This short series, Middlebury College is Failing its Transgender Students, is separated into three parts. Part 1 can be read here. Part 2 can be read here. Part 3 is below.
Middlebury’s disinterest and oftentimes hostility towards LGBTQ+ students and faculty is reflected in the ideological makeup of some members of its faculty who hold high-profile academic positions. Its administration protects these faculty members regardless of harm done to queer and trans students. In the first two pieces, we highlighted several trans students who did not feel welcome at Middlebury College, including two trans women, Lia Smith and Evelyn Mae Sorensen, whose lives ended after an incompetent college administration allowed transphobia to flourish on campus while neglecting the mental health needs of marginalized students.
In this final part of the series, we look at Middlebury faculty members and guest speakers who have created a hostile campus environment.
The locus of white supremacy and bigotry at Middlebury College can be found at the Alexander Hamilton Forum and its many members, including Jim Douglas, Gary Winslett, Keegan Callanan, Allison Stanger, and Murray Dry. One cannot understand the full scope of Middlebury’s uniqueness as a New England liberal-arts college that is particularly unwelcome to many queer and trans students without understanding some of its most prominent enablers. Dry is considered by many students (and some former staff) to be a sexist, racist, and transphobic professor. Callanan is a Trump appointee who parlayed his support of eugenicists on campus to increase his influence among the far-right. Stanger defended many of the positions made by eugenicist Charles Murray. Winslett created and hosted an event on campus that debated trans people’s basic humanity. A closer look at the people behind these patterns reveals how deeply these attitudes have been allowed to take root.
Former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas
One of these high-profile conservative academics is former Republican and Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, a Middlebury alum. As governor from 2003 to 2011, Douglas initially vetoed a 2006 bill protecting trans Vermonters from discrimination. He also vetoed a 2009 bill legalizing gay marriage. Only one year after his veto of gay marriage, Middlebury hired Douglas as an executive-in-residence in the Political Science department. He was also, unsurprisingly, one of the original (and still current) members of the Alexander Hamilton Forum’s steering committee.
Douglas has used his time on campus to platform and defend eugenicists. He is currently suing the college to retain the name of former Vermont Governor John Mead on a campus building. Mead was a well-documented eugenicist who, in his farewell speech to the Vermont Legislature in 1912, introduced eugenics to the state, calling for legislation to outlaw marriage for “Our Degenerates,” to segregate them from the population, and force sterilization on men deemed “defective.” In keeping with Mead’s legacy, Douglas assisted campus Republicans in attempting to platform eugenicist Charles Murray for the third time in 15 years. The event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gary Winslett, Alexander Hamilton Forum’s Director
The Alexander Hamilton Forum, which has received funding from Koch-affiliated Institute for Humane Studies, is currently headed by political science professor Gary Winslett. Winslett has participated in several events with homophobic speakers and organized a transphobic “debate” in February featuring Brianna Wu and Leor Sapir. Over the last few years, Winslett, who once demonstrated a libertarian position of support for trans rights, now supports the exclusion of trans women from women’s sports.
Winslett has a history of flirting with transphobia on X (formerly Twitter). He has retweeted without criticism a far-right transphobic poll in which trans women athletes were called “boys in girls’ sports,” argued that Vermont Christian schools who refuse to play against teams with trans girls should face no consequences beyond a forfeiture, displaying no empathy for the trans girls being discriminated against, and just a couple months ago, he tweeted that “girl sports need to be for athletes born female,” echoing President Trump’s executive order in February that banned Lia Smith from competing against her peers.
Winslett has not tweeted about Smith’s suicide at the time of publishing, nor has he expressed concerns about transphobia and how it can lead to detrimental outcomesfor trans and queer Middlebury students and for society at large. While LGBTQ+ students contend with a torrent of bigotry online and on campus, Winslett has remained fairly insulated from his harmful actions.
Alliston Stanger and Eugenic Pseudoscientist Charles Murray
In 2017, the Political Science department invited former New Hampshire Governor John H. Sununu, a Republican, to speak alongside former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, a Democrat, on finding economic common ground during Trump’s first term. Sununu had previously said that the failed, racist war on drugs “didn’t go far enough,” called bills that would ban discrimination against queer and trans people “garbage,” and has made many racist comments about former President Barack Obama.
Sununu wasn’t the only known for promoting bigotry and discriminatory views hosted on campus that year. Earlier that year, one of America’s pre-eminent modern eugenicists, Charles Murray, was invited by Middlebury’s American Enterprise Institute chapter to speak at the college for the second time.
Murray previously spoke on campus in 2007 to promote his book Real Education, which furthered his eugenic obsession with IQ tests using flawed logic and thin evidence. Murray’s credentials and ideas have been widely debunked and criticized by scholars, while the Southern Poverty Law Center has called Murray a white nationalist, racist, homophobe, and eugenicist who insists Black and Hispanic people are inherently less intelligent than white people and who regularly misgenders trans women.
International Politics and Economics professor Allison Stanger, a member of the Hamilton Forum steering committee who agreed to moderate the 2017 event, said at the time that she did not agree with Murray’s views. Yet despite this assertion, Stanger dismissed accusations of racism against Murray, asking participants at the event to “ponder how Charles Murray can be a white supremacist when he married an Asian woman and had two children with her.”
With campus embroiled in controversy, the Political Science department wrote a letter in defense of its decision to co-sponsor the event. In the letter, the department admitted that Murray engaged in “pseudoscience and racism,” but because they believed he was not “an utter charlatan” and was a prominent voice on the far-right who had been platformed at other universities and colleges, they would not revoke their sponsorship. The lecture was held, though due to disruption by students, Murray spoke from a separate room that was livestreamed to the venue, with students picking up their protest again as Murray left campus.
In response to the disruption, over 100 Middlebury faculty members signed a letter defending Murray’s presence at the college, arguing that consistently platforming bigots who hold genocidal views does not constitute violence. The letter argued that students should remain “civil” and that protest is acceptable only insofar as it leaves invited speakers entirely undisturbed.
Eleven political science professors signed, including Keegan Callanan, Matthew Dickinson, Murray Dry, and Stanger, nearly all of whom are Hamilton Forum steering committee members or have endorsed far-right speakers. Not a single professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Department signed on. Dr. Laurie Essig, a professor in that department, told us that it was not a coincidence, as her department was blamed for the protests, despite having nothing to do with them. Essig said that because “there was no Black Studies at the time, they blamed Gender Studies. We got so much hate mail, so many really horrifying articles in the right-wing press…my office phone was filled death threats and rape threats, and so it was a really lovely year or so afterwards for us.” While dozens of articles were written about how horrible students were to “cancel” the “free speech” of a eugenicist, the misogynistic attacks against the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Department received no press or letters of condemnation.
Still, a few Middlebury professors risked death threats and spoke out to the press in protest. One Middlebury professor described Murray as a “classic pseudoscientist,” a characterization that even the Political Science department agreed with. Essig, who co-hosted the trans debate counter-event with Lia Smith this past February, told VTDigger that Murray used eugenicist arguments in his work, and that she was “…saddened and perplexed that a person who has no scholarly record — that is, he has never held an academic appointment nor published in peer reviewed journals — is being presented as a scholar rather than a right wing polemicist.”
Keegan Callanan, Matthew Dickinson, and Poland’s Far-Right, Anti-LGBTQ+ Politician Ryszard Legutko
In 2019, the Hamilton Forum sponsored a talk by far-right Polish politician Ryszard Legutko, with the support of professors Callanan and Dickinson. Callanan, the director of the Hamilton Forum at the time, sent a letter to the campus, giving students only two days’ notice for the very controversial event. In the letter, Callanan defended Legutko’s homophobia, arguing with an absurdly false comparison that Legutko “holds the same position on same-sex marriage” once held by former Presidents Obama and Bill Clinton, and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.
Legutko is a member of Poland’s far-right Law and Justice Party and is anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, and has defended what amounts to genocidal zones in which politicians claim areas are “free” of LGBTQ+ people. The Law and Justice Party is helmed by anti-semitic president Karol Nawrocki, who has attacked Hanukkah candle lighting in public and championed Holocaust revisionism, denying Poland’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.
Despite organizing and collecting over 800 signatures against the event, Middlebury’s response to Legutko’s visit was initially to hold a second talk beforehand, called “Populism, Homophobia, and Illiberal Democracy,” hosted by Gary Winslett, the future director of the Hamilton Forum. Winslett did not oppose Legutko being platformed; he merely believed that a rebuttal was needed in the “marketplace of ideas.” However, under pressure from a potential protest, Middlebury cancelled the talk, citing “safety concerns” due to fears that students would organize a “queer disco” party and distribute information about Legutko.
Dickinson expressed disappointment at the public cancellation, saying that all students, including queer, trans, and marginalized ones, “lost that opportunity to express that feeling of being violated in their own home,” a chilling argument for platforming someone who casually uses genocidal language. Despite the cancellation, Legutko still managed to garner an audience on campus. Dozens of students in Dickinson’s class, with support from Callanan, were given a private, impromptu lecture from the Polish politician. Dickinson, who was worried that the event might become “confrontational,” refused to let a student live-stream it on Facebook. Dickinson was later congratulated by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a right-wing think-tank funded by two billionaires, which has a history of defending transphobia, transphobic groups, and transphobic individuals in schools, for ignoring Middlebury administrators and covertly platforming Legutko. There is no public record of Dickinson facing any consequences for his actions.
Callanan compared this secretive platforming of Legutko, done against the administration’s wishes, to academics in the Soviet Union risking their safety from state oppression to host underground lectures and seminars with Western academics. Callanan was excited to invite Legutko back the following year.
That same year, 2019, conservative political commentator Ross Douthat was invited to Middlebury College, presented by Vermont Public, and moderated by Jim Douglas. Douthat had contributed to the New York Times’ anti-trans coverage, and GLAAD called him a “frequent LGBTQ equality critic” who had published harmful misinformation about the “debate” around gender affirming care for trans youth and teens.
Gary Winslett and Boston College’s Homophobic and Transphobic Professor, Peter Kreeft
In 2021, the Religion Department, the Middlebury branch of the Newman Catholic Club, the College Activities Board, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship invited Boston College professor Peter Kreeft to campus. Students were horrified that Kreeft, a long-time homophobe and transphobe, had compared gender affirming surgeries to torture and murder. In an interview with the school paper, Newman Club president Pedro Guizar refused to answer questions about whether he knew Kreeft’s anti-LGBTQ+ position before inviting him. In part because the event occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was no coordinated protest against Kreeft. At a time when life was mostly conducted on screens, Kreeft was invited into every student’s dorm room or home via video conference.
Winslett moderated the event. The day before the talk, according to a report from The Middlebury Campus, Guizar sent Winslett an email with a list of Newman Club member names, with the subject line “Names to call on,” which was mistakenly sent to the entire membership of the Newman Club. The immediate backlash led to several members leaving the club, with a former club president and treasurer criticizing Guizar in response. According to The Middlebury Campus, Guizar denied the accusations of special treatment and claimed that he wanted to “prioritize” questions from Newman Club members, but that he and Winslett “still called on all those who raised their hands.”
Accusations of providing special treatment or access to speakers are not new to Winslett. Winslett moderated the transphobic “debate” in February in which campus Republicans gained special access to speakers Brianna Wu and Leor Saphir. Winslett did not respond to interview requests.
In response to Kreeft’s appearance, multiple trans students discussed the high amount of transphobia they faced on campus. In one piece in The Middlebury Campus, a 2022 graduate worried that fellow trans classmates would internalize Kreeft’s bigotry and self-harm.
Another trans student who spoke to The Rake, X, told us she was reassured by college staff that the event “had nothing to do with trans people.” When she changed her screen name to “Trans Rights” and asked a question in the comment section about Kreeft’s views on women in the priesthood, Winslett replied and told her she would be called on at the very end of the Q&A. Kreeft and the student then argued for over ten minutes about the basic humanity of trans people, without moderation from Winslett. The student told us she was upset that she was not given a chance to talk about her own experience as a trans woman, and argued that Kreeft’s entire approach was to “obfuscate, confuse, philosophize, and deny.”
At one point, Kreeft denied that the media ever reports on trans women being murdered, claiming that “The Boston Globe is one of the most left-wing newspapers in the world, and I’ve never seen an article about the murder of a transgender person.” X then told us how they felt targeted by the local Catholic pastor and Guizar, who sent out emails and wrote op-eds singling her out and tokenizing her as someone who showed dignity while debating her own existence and value.
Emails verified by The Rake show that Father Luke Austin, the pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Middlebury, which is the affiliate parish of the college’s Newman Club, along with Nicholas Maille, the parish’s Director of Faith Formation and Campus Ministry, sent a mass email to club members and parishioners after the event. The email titled “Some thoughts as we head into the weekend,” made sure to draw attention to X as a student “who is trans-identifying.” The phrasing, in parentheses and italics, served to delegitimize trans people and act as a dog whistle to their audience. Guizar, the Newman Club’s president at the time, also used the same transphobic language in an op-ed defending Kreeft.
While the email and op-ed made sure to “commend” X and Kreeft for “their dialogue at the end of the Q&A,” it also stated that Kreeft’s back-and-forth “was not the topic of the talk, but clearly important to the student.” The email implied that X was in no position to question Kreeft’s transphobia, stating that Kreeft has “worked with college students for +40 years,” as if longevity in academia or religious scholarship placed him beyond bigotry and reproach. However, Kreeft’s anti-trans stance had fractured the Newman Club, led to the club’s academic sponsor being replaced, and was talked about widely on campus before the event.
The email closed with a trusty right-wing refrain of “cancel culture,” stating, “As we are created in the image of the triune of God, we are called to dialogue, not to cancel.”
In response to the email, X’s friends reached out to Austin and Maille. One friend shared an email exchange with The Rake, writing, “I saw as a student being put in a position where they had to defend their own personhood on a public stage to an influential man who, during the conversation, tried to undermine their experiences.” The email listed paraphrases of Kreeft’s points: “(‘If I haven’t seen reports of trans murders in The Boston Globe, they didn’t happen and therefore I haven’t done any harm by spreading my beliefs’; ‘Even though you are trans and I’m not, I…hold the position that being trans is a psychological disorder, and therefore gender-affirming surgery is an unnatural mutilation of the body’; ‘Now explain to me how I am harming you; you must prove how harmed you are’.)”
In an in-person follow-up conversation with one of X’s friends, they told us that Father Austin got defensive, behaved condescendingly, and talked over them. While the friend told us that Father Austin was not “more hateful than average”, they remembered Austin telling them that “if they really love [X] help instead of supporting their mental illness…the sort of ‘I know best for you and I really do love everyone including sinners’ mentality.” On November 12, 2025, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops banned all transgender affirming care from their hospitals.
A few weeks later, trans students put up flyers in the student center in support of trans rights. They were all quickly defaced with transphobic slogans. The person alleged to have done this reached out to multiple trans and non-binary students, admitting that he had defaced the signs. At least one student filed a complaint with Middlebury’s Title IX office, but received no response. These experiences led X to believe that “the administration of Middlebury is completely complicit in the erasure of trans students.” With her grades and mental health suffering, X decided to leave campus the following October and has not returned to Vermont since.
Middlebury College is Doing Too Little Too Late for LGBTQ+ Students
Although Middlebury College was recognized as one of the top 100 campuses for LGBTQ+ students in 2006, the reality on the ground is one of effort too little and too late. In 2020, Middlebury’s trans and non-binary students struggled to have their new names added to email profiles and Canvas (an online teaching platform), nearly a year and a half after the issue was brought to the attention of administrators. In 2022, LGBTQ+ students celebrated a Lavender Graduation for the first time. Middlebury offered specific LGBTQ+ housing for the first time in 2023. The Prism Center opened two and a half years later than promised, in the winter of 2024, and would likely have never happened if the project had not been, in the words of Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández, “primarily driven by students.”
X said the Prism Center alone isn’t enough, as the entire campus felt unwelcoming to trans students like her. The athletic building made Lia Smith feel unwelcome, academic buildings hold professors who “casually erase the meaning and history of trans struggle,” and visiting presenters like Kreeft were allowed to “question and deny statistics about the violence against trans women,” X said.
Noting that while the campus was never exactly a good place for LGBTQ+ students, Essig told The Rake that in the past, at least they “weren’t killing themselves.” Essig went on to ask, “If three Jewish students had killed themselves, you know, would we be continuing to platform people who speak against their existence…then not even have any larger conversation?”
“It’s actually appalling, and it makes me really angry. It makes me sad. I’ll be honest, if I didn’t have to go back to Middlebury next year, I wouldn’t.”
“I hope the administration will decide that something more explicit needs to happen,” Essig continued. “We can’t sweep it under the rug.”
Lia Smith’s family has requested that donations in Lia’s honor be made to the Prism Center, Middlebury campus’ LGBTQ+ resource center.
