Lia Smith
Age 2123 Oct 2025
Middlebury, Vermont (USA)
Suicide
Lia died by suicide. She was a student who had left the women’s swimming and diving team at Middlebury College, citing the pressure and isolation she felt as a trans athlete.
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.”
https://www.them.us/story/lia-smith-vermont-trans-trump-transphobia-suicide-middlebury
https://pridesource.com/article/erin-reed-on-lia-smith
https://www.them.us/story/lia-smith-middlebury-college-vermont-missing-cause-of-death
https://www.scenemag.co.uk/communities-mourn-the-loss-of-trans-student-athlete-lia-smith/
https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/10/28/lia-smith-middlebury-vermont-suicide-trans/
https://www.newsweek.com/missing-transgender-college-student-lia-smith-died-by-suicide-m-e-10936164
https://gcn.ie/us-trans-diver-lia-smith-dead/
https://www.middleburycampus.com/article/2025/10/middlebury-mourns-the-death-of-lia-smith-26
https://vtstatepolice.blogspot.com/2025/10/update-no-4-autopsy-completed-following.html
https://www.facebook.com/middleburycollege/posts/1207646054743731
