[T]he morning of last fall’s election, Vermonter Christine Hallquist woke to yet another heady news cycle of headlines trumpeting her as the nation’s first transgender major-party gubernatorial candidate.
Then that night, she lost.
“This is not the end of the story,” the 63-year-old Hyde Park Democrat posted on social media. “There is still so much work to do.”
A half-year later, Hallquist has plugged into a new source of power.
“I’ve had this unique experience of living in both genders, and I plan on continuing to be as strong as a woman as I was as a man,” she said at Brattleboro’s recent Slow Living Summit panel on “Women in the Workplace: How to Approach Both Challenge and Success.” “I believe we all have to stand up for each other.”
News outlets from the Boston Globe to the BBC have shared how Hallquist was an energy executive named David before publicly transitioning to Christine in 2015, only to experience an equally seismic shift while listening to stories of discrimination and harassment at Montpelier’s Women’s March last year.
“I realized this is not the world I want to live in,” she went on to recount to GQ magazine, “and I’m going to do everything I can to change it.”
Hallquist resigned as the longtime CEO of the Vermont Electric Cooperative and launched her first run for political office. Winning the Democratic Party nomination, she drew both national headlines and hate mail before losing to incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who reaped 55.4% of the vote to her 40.4%.
“Sometimes people ask me how I’m doing since the election,” Hallquist posted on Facebook. “I’m doing great.”
That’s because she’s continuing to push the same slate of issues from her career and campaign.
Hallquist is creating a new company, Cross Border Power, just north of Vermont in Quebec, noting Canada is more open to such initiatives than the current U.S. presidential administration.
“Our mission,” she says, “is to solve climate change.”
Specifically, Hallquist is working with investors to offer competitively priced renewable energy to industry and consumers through battery storage technology. She launched the new venture in February, just as she visited the Statehouse to pitch her 2018 campaign plan to encourage utilities to install fiber infrastructure to expand Vermont broadband.
“I know with absolute certainty that we are not going to improve our rural economy if we can’t get connected,” she told legislators.
Hallquist’s current concerns also run personal. She returned to the Montpelier capitol this past week to promote LGBTQ rights at a rally marking the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.
“We shall overcome the hatred and bigotry that is being directed at us,” she told the crowd, “and we will make this a better, more inclusive world for our children and our children’s children.”
A documentary about Hallquist’s transition by her son, Derek, recently was named one of “The Top 11 Transgender Films of All Time” by Metrosource.com. She elaborated on the resulting challenges at this month’s “Women in the Workplace” panel.
“When I was running, I received more hostility for being a woman than I did being transgender,” she said.
Hallquist also has learned that fellow executives who listened to David aren’t always as open to the same ideas from Christine.
“Welcome to being a woman,” she recalls her daughter saying. “I didn’t know the experiences I was going to have as a result of my transitioning. There are all these subtleties that we don’t realize.”
Hallquist recently joined South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg at a Washington, D.C., event for the Victory Fund, a national organization dedicated to electing openly LGBTQ candidates at all levels of government. Although she hasn’t ruled out another run, she notes campaigning is time-consuming, she’s “really busy” with her new company and may move to Canada to be closer to work.
“I will continue to have a voice in other avenues,” she says. “My focus is on climate change and civil rights. I didn’t anticipate I’d become a default leader of the LGBT community, but I’m owning it in a big way. A diverse population leads to diverse thinking, which leads to breakthrough ideas.”
