A quintessential Vermont Day. Late fall. Planned it perfectly for our out-of-town big-city guests, my brother and his wife.

Told them we were taking them on a secret adventure (the Museum of Everyday Life in Glover, Perennial Pleasures in Hardwick for afternoon English cream tea, Glover General Store, and the Bread and Puppet Theater and Museum). Our guests, however, had no idea where we were going. Just that it would be a totally unique Vermont experience, found nowhere else.

So, Saturday noon, a late start, we set out for the Northeast Kingdom. The drive across Route 15 was beautiful but long. Two and a half hours later we arrived at the indescribable Museum for Everyday Living. Let’s just say, our guests were speechless but in a few minutes posed for a photo in front of the 20-foot wire toothbrush.

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Jamie Moorby, who grew up in rural Vermont and still lives there, “always knew [she] was a woman inside.” But she didn’t know about the possibility of gender transition until she was in college. A “happy person who wasn’t stressed out” by a growing awareness that she might want to transition, she moved to Washington, DC, after graduation to work as a political activist. There she found community, a transgender activist group, and helpful resources while working on a bathroom bill that now prohibits single-stall bathrooms to be gender specific.

She soon realized that she did want to transition, so she saw a therapist and then a physician, went on hormones, and two years later, in 2008, at the age of 26, flew to Bangkok with her supportive mother for surgery. “The culture there was amazing,” she recalls. “There were trans women from all over the world. It was a very communal experience.”

But when she returned to Vermont, she says, while her friends and family were supportive, the medical professionals she met with were “very confused,” and she couldn’t find a doctor who would do a postoperative examination. Enter Rachel Inker, MD, to whom Moorby was referred by a Montpelier advocacy group in 2010 because “she knew how to deal with hormones.”

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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.”

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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 of Christine Hallquist