Vivian Smotherman, a former hog farmer, out trans woman, Navy veteran, and educator — with a career in the oil industry behind her and a brand-new double degree in history and anthropology just added to her resume — is running for the state Senate from her district in Southwestern Colorado.
The married grandmother of three lives in Durango with her wife Joanna — whom she met “on the apps” — and says she brings diverse, real-world experience to a race that was uncontested before she jumped in earlier this year.
We caught up with the sunny and ever-engaging candidate, 54, on the campaign trail early in the morning at an outdoor market in Aurora, where she was in search of breakfast and a coffee. She was, she said, “doing amazing.”
LGBTQ+ Nation: Last week, you were the subject of an email distributed by the Colorado GOP that deadnamed you and quoted from online scowl Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok that you’re a man pretending to be a woman and mentally ill. What was your reaction?
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Vivian Smotherman: We laughed. The insanity of the things that they spit out! There was actually another letter that came out today against me, and now I’m trying to kidnap children and chemically castrate them. The evil that I apparently am capable of is unrivaled.
Are you going to sue? What’s your recourse in a political campaign?
My opponent is a decent human being, and he apologized to me, and at this point he has all but alienated himself from his own party because he’s not as insane and crazy as they are, and they have disowned him. So I think that’s enough. Our campaign is doing fantastic, and we’re confident that we’re going to come out on top of this thing, and letters like that, emails, and the spewing of lies and hate, it just helps us, and it hurts them.
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Kamala Harris has described both reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights as among a group of fundamental freedoms that she’ll fight to protect as president. Colorado is a blue state with a gay governor, but it’s also largely rural, and it has Lauren Boebert skulking around. What kind of pressures are the LGBTQ+ and trans communities facing in Colorado, and what can be done to address them?
I think we face an incredible amount of pressure. We know the nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs a few years back, and battles are always erupting where the extreme right are trying to make a statement. But the acceptance of the LGBT community has been going on in Colorado since I first came here in the 70s. It’s a very welcoming state. It’s a very friendly, warm state. And the people that are spreading this stuff, they’re a minority, which is why we’re so blue. The GOP is less than 25% of the voting population here in Colorado, but they like making noise.
Lauren Boebert’s current congressional district overlaps with the one that you’re running in. Have you crossed paths with her, and what would you say if you did?
I have not crossed paths with her once. She went to the other side of the state and she has completely abandoned my district and all of the bills, all of the legislation, all of the efforts she was making to help the people there. She just quit cold turkey and started campaigning elsewhere. That’s just another example of what a poor leader she is, because it’s all about her.
Colorado ranks among the top states for book bans, according to an American Library Association report in 2023. 80% of those bans across the country have been instigated by national groups like Moms for Liberty, who provide angry moms with cut-and-paste complaints about the same titles in school districts in every state. Have you interacted with these women, and how would you describe their effect on civil discourse?
Their effect is horrible. The letter that we started this conversation talking about, it appears that that was actually written by — I think her name was Darcy or Marcy from Moms for Liberty, so it is closely tied to that group. About a year ago, they were involved with a group that came to my town, Durango, and tried to bring in a racist charter school, and our community shut them down cold. And then they went to the legislature, and they tried to make rules with the State Board of Education that the community was not allowed to keep them out. That also failed.
So yes, there is some book banning in Colorado. It is, for the most part, restricted to extreme MAGA areas.
How do you define a racist charter school?
They come in and they talk to your parents, and they say, “We’re a fantastic school. We have these fantastic scores and results.” And you look at them, and you say, “Well, your student body, they’re entirely white and they’re entirely upper middle class. You’re not letting in any diversity into your student body.” That’s a racist school.
The fact that they won’t let in, especially in our neck of the woods, Indigenous people or ethnic and culturally diverse people — they won’t let them wear their hair the way the culture does, or dress the way the culture does, that’s what I mean by a racist charter school. They take deliberate steps to make sure that only a certain demographic is allowed in.
Initiative 89 on the Colorado ballot this fall will change the Colorado Constitution to recognize a woman’s right to an abortion. What do you predict the vote’s going to be?
I think it’s going to be overwhelmingly positive. I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit 70 or 80% for that. This state is very into protecting women and women’s rights. We have it already on the books that abortions are legal. We also have it in the books that a red state or any other state trying to find out why a woman came to Colorado, we don’t share that information. That’s none of their business.
You have a lot of events to attend this week, including the State Legislative BBQ sponsored by the Pueblo Chamber of Commerce this Friday. You must go to a lot of functions where there’s food, like BBQs and county fairs. What’s your strategy? Do you avoid eating, do you eat beforehand, or do you just load up on the calories?
No, I eat very little, which is strange coming from a larger woman like myself (laughing). But once I’m around people and we’re in that environment and there’s excitement going on and there’s conversations, there’s just smiles and happiness. The last thing I think about is eating.
What’s your favorite county fair dish or snack?
Oh, oh, well, I love the Navajo tacos.
What’s a Navajo taco?
How do I describe it? Fried bread? That’s the biggest difference, is it’s served on fried bread. It’s sloppy, it’s yummy, it’s delicious. And I’ll eat those every chance I get.
On Saturday, there’s a Pride festival in the town of Alamosa, which is the home of your Republican opponent. What’s the difference between a small-town Pride event and one in San Francisco or New York? And what does it represent for the people who live there?
This will be my third or fourth Pride festival this summer. The first one we did was 300 people, and it was amazing, because that town was in a very red county, and this was their first Pride ever. And I was very honored that I was the keynote speaker. And when I speak at Pride events, it’s non-political. It’s simply about relating stories of my own personal experience and that being transgender is not a curse. It can be a wonderful thing. It can be a gift. You can really thrive as a transgender person.
I say, listen, I know it can seem rough at times. I transitioned in probably the hardest setting you could ever imagine transitioning. I was an oil field worker in the Gulf of Mexico, offshore, and that’s where I came out and said, “Hey, I’m not going to be a him anymore. I’m accepting who I am, and I’m going to be a her.”
And you know what? All of those Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi — all of those extreme Southern men, they were wonderful. They accepted it. They took it. They knew me for who I was, and they respected me for who I was, and they were unbelievably supportive.
And these are oil field workers, you know? They take hate with their breakfast every morning. They’re really good at it. But that’s what I’ve given in my Pride talks, is that message that says, “When you’re yourself and people respect you, that’s all that matters, and you can be whoever you want to be. Just be true.”
When I finished one speech and I stepped off the stage and there was a line of people wanting to talk to me, wanting to thank me for the words, for the inspiration. And what was really touching is there were two bears that were waiting in line, and they were in a red county that’s always been red. I don’t think either one of them were out of the closet, which broke my heart, but they were so warm and came up to me and thanked me and said, “Hey, you know, you really made a difference with those words.”
So word is getting out. People are responding to me just beautifully. They love the enthusiasm, they love the honesty, they love the integrity, and they love the work ethic.
It sounds like another campaign right now.
You know, when you put in the effort, and people recognize it, people respect it, and that’s what it’s about. And to serve, to be a senator, or, you know, even a president, it’s about doing the work. It’s about getting out there and exhausting yourself for the people that you’re trying to serve.
Education is a big part of your platform. You write, “Education is the greatest gift society can bestow upon its children, but it needs to serve the children, not the administrators trying for better jobs, and certainly not the corporations looking for a compliant labor force.” Describe how the education system is complicit in producing a “compliant labor force.”
What I’ve seen in our country, literally since George Bush, Jr got in and he did his No Child Left Behind, the focus of education has really shifted from a balanced education that had arts and sciences and had humanities, to now they are continually deemphasizing and removing those requirements and constantly increasing the math requirements and the science requirements. Those are all done because that’s what you want your workers to be good at.
Civics and humanities classes teach people to really think objectively, and by getting rid of those, they’re creating workers. They’re creating citizens that do not know how to think, that only know how to fill in the blank answer to the problem, and it’s just very rote work.
But life is so much more than that. Life is about art. Life is about expression. Life is about humanities, reading, history, all of these things. We don’t have to train kids simply to get jobs.
You went back to college two years ago for a history and anthropology degree. What did you concentrate on in your majors?
Trans issues. I did some amazing research for my anthropology senior seminar where I was exploring — how did I word it? “The ability of trans people to code switch.” Transgender people, they use linguistics. People use code switching as a term that says, you know, if you’re bilingual and you go into a situation, you can go back and forth in that conversation seamlessly. So my research was looking at how transgender people have that ability.
I can go into a group of men, and suddenly I can speak “man” with them, because I grew up doing that. I can also go into a group of women and feel just as comfortable and speak just as fluently as a woman would. That gives a trans person an enormous amount of power and influence in any social situation, because they can react appropriately depending on who’s around them, and that’s something that most people cannot do.
And then, for my history research, I was looking at trans people throughout history, like Catalina de Erauso, who was a 16th-century Basque noblewoman. She came from a good family and escaped a convent when she was 15 — turned her nun’s habit into men’s clothing, and spent the rest of her life doing amazing adventures all around the New World. She was killing, she was gambling, she was fighting, all of this as a man, and eventually she got discovered, because they arrested her and tried to execute her. And she said, “No, no, wait. I’m really a female.”
After that, she managed to get back to Spain, where she appealed to the King, who gave her a military pension that normally would only go to a man because of her service. And then she went to the Pope in Rome, who gave her dispensation to continue living the rest of her life as a man. This was over 500 years ago, and you have a very successful trans person.
Would you support mandatory national service for young people in the military, or some other form of public service of their choosing?
No, I don’t believe so. I don’t see any reason for that in our society right now.
What’s the single most important thing the world should do to address climate change?
Education. Let’s educate everybody on the dangers that climate change poses to our planet. As long as we’re bickering and fighting and avoiding the issue out of ignorance, we’re never going to get anymore.
Predictions!
I think this is going to be an amazing election cycle. We were terrified as centrists and moderates and progressives of what a second Trump term would mean, and as much as we all love and respect Joe Biden, we were getting fearful that it wasn’t going to be enough. Then obviously Kamala came out, and the energy changed, the motivation changed — everybody got so excited. There’s so much goodness in the air surrounding her. There’s more hope. There’s more possibilities with her as a candidate.
Listen, we have to root out the cancer that is MAGA, and I think it’s just going to be a landslide come November.
What’s the thing you’re most looking forward to if you’re elected to represent the constituents of Colorado Senate District 6?
Six months ago, I would not have thought I was going to be in this business. I’ll be honest with you, it just came out of the blue. But I did it because I see the things around my district that need addressing, problems that need solving, and I looked in the mirror and I said, “You know what? I have a career of solving problems. That’s what I’ve done my entire life and we can make a difference.” I’m just going to try to solve the problems.
Also, maybe just getting a license plate that says senator on it. And I don’t even know if that’s a thing, but if it is, that’s what I want.
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