On Sunday, April 6, the Office of the Chaplain and the Gender Sexuality Center (GSC) hosted its second annual Transgender Day of Visibility service. The hourlong service was centered around the theme of trans joy, and the event sought to celebrate the lives and role of the transgender community. 

“I think our hope was just to bring people together in celebrating transness,” said Em Malecki ’29, a GSC intern who helped plan the service. 

The service featured speakers from Carleton and the broader Northfield and Minnesota community for performances and speeches. To find a keynote speaker, the chapel turned to Prism, an interfaith coalition for LGBTQ rights in Minnesota.

 “We were given a few names of speakers [by Prism] and asked what we were looking for,” said Theo Borowski ’25, fifth year educational associate at the Chapel and Division of Inclusion, Equity and Community (IEC). “And we just emphasized that as an interfaith chapel and in partnership with the GSC, spirituality was definitely welcome, but not required for insight in the speech that was going to be given, and the main thing we wanted was to focus on the theme of trans joy.”

Malecki and Borowski explained how the student-led service was open to all, and that they wanted to bring various trans perspectives to the event.

“It went from really playful and energetic with the drag performance, and then really personal with the keynote speaker, and then beautiful and hopeful, but also peaceful and almost somber with the musical performance by Kaya [Shin-Sherman],” said Borowski. “I thought [there] was a really great breadth of experience shown in the program.”

In their keynote address, Cascade Stoll, a Minnesota-based trans activist, shared their experience growing up as transgender and their struggle to accept their identity. They expressed hope that trans people everywhere could find and love their most authentic selves.

“I think the queer community is just such a force to be reckoned with. Walking into a room full of queer people is just so magical,” said Stoll. “There’s something so beautiful and unique about queer people coming together and saying, ‘we’re safe here, we love each other, we’re gonna be okay.’”

Much of Stoll’s speech was a personal meditation on their own trans journey.“A lot of [my speech] came from a very personal place. “So a lot of [my speech] was just me trying to find for myself those bright spots or those things that the trans experience has to offer,” Stoll said.

In the face of legal challenges threatening trans people’s expression and rights to gender affirming care, event attendees found hope in the program.

“I recently came out as trans. It’s been an overall great experience; my friends have all been really supportive,” said Emmy Coyle ’26. “I thought [this] was like the perfect event to celebrate all the trans joy I was feeling.”

The service was advertised by the GSC and the Chapel. “We tried a lot of different new advertising strategies. We partnered with Prism and Northfield Pride to get the word out beyond Carleton,” said Borowski. “We also partnered with our chaplains since the Muslim chaplain and the Rabbi both worked at St. Olaf as well, so they used their networks there to broadcast to St. Olaf.”

Carleton’s GSC also connected with the community through their staff. “[Working with local organizations] was mainly coordinated by my boss Jonathan Gonzales, [who is] part of Northfield’s Pride organization, and they were great at communicating [with] and being a liaison to the community,” said Malecki.

Sunday was the annual service’s second gathering, and the organizers said they are proud of their progress since last year and eagerly anticipate next year’s event.

“I think we involved people from the community more,” said Borowski. “We’ve never had a keynote speaker before, and last time, we had a student drag performance, which was awesome but I think it was really cool to involve some of the Northfield community and broader community members to help people branch outside of the Carleton bubble.”

As a first-year, Malecki’s hope for the future is clear: “I hope that we get to do this in, you know, many years in the many years to come, that I hope to be a part of planning it.”