When Sandy Baird, a self-trained lawyer, Burlington College professor, activist, feminist, and immigration attorney, died in February of this year, Vermont’s news organizations, from Seven Days to WCAX, came out in force to laud her credentials and storied past. A former state representative, Baird worked to pass legislation increasing reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. She was active across many issues, from the environment and tenants rights to free speech and Palestine. Yet Vermont’s mainstream media buried a hallmark of Baird’s last years.
For many in Burlington’s LGBTQ+ and progressive communities, Baird’s reputation is not just one of solidarity, but of betrayal. Her legacy is more than just advocacy for bodily autonomy, but also repeated, increasingly public efforts to undermine the rights and humanity of trans and nonbinary people — especially trans women.
Baird aligned herself with people who were outspoken in their attacks on trans rights, working in lockstep with anti-trans feminists such as the late Peggy Luhrs and later developing a cordial relationship with Christopher-Aaron Felker, a Burlington Republican Party member and member of the transphobic LGB Alliance.
In the several years before her death, Baird made numerous media appearances in which she spoke out against trans people and trans rights, intentionally misgendered trans individuals, and aligned herself with right-wing transphobes on issues regarding gender.
Building Alliances with Organized Transphobia
Baird enjoyed a reputation as a feminist but was most at home with trans-exclusionary organizers. Perhaps the most striking example of this was her friendly collaboration with Christopher-Aaron Felker, a member of the Burlington Republican Party and the transphobic LGB Alliance, who has a history of posting transphobic comments and regularly harassing trans women online.
It seems this relationship blossomed when Felker invited Baird to join him in protesting a fundraiser for Outright Vermont, an organization that supports LGBTQ+ youth and their families. Later, Felker appeared twice on Baird’s show, in part to platform the transphobic sticker campaign he and Bill Oetjen enacted.
Baird advanced the false narrative that transphobes like Luhrs and Felker were being silenced, telling Felker in an October 2022 show that people are “censored if [they] criticize the so-called trans agenda.” This claim seems particularly absurd now, after an election cycle in which Republicans spent some $215 million on anti-trans ads and right-wing media figures regularly fundraise millions of dollars off their transphobia.
Baird used Felker’s appearances on her show to laud his ideas. She told him his protest signs and stickers which included statements and phrases such as ‘No one’s born in the wrong body’ are “so correct, in a way.” She claims that “many of [her] lesbian friends” agree with Felker that sex is real and doesn’t change.
Her close ties to local transphobes were further highlighted when she appeared on the Disaffected podcast in October 2023 as Bill Oetjen’s legal representative against Burlington’s impending legal challenge to Oetjen’s transphobic stickering. The podcast is hosted by former Vermont resident Josh Slocum, who was fired from his position as director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance in 2022 for hate speech. In his conversation with Baird, Slocum dehumanizes trans women, calling them “troon,” an amalgamation of trans and cartoon, and victim-blames and misgenders Fern Feather, a local trans woman who was murdered in April 2023.
On Slocum’s show, Baird discussed her collaborations with Peggy Luhrs, Bill Oetjen, and Christopher-Aaron Felker in combating the “transgender kind of ideology,” saying “I then got to know Bill and also Chris Aaron Felker, who were trying to do something about it and trying to end it, and they were stickering all these little slogans around town that I thought were really not only true, but also kind of fun.”
In these interactions, Baird positioned herself as an active participant in the effort to erase trans people from public life.
In a 2022 article about the death of local feminist Peggy Luhrs, Baird alludes to the controversy surrounding Luhrs’ blatant transphobia, implying that community members who agreed with Luhrs were reluctant to voice support because of backlash to transphobic ideas. “She told me she feared violence,” Baird said of her friend, “but I think the main feeling she had was terrific sadness, feeling cut off from people that she felt were her friends.”
It appears those fears of backlash weighed heavily on Baird’s mind, as well. In a 2023 interview with the Rake Vermont, Baird digressed from a discussion of Burlington history to discuss her rocky road with some marginalized groups. “I mean, I’m a feminist,” she said. “I got in trouble with the lesbians, but, you know, I’ve made peace with them. I got in trouble — I could get in trouble over this goddamn trans issue.”
Platforming Transphobia
Far from simply tolerating dissenting views, Baird increasingly used her media presence to actively spread misinformation and rhetoric that endangered trans lives. Baird amplified transphobic rhetoric and dog whistles under the guise of her free speech absolutism. While she often argues that speech, unlike physical violence, cannot hurt people, she applied this concept unevenly. On her CCTV current events show “What’s Going On,” Baird platformed anti-trans talking points, claiming that society was suffering from “a war against women and girls, which is going on on both the left and the right.”
Baird and her show’s guests took many opportunities to echo the widely debunked argument that trans women should be barred from women’s sports. In one conversation with Felker, Baird voiced her agreement with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, citing fears about “biological males” — a term weaponized to delegitimize and dehumanize trans women — competing in women’s athletics. She referenced what she called “an incredible boxing match,” seemingly alluding to a 2023 IBA match involving Imane Khelif, an athlete whom right-wing media falsely labeled as transgender in an attempt to delegitimize her presence in the ring.
Baird’s rhetoric escalated further when she expressed dismay about a high school girl who was targeted by conservative media for playing volleyball in Randolph. “This whole idea that a male can be in women’s locker rooms, in women’s bathrooms, and that they can compete in women’s sports, I don’t get it,” she said in an episode with Christopher-Aaron Felker. “And that, again, is, I guess, allowable by the President, even correct.”
Openly transphobic recurring guest Peter Garritano claimed that if the Burlington Marathon keeps its nonbinary category, “men” will pretend to be nonbinary just to win and collect prize money, an unfounded and absurd claim. He framed this as a one-way women’s rights issue, arguing that trans men are simply not competitive in men’s sports — while not mentioning that, among the many barriers facing trans male athletes, most professional sports leagues ban testosterone use, which systematically excludes trans men for whom testosterone is medically necessary.
Men’s sports culture has long been steeped in domination, aggression, and violence. It is this same toxic masculinity that Garritano projects onto trans women, as if they – and not straight, cisgender men – were the torchbearers for masculine aggression. In fact, research shows that male athletes disproportionately commit harassment and assault, and for many trans men, competing in men’s leagues can mean entering deeply unsafe and hostile spaces.
Unsurprisingly for someone who constantly misgendered and disrespected trans people, Baird never corrected transphobic transgressions from her guests. While Felker misgendered NCAA swimmer Lia Thomas and Garritano deadnamed Caitlyn Jenner, Baird nodded along, agreeing emphatically with debunked claims that trans women are ruining athletic opportunities for cisgender women and reinforcing the patriarchy.
Among the many grievances against what she called the “transgender kind of ideology,” Baird and Felker relied on misleading right-wing reporting claiming the National Education Association was trying to mandate the term “birthing person” instead of “mother,” something she described “eliminates women and girls.” In fact, the NEA made no attempt at this: some NEA delegates proposed a resolution to adopt that language in their union contracts to strengthen the legal rights of their trans and non-binary members in different jurisdictions. Not only would this have not affected language used in classrooms, the motion did not come up for a vote.
This framing mirrors right-wing narratives that falsely portray inclusive language as erasure. Baird consistently affirmed a binary view of gender in her language around reproductive rights, at times becoming visibly upset when others used terms like “pregnant people.”
On another CCTV program, Baird appeared with community member and anti-fascist Marina Brown for a moderated conversation about whether hate speech and free speech were the same thing. Brown, who happens to be a trans woman, told The Rake she joined the discussion as an anti-fascist and was not there representing the trans community. Brown refused to return to CCTV after the contentious conversation, during which Baird purposefully misgendered Brown twice. Baird repeatedly argued that there was no evidence that dehumanizing language, like transphobia, can lead to targeted violence and hate crimes. When Brown described members of the white supremacist and neo-fascist Patriot Front as fascist and that hate speech is a precursor to genocide, as Brown pointed out was the case in Rwanda, Baird insisted she was using “hateful words” and claimed that calling someone fascist, even someone who identifies with that label, is “hate speech.”
Transphobia in Baird’s show became a significant concern for CCTV staff, including two trans women, who expressed feeling unsafe around guests like Felker. Staff met to discuss possible boundaries around speech or protections for trans and nonbinary staff. Bobby Lussier, then CCTV’s Development Director, raised these concerns at the Alliance for Community Media’s 2023 regional conference.
In an interview with the Rake Vermont, Lussier discussed how CCTV was navigating difficult internal conversations. Popular YouTube videos often required staff to spend significant time removing hate speech or slurs from the comments. A working group was created to address staff safety and the platforming of openly bigoted opinions. According to Lussier, nothing lasting came of this work.
Interpersonal Conflicts and Gender Dysphoria
Baird’s transphobia was not only political. It was personal. Her rhetoric often mirrored internal conflict, especially in her complex relationship with her own gender identity and that of her trans sister.
Over the course of her career, Baird repeatedly described her discomfort with her own gender and body. Raised in a severely abusive household, a young Baird internalized the message that “it was better to be a boy than a girl.”
Despite his battering, Baird identified with her father, describing him to Seven Days in 1999 as “intensely political, in a drunken, male kind of way.” On the other hand, she found it hard not to blame her mother for her victimhood. This, she claimed, gave her a profound desire to be a boy. “Women have all the responsibility,” she said. “Who needed that shit? Who needed to be my mother?”
Baird described herself as a “real tomboy” growing up. In a 2015 interview with the Vermont Historical Society, Baird related an experience strikingly familiar to many trans people. “I really wanted to be a boy,” she insisted. “I did not want to be a girl. I was horrified at being a girl. And when I first menstruated, I denied it. I just said, ‘This is not happening to me. I’m not really a girl.’ But, of course, I was really a girl.”
Read in isolation, her words reflect what many would identify as intense childhood gender dysphoria.
In fact, she drew a parallel between her dysphoric feelings and her trans sister’s rejection of her own assigned gender. But rather than using this shared experience as a foundation for solidarity, Baird used it to pathologize trans identities. While constantly misgendering and deadnaming her sister, Baird implied that her sister’s trans identity was a trauma response:
“One of my brothers – although I don’t know if he’s now dead – he became… a transgender person. He became a woman, basically.… He really wanted to be a woman, I think, out of an identity with my mother. He was her protector.… And when my mother died and there was a picture of my father in the room, my brother Chuck wouldn’t even look at it. And I never felt that way about my father, not totally. I didn’t ever understand what he was doing, but I never came to the position that I hated him or anything.”
Bearing witness to her father’s abuse of her mother pushed her toward feminist politics, she explained, in that she “often found [her]self in the role of protecting other girls.” She further detailed the dissonance between her assigned gender and her gender identity, saying, “I always regarded myself in some way as the ally of women, but not really a woman myself.”
She explained her affinity for the “company of men” by reasoning, “I identify a lot as a man, although I know I’m not.”
Again, rather than hide this side of herself, Baird zealously weaponized her story to delegitimize trans identities while actively working to undermine trans safety and existence in society. “My brother didn’t know that he wasn’t a woman,” she said, “but I know that I’m a female.”
No Room for Compromise on Trans Liberation
Sandy Baird’s decades of activism cannot be divorced from the harm she caused trans and non-binary people. We cannot simply say, “it was complicated” — though even that would be more honest than the glowing eulogies she received. While she stood with many marginalized people and groups, in her final years Baird chose, again and again, to endorse and elevate those who endanger trans lives.
The past several years of social movement growth in Vermont are a testament to the power of organizing across issues and communities. These struggles are deeply interconnected, and they demand hard conversations within organizations and among ourselves. Growth is challenging, and it won’t always result in everyone reaching consensus. For example, some of the Pride Center’s board members resigned after the organization publicly condemned the genocide in Gaza.
But Baird, with her long-standing role on the Vermont left, was given a pass by many for her transphobia. Her supporters and collaborators either never had those difficult conversations with her, or if they did, nothing changed. Bigotry is bigotry, and it’s worth asking: would those who chose to uncritically stand by Baird have done the same if her rhetoric had been racist or antisemitic?
Transphobia in our movements cannot be dismissed as a difference of opinion: it is a violent, genocidal ideology gaining ground in the US and abroad. While liberal politicians may treat trans rights as negotiable, those fighting for justice must refuse to treat trans lives as expendable.
Coalitions will always contain ideological or strategic differences. But when we accommodate bigotry in the name of “unity” or “strategy,” the cost is real, and it is human.
Sandra Baird is gone. She can no longer reflect, grow, and act. We, on the other hand, have no such excuse.
Trans people deserve safety and solidarity. And our liberation requires trans freedom.
Update June 25, 2025: This article was updated to include clarification from Brown regarding the discussion with Baird.
