Christine Hallquist, Democratic nominee for governor for Vermont, is the first transgender gubernatorial candidate in the country. Key among her economic goals is bringing high-speed Internet to rural communities.
photo: courtesy Christine Hallquist

Christine Hallquist credits her mother with instilling an early understanding of social justice in her: “My mom was a wonderful woman. She taught me a lot about social issues. We were church-going people. When I was 13 years old, she took me into the city of Syracuse one Sunday for an Easter Mass, and she was teaching me a lesson. I went to this Mass, and I was surrounded by people of different ethnic origins and street people. I asked my mom at the end of the Mass, ‘Why did you bring me here?’ And she told me, ‘Because I want you to be aware that these are God’s people. You’re living in a community that’s not really a real community of God’s people.’ That was such a powerful learning experience for me, and I think she really helped form my views on life with that experience.”

Hallquist, now 61 and running as a Democratic candidate for governor of Vermont, benefitted from these early life lessons on privilege, oppression, and issues of intersectionality when she made the decision to come out as a transgender woman in 2015 while CEO of Vermont Electric Cooperative. In making this courageous choice to follow her genuine path, she knew she was going to face discrimination and bias: “It’s going to take a lot to get people to become aware of their own biases, because it is so embedded in our social structure. Even intelligent and advanced-thinking women make mistakes that enforce the gender hierarchy—so even women aren’t aware of some of the subtleties. What I have learned to do now is to point it out specifically when it happens. And it may make people feel uncomfortable, but that’s how we grow—in discomfort.”

She realizes that addressing these issues is risky, particularly when running for office. However, her unique perspective gives her a much broader lens than others have—she gets where almost everyone is coming from. She has experienced both extreme privilege and extreme oppression, and she knows how to approach uncomfortable topics while considering all points of view: “White male privilege—white males get so offended by that, and it has caused rifts in my own family when I use that term, with my own siblings. I want that to change. I want to pull people together, not separate people, but people get a lot of mileage writing off people who use these terms. We need to talk to people individually about these issues. I’m not afraid to talk about white male privilege, but I don’t necessarily want to lead with it.”

Hallquist also knows that she can’t fully grasp what it is like to be a woman in our society. She was not born a girl, and she did not grow up as a girl in a patriarchal society. To say she knows what that is like would be a lie, in the same way that she cannot completely understand what it is like to have experienced a lifetime of racial discrimination. But she does know what it feels like to be discriminated against, which gives her increased awareness and a strong desire to work toward a more equitable society.

Hallquist is passionate about engaged, collaborative leadership. Since announcing her run for governor in April, she has embarked on a full schedule of meetings and interviews in order to discuss her platform; she wants to ensure that the people of Vermont get to know her as both a candidate and a person and that they understand the type of collaborative leadership she brings to the table: “We talk about getting women at parity in pay scales. At Vermont Electric, we conducted local, regional, and national studies on pay and paid people competitively, but the problem is that the primary female occupations are paid less overall. I worked in utilities. There is not one single female line worker in the state of Vermont. Yet a line worker is one of the highest paying professions you can find. The average line worker with overtime is making over $100,000 a year, yet there’s not one woman in that profession.”

Her economic platform extends well beyond pay equity and focuses on rural Vermont. When she looks at the hardships facing the dairy industry, for instance, she knows that farms need to produce valued-added product in order to survive, and they need support to pursue innovative approaches to doing so. She points to the North Hardwick Organic Dairy as an example of a farm that has achieved this goal through collaboration with the Vermont Bioenergy Initiative. The dairy erected a wind turbine and began making biodiesel from waste vegetable oil with the help of the Bioenergy Initiative matching grant, which allowed them to purchase an oilseed press and a grain bin with a perforated drying floor. Soon they were milling sunflower seeds into oil and processing it into biodiesel for their tractors. This project provided the farm with options regarding crop rotation and has allowed it to profit from a product other than the dairy’s high-quality milk; as Hallquist points out, they have been able to produce a valued-added product and have not only survived but have also thrived. This is a model she would like to see replicated throughout the state, taking each individual farm’s needs and goals into consideration.

Another economic goal includes getting all of Vermont connected via high-speed fiber optics. Hallquist knows that all Vermonters, especially those in rural counties, need fast, reliable Internet in order to be successful and competitive in today’s global economy. Her strategy is twofold.

Getting all Vermonters connected to high-speed Internet will help residents already in business here, especially artists and craftspeople who will be able to expand their reach by selling their art online. In addition, the access to high-speed Internet will attract individuals and businesses to the state, which will help counter the demographic shift the state has been experiencing, as people move out of rural areas in favor of a more urban environment.

Addressing this demographic shift is also key to fixing education in our state. Rural schools, in particular, have been experiencing decreasing enrollment as families with young children choose cities over small towns. Hallquist believes the long-term fix to our education crisis involves reversing this demographic shift. In the short term, she wants to see the leadership piece addressed. She does not support the command-and-control management style she is currently seeing in Montpelier. To achieve the level of success she experienced as CEO of Vermont Electric Cooperative, she engaged in a collaborative leadership approach that brought people together. This same approach can be applied to issues related to education: “It’s not good leadership to be dividing people against each other. It’s good leadership to pull people together to do great things. We need to have discussions that engage individual communities and come up with real solutions that will work for each community in our state.” She believes that for some communities, this could involve adding wrap-around services to schools, including pediatric care, day care, and mental health care.

Another significant issue facing Vermont is drug addiction. In addressing the opioid crisis, she pointed to the Howard Center and its needle exchange program as one example of a program that is working to make a real difference: “I recently spent an afternoon with Grace Keller at the Howard Center. Last year they exchanged 300,000 needles. There were only 85 needles found on the streets of Burlington, and that’s such an improvement from years ago. The needle exchange program is a very successful program, yet people were very uncomfortable with that concept when it first came up. By reducing the number of dirty needles, we can reduce the number of heart valve operations that need to be done as a result of dirty needle use. And one heart valve operation costs $600,000. There are about a dozen heart valve operations done at the University Medical Center every year due to dirty needles. We are paying for those heart valve replacements. To solve the opiate crisis, we are going to have to do things we’re not comfortable with. We are all going to have to lean into these things. We’ve spent a trillion dollars since Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs, and we haven’t changed drug use at all. All we’ve done is broken up families, and it looks like it has been racially targeted. So we know what doesn’t work. And we’ve seen things that have worked. So I would tell even the most skeptical folks, just look at the data. We are now addressing the issue as a mental health issue in Vermont, and as a result we have seen a shift. While there was a 13 percent increase in opioid deaths in 2016, there was only a 5 percent increase in 2017. We need to spend more money on the treatment side and less on the criminal side.”

Hallquist also supports the full legalization of marijuana, but she understands that Vermont has much work to do to avoid some of the mistakes made by other states that have legalized the drug. She stresses the need to study the implementation of legalization in those states so that Vermont can be more proactive by addressing issues such as the impact on neighboring states, clear labeling—particularly of edibles to avoid accidental ingestion by children and animals—the influx of people moving to the state without jobs or housing in order to access the drug legally, and the issue of determining how to measure impairment while operating a vehicle: “Colorado has seen a 14 percent drop in opioid use since legalizing marijuana. I firmly believe we should take the final step and regulate and sell marijuana. Treating these things as criminal activities is not the right approach. We can learn from the other states that have legalized marijuana.”

Hallquist knows that her experience running for office as a woman will be different than if she had run while identifying as a man; however, she doesn’t believe that she has shifted management styles. She has always been a collaborative leader, before and after her transition, which has led to her many career successes. Yet she believes that this management style will be accentuated in her run for office as a trans woman. She also acknowledges that in her own experience, as well as in the experiences of others who have transitioned, she has been wholly accepted for who she is by more women than men: “That is my personal experience, but you will also hear that in general from the transgender community—whether you are transitioning to a woman or a man. You get more support from women. There’s a higher level of sensitivity to marginalized people from women.”

Not only has Hallquist experienced marginalization herself, she is also keenly aware of all of the teachable moments that led her to where she is today: “When I became CEO of Vermont Electric Cooperative, I was driving by a house in the Northeast Kingdom. It was really worn down. There was garbage in the yard, and there were a couple of kids playing. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh, why don’t they clean up their yard?’ But I quickly realized that I had the privilege to be an environmentalist. I learned early on about economic justice. If you only have $18 in your pocket and you’re living on the economic margins and you’re trying to make it to tomorrow and feed your kids and buy medicine, you’re not going to pay $2.75 to take your trash to the dump. So my first education was when I became CEO because we served some of the poorest communities in Vermont. I realized that those of us who are trying to solve climate change and those of us who are trying to clean up the environment have to keep in mind economic justice. I had the privilege to be an environmentalist.”

Hallquist knows that in her role as the first transgender woman to run for the office of governor in the US, she is making history. Yet that is not her focus. Inclusivity is her goal: “The issues that I’m running on are human rights issues, so from a platform standpoint, I’m totally comfortable with this platform, and I’m going to run it whether I win or lose. It’s not about winning. It’s about improving life for all, and I’m so confident in the platform that there is no way that I will be talked out of it.”

Diane DeBella has spent over 20 years examining women’s issues as a writer, teacher, and speaker. www.iamsubject.com