For several days, including overnight when the vast sky in rural Vermont turned black hole dark, hundreds of people searched the campus of Middlebury College, walking atop fallen leaves the color of cranberries and pumpkins, desperately examining every inch of ground.
They combed through classrooms, dormitories and the athletic center. And then doubled back to them, again and again.
Fellow students. Close friends. Townsfolk. The police. All looking for a missing senior, Lia Smith.
She was a college diver who sang as she flipped and twisted before hitting the water, a friend who showed up with a traveling tea set, someone whose laugh reverberated down campus hallways.
And one Friday night in mid-October, without leaving any clues, she disappeared.
“Lia are you alright?” texted Julia Nerenberg, a friend who graduated from Middlebury in 2025. “Idk if something’s wrong but whatever is happening i will do anything i can to help you through it.”
The police found Lia’s body six days later. They ruled her death a suicide.
She did not leave a note.
An Unsettling Year
Lia, a transgender woman who was 21 when she died, struggled to feel comfortable in her body and in the world, according to interviews with more than a dozen people who knew her, though no one knows exactly why she killed herself. The reasons for suicide are complex, and multiple factors — including mental disorders, brain chemistry and destabilizing life events — almost always play a role.
But Lia’s father and friends say she was a casualty, in part, of the argument over transgender women competing in women’s sports, and a broader national climate that has been unwelcoming, and often vicious, to all trans people.
Lia had endured a particularly unsettling junior year, telling several friends that she was terrified of being hurt or killed because of growing anti-trans sentiment and President Trump’s politicization of it.
Shortly before spring term began, Lia, a computer science and statistics double major, faced a gauntlet of attacks against her and the trans community.
Less than a week before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, her photo and birth name were posted on the social media platform X, by a website that publicly outs trans women athletes. The post said Lia had returned to competing for the Middlebury women’s diving team after taking a year off, and had competed as a boy in high school. It called trans women cheaters, even though the N.C.A.A. rules had allowed their participation since it set its first policy about it, in 2010, before barring them early last year.
As a trans woman on a women’s team, she was a target from several directions. Looming over her was an ongoing, intense debate about the fairness of trans women participating in women’s competitions. In some cases, people consider it unsafe.
In this case, her friends said, Lia believed that someone at school had fed the site her information. She felt betrayed. And despite the social media post’s assertion, Lia had not returned to competing on the diving team, her coach said and records show. It had been three years since she last dove for Middlebury.
Lia had, however, just finished a season of only practicing with the team, and her teammates knew she was transgender.
Less than a week later, on the day Mr. Trump returned to office, he issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female, determined at conception and unchangeable.
A subsequent order barred trans women from women’s sports at federally funded institutions, with the N.C.A.A. announcing the very next day, in February, that it would follow the president’s lead.
The online criticisms of Lia were becoming so brutal that Middlebury removed Lia’s bio from its athletics website. Through it all, she began losing focus in her classes, even failing one, said her father, Greg Smith. She had been a straight-A student the semester before.
“One of the concerns she shared with me was that, because of her identity as a trans person, people just didn’t want her to exist,” said Edy Cruz, Lia’s housemate and a senior at Middlebury.
‘I Think I’m a Girl’
Lia’s childhood bedroom remains as she left it. Plaques from diving. Trophies from soccer and Little League Baseball. A book from the Japanese young adult series, “The Mimosa Confessions,” about a trans girl searching for love and acceptance.
Not long ago, Mr. Smith walked through their house outside of San Francisco with tears in his eyes, stopping by family photos — Lia hugging him, Lia at their vacation home in Mexico, Lia posing next to Middlebury’s panther mascot. When she died, he had to endure merciless online comments, including one on his Facebook page saying that her death was no loss. But he thought she was perfect, he said, adding that she just couldn’t handle all the hate in the world.
Lia had struggled on and off since high school, her father said, and he doesn’t blame anyone for her death.
Long before Lia legally took the name Lia, she was a teeny, swaddled, burrito-size baby that weighed less than four pounds — a twin, with a sister, each born prematurely.
In her early years she was happy and healthy, Mr. Smith told me, in his first interview since Lia went missing. She began diving at 7 or 8.
Lia lived for roller coasters, and relished recklessly riding her orange bike down her steep driveway, only to slam on the brakes at the last second and giggle. Diving gave her a similar thrill, and her father later came to understand that she also liked the sport because she could hang out with the girls on the team.
In high school at Sacred Heart Preparatory in Atherton, Calif., though, Lia became so depressed that during her freshman year she thought about killing herself, her father said. He recalled feeling helpless as he and his husband tried to figure out what was happening. One day, near the end of that school year, she told him bluntly, “I think I’m a girl.”
He was shocked. But she was confident, he said, and clearly had thought about it for a long time. At therapy, she began to talk it through.
Medical advisers recommended that Lia, who had already gone through puberty, wait before taking testosterone blockers or estrogen, her father said.
“No one is in any hurry to give their kid a bunch of hormones,” he said, explaining that Lia wanted the drugs that would feminize her.
She started her medical transition before her senior year of high school, changing her name and sex on her birth certificate and other government documents. Like many trans people, Lia had set out on a long road. But her friends and family said she had never been happier.
Lia was feeling brave.
Without telling her parents, she began contacting college diving coaches, asking if they would consider her for their women’s team. N.C.A.A. rules said she would just have to follow its protocols for suppressing her testosterone, a hormone known to increase strength, muscle mass and endurance.
Middlebury’s coach, Bradley Schott, said yes.
A Fresh Start
Middlebury College, a small liberal arts school in a town of about 9,000 people, was the only place Lia applied. The diving program was Division III, meaning it didn’t offer scholarships, and the coach recruited anyone who showed an interest in diving.
Lia loved that it was far from home, tucked into a sprawling valley of farms between Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains in Vermont, a progressive state where she thought she could safely grow into her new identity.
At Middlebury, she could boldly be Lia Smith — woman diver, connoisseur of anime, teller of puns both brilliant and bad, player of pianos, board games and bridge.
But it wasn’t that simple.
Lia always felt that people were staring at her. She caught the grimaces and dirty looks. She was 5-foot-11, with women’s size 11-1/2 feet, and often people called her male or were confused about her gender. Her friends say she was crushed by that.
She wanted to look more feminine, but had started her transition after the effects of puberty had already settled. A lower-pitched voice. Bigger muscles. A more robust bone structure. At the edge of a diving board, in only a swimsuit, she felt insecure. She told friends that she regretted not transitioning earlier, because she often could not pass as a woman.
Mr. Schott, her coach, also works at a mental health, substance abuse and developmental counseling service, and said he was aware that she was having a hard time.
“Supporting Lia was always a priority in making sure we offered a safe space for her on our team,” he said.
For away meets, she would use a gender neutral restroom and started her freshman season changing in those restrooms, her coach said, but eventually began using the women’s locker room, trying to do so when it was empty.
Sometimes she couldn’t find what she considered to be a safe place to use the restroom and would hold it for hours.
Mr. Schott said he never received any complaints from within the Middlebury team or the league they competed in. He added, however, that he couldn’t be sure of what was going on behind the scenes.
As it turned out, several women swimmers were not comfortable with Lia being on the team or using the women’s locker room, two of her teammates said. Like some of Lia’s friends, they did not want their names published because of the sensitive nature of Lia’s death and the politics surrounding trans identity.
‘What’s the National Emergency?’
During Lia’s freshman year, she was the top diver on the Middlebury women’s team, competing in the sport she had loved since elementary school.
She won seven of 20 events. At the league’s championships, she failed to make the final, or top eight, in the one-meter dive. But in the three-meter, she finished fifth.
And then she quit competing.
The sport took up too much of her time, her father remembered her saying, but she added: “There’s a social critique that’s uncomfortable. It’s not overt, but at the meets, sometimes it’s noticeable.”
Yet, around campus, she still wore her navy blue Middlebury swimming and diving parka, her favorite piece of clothing. She often helped with scoring at meets and attended team dinners.
Her junior year, she began practicing with the team, looking for the comfort of the pool and her diving friends, who knew about the cruel online and real-time harassment she was facing.
Several times in the town of Middlebury, people shouted homophobic slurs at her from their cars, two of her friends said. On campus, at least one student complained that Lia was using the women’s bathroom.
In response to a February panel discussion about the safety of gender-affirming care for minors, Lia spoke at an event called “Trans Healthcare is NOT a debate,” and said she had felt a shift in the way trans athletes were being treated.
“As much as trans athletes were disliked before, now it’s definitely coming back to the forefront again,” she said, according to Addison County Independent, a local newspaper.
She added, “It’s really hard putting on the suit every day if you are obviously an outlier. It’s also really hard going in a locker room where you’re not welcome.”
In conversations with her friends and family, she said that barring trans athletes from women’s sports was a way for politicians to galvanize anti-trans support and consolidate their power.
“With fewer than 10 transgender athletes at the college level, with most of them at Division III, not going to the Olympics, what’s the national emergency?” she said to her father. She was referring to the N.C.A.A. President Charlie Baker’s estimate of how many trans athletes were among the 510,000 students competing in the N.C.A.A.
Mr. Smith, a corporate lawyer, tried to convince Lia that everything would be OK — eventually. He told her stories about his own life, including what it was like growing up in a Mormon community and then coming out as gay, and he recounted fighting for the right for gays to marry.
“I’ve lived through these fundamental paradigm changes where the law is used to stigmatize a group of people, a marginalized group of people, but it got better,” he said.
‘Doing better and better’
Lia’s death hit Middlebury hard: In the past two years, two other students on campus had died unexpectedly.
One was a trans woman who accidentally overdosed on drugs. The other was a man who died by suicide.
Addressing all the deaths, an editorial in the campus newspaper said, “In a rural institution like ours, it is far too easy for students to feel lost and unseen.” It went on to criticize the college for hosting “speakers that make transgender students feel unseen and invalidated.”
Laurie Essig, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at the college, said it had always been challenging to be L.G.B.T.Q. at Middlebury, because the town is geographically isolated and “a little less trans, a little less queer and a little less gay than other places.”
“This anti-gender movement makes it hard to wake up every day and think, to quote Taylor Swift, ‘I’m the problem, it’s me,’” she said. “If you are being told that over and over again, it’s harder to remember that, wait, this isn’t right.”
Last summer, before Lia’s senior year at Middlebury, while home in Woodside, Calif., she shared her frustrations with Madison Verner, one of her best friends. It unnerved Lia that Mr. Trump had declared that passports must show a person’s assigned sex at birth. Her friend remembered how Lia was upset that the president was erasing all the progress she had made.
But a few months later, she called Ms. Verner from Middlebury, raving about her school year and saying life was good. She had even taken a standard concussion test to possibly start practicing again with the diving team, though she promised to quit if made to use the men’s locker room.
“Every year I’m doing better and better,” she said.
Her father got the same impression when he visited her the week before she disappeared. He took her and her friends to her favorite Indian restaurant, and she seemed happy. He checked in on her classes. Her Middlebury friends said she was doing just fine.
“I knew she was struggling, but I didn’t know to what extent,” said Mr. Cruz, her housemate, who lived in the room next to hers. “But she was very good at pretending things were going fine when they clearly weren’t.”
No One to Blame
Lia’s body was found on Oct. 23, lying at the edge of a group of trees near the college’s organic farm. The spot was secluded, down a hill and across sweeping fields from the center of campus, in a place her friends and family were not likely to look for her.
In the following days, a memorial was held at her Catholic high school, with hundreds of people attending. The next week, hundreds more packed into a meeting hall at Middlebury, sitting on chairs arranged in concentric circles, with boxes of tissues placed on the floor.
More than a dozen people, including friends on the swimming and diving team, took turns telling their favorite Lia stories. How she chatted up every cabdriver on a recent trip to Mexico, because she wanted to connect with other people. How she showed up, even in the cutting cold and pelting snow, to a Korean tea-drinking event hosted by a friend who was nervous that no one would come.
A computer science professor said Lia was always engaged, curious and energetic. They had planned to play a chess match against each other. The board was still set up in his classroom.
Afterward, the mourners wrote notes to Lia, made videos for her family, and, in her honor, ate sushi and drank tea.
“I hope you know how safe you made me feel, like I could always be myself and never say anything wrong,” one note to her said. Another: “I wish you could feel the love in this space, for you, right now.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.
Juliet Macur is a national reporter at The Times, based in Washington, D.C., who often writes about America through the lens of sports.
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