Every Trans Suicide Is A Murder By Those In Power

News came this week that transgender athlete and student Lia Smith took her life at just 21 years of age.

Just days ago, Middlebury College in Vermont announced the tragic death of Lia Smith, a transgender student and former athlete at the school. In the days that followed, a clearer picture of her life emerged: she was a passionate advocate for transgender rights, a devoted teammate before leaving athletics in the 2023-2024 season, and someone who, like so many visible trans people today, faced relentless hostility. While we may never know the exact reasons she took her own life, her death came amid a wave of Republican attacks on transgender student athletes and sweeping Trump administration restrictions on transgender people across nearly every aspect of life. To call her death merely a suicide misses the larger truth—no suicide happens in a vacuum. Policies designed to make life unlivable for transgender people bear responsibility too; every trans suicide is a murder by those in power.

To understand Lia’s life before her passing is to see the power of what acceptance can make possible. She was a model student—proof that when transgender people are allowed to live authentically, the benefits ripple outward. Lia double-majored in computer science and statistics, played in the Chess and Japanese clubs, loved music, and competed on the women’s swimming and diving team until she left, citing the pressure and isolation she felt as a transgender athlete who “didn’t feel welcome.” Her departure came amid a growing wave of anti-trans policies on college campuses, as states began banning transgender athletes in 2022—a wave that has only intensified since into national bans. That hostility marked the beginning of what every transgender person now recognizes: a coordinated effort to legislate us out of public life.

“We’re not trying to get into women’s spaces to be perverts. We’re just being ourselves. We don’t mean any harm to anyone,” Smith said during a campus panel she joined that coincided and competed with an anti-trans event featuring Brianna Wu and Leor Sapir—the latter a prominent anti-transgender activist affiliated with the Manhattan Institute. On her panel, Smith spoke candidly about her experiences as a transgender athlete and student, sharing the challenges of navigating both visibility and hostility. She closed with a simple plea to the packed audience: “Know that there are people in your community who are here for you and care about you.”

As a transgender journalist and public speaker who has sat on many similar panels, I could have said the same words as Lia. When I learned of her death, I thought of the countless times transgender people have pleaded for our humanity and our rights, and of how often we’ve continued to push for inclusion while clinging to the belief that a brighter future will come—one where we can share in the same basic dignity that Lia asked for. But I also understand the pain she must have carried. It’s a pain familiar to anyone who advocates for transgender people: those moments when hope slips away, when you watch an administration—all the way up to the presidency itself—target you, and when each new policy reminds you how precarious your place is, leaving you braced for the next blow.

This year, transgender people have faced a relentless wave of policy attacks. Hospitals across the country have shut down gender-affirming care for trans youth, forcing many into medical detransition. The NCAA has moved to block transgender athletes from competition, with numerous national sports organizations following its lead. LGBTQ+ student life centers are being dismantled nationwide. Passports have become a new battleground—those who received documents reflecting their correct gender under the attestation form instituted this year have already been warned in court filings that if the Supreme Court rules for the federal government, their passports could be confiscated and reissued under their former gender markers. Our history is being erased, our books banned, and even our role in the Stonewall uprising—the spark of the modern Pride movement—has been stripped from the national monument’s own website. Meanwhile, social-media platforms amplify anti-trans hate as the billionaires who run them disable what few protections once existed, leaving trolls free to publish personal information that invites harassment and threats.

It was this same kind of anti-trans hate and harassment that Lia faced. Early this year, the hate site “HeCheated” targeted her directly, listing her diving competitions and later celebrating when her name disappeared from the roster. Sites like HeCheated and SheWon are riddled with inaccuracies and strange logic, often ensnaring both trans and cis athletes in their obsessive attempts to police identity. Their real purpose is harassment, driving coordinated online attacks against anyone they mention. We can’t know whether that pressure played a role in Lia’s death, but it’s clear she felt the weight of that hostility. In a February panel, she spoke to that isolation: “It’s really hard putting on the suit every day if you are obviously an outlier. It’s also really hard going in a locker room where you’re not welcome, and there’s really not a clear space that I should be going to.”

The policies that targeted Lia make life harder—and shorter—for transgender people. In a time when we can’t predict what fresh cruelty might come next, as the president signs one anti-trans order after another, as elite universities quietly comply with his demands to discriminate even in blue states, and as the movement against us widens its sights to target transgender people of every age, we have to name what’s happening plainly. These policies carry blood on their hands. Transgender advocates have warned for years that the relentless criminalization and isolation of our community would lead to deaths. Lia deserved better—better than this government, better than these institutions. Every transgender suicide is not just a tragedy, its a murder; it’s the foreseeable consequence of policies designed to make us disappear.

For those wishing to help Lia’s family, you can give to the Middlebury’s Prism center for Queer and Trans life as requested by her family.