trans bills to have been introduced in a single year.
“Although (Vermont) is legally a safe state to be trans in, we’re definitely not (safe) politically or culturally,” Farley said. “I’m thinking a lot about Fern’s murder last year, anti-trans violence on campus the year previous, and then just, like, currently, ongoing physical and verbal harassment that the kids (I work with) experience at school.”
Farley was referring to Fern Feather, a transgender woman who was killed in Morristown in April 2022. The year before, Middlebury College hosted Peter Kreeft, a Christian apologetic who, in an interview with the Catholic Sun, likened a desire for gender reassignment surgery to a desire to engage in torture or murder.
M. Stiffler, an attendee at the vigil, said they want Vermont to take more extensive measures to protect and express solidarity with transgender people in the state.
“After the striking down of Roe v. Wade, the Vermont state government was all over making provisions in order to protect AFAB (people assigned female at birth) and others with uteruses in the state, and they have been oddly quiet (in light of recent anti-trans violence),” Stiffler said.
“There is sadness in this. There’s grief. We shouldn’t have to be doing this, but here we are,” Farley said. “But we are able to come together like this — like, here is a path of candles. Here is a path forward. And the most powerful thing is fire.”
Toward the end of the vigil, one attendee read aloud from a poem by Lucille Clifton that she said resonated with her: “Come celebrate/ with me that everyday/ something has tried to kill me/ and has failed.”
