The parents of a transgender teen who died by suicide earlier this year are speaking out about the toll Idaho’s anti-trans laws and the Trump administration’s anti-trans crusade took on their daughter.
“You worry about that hatred being internalized, and that’s what happened to my kid,” Elyse Thorpe told NBC News in a recent profile. “It got inside.”
Thorpe and ex-husband Joseph Pollard describe their late daughter, May Pollard, as an energetic and curious child who loved sloths, video games, and writing poetry. She just wanted to live her life and experience the same things any teen does. But she was also keenly aware of the wave of anti-trans laws and sentiment that have swept Idaho and much of the U.S. in recent years.
According to NBC News, May, who had also been diagnosed with autism, came out as trans when she was in eighth grade. She began receiving gender-affirming medical care in ninth grade. But due to Idaho’s ban on such care for minors, passed in 2022 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2024, her parents were forced to travel to Portland, Oregon, every six months to get May the care she needed. Following President Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025, Thorpe began making the 13-hour round trip by car to avoid creating a flight record amid the administration’s relentless crackdown on gender-affirming care for young people.
While the treatment improved things for May, the obstacles placed between her and the care she needed by anti-trans legislators continued to weigh on her.
Then, in July 2023, Idaho’s law banning trans students from accessing single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity took effect. Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit challenging the law on behalf of Boise High School’s Sexuality and Gender Alliance, and in July 2025, May joined the lawsuit under the pseudonym Jane Doe. In court filings, May described feeling stigmatized by being forced to use her campus’s two single-occupancy restrooms, which came to be referred to as the “trans bathrooms.”
“It is scary having to look around before to see if anyone will see me going into the single-user restroom, as I worry about people gossiping and speculating about me being transgender,” she said. “I don’t want people to know I am transgender without my consent — even students who might be friendly. For me, it is not a part of myself I talk about or that I feel is the most important part of my identity.”
Her parents told NBC News that May would avoid eating and drinking during the school day, hoping to not have to use the school’s bathrooms. “I just want to fit in,” she wrote in her affidavit in the Lambda Legal case. “It is upsetting to think that I may have to go through the rest of high school without access to something as basic as the ability to use the same restroom as everyone else.”
May’s parents say she became more troubled last fall and winter, according to NBC News. She attempted to run away to Oregon, and at least one of her poems seemed to reference self-harm. Then on the morning of January 27, Thorpe woke to find May missing from her bedroom. She later found her daughter’s body in a downstairs bedroom. May was just 16 years old.
When a detective asked her parents whether anyone might have wanted to harm May, Thorpe responded that “A lot of America” did.
“There is a huge amount of animosity, every single day, thrown at trans kids,” an angry and grieving Pollard told the detective. “The whole f**king country. The whole f**king administration, every single f**king day.”
As NBC News notes, over the last few years, Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) has signed 15 anti-LGBTQ+ laws. In April, Little signed a pair of bills, one of which made it a criminal offense for trans people to use the bathroom associated with their gender, while the other banned Pride flags on government buildings.
As for Lambda Legal’s challenge to the state’s school bathroom ban, at the time of May’s death, she was one of just two plaintiffs left in the case, as all the others had graduated high school and no longer held standing. Earlier this spring, Lambda Legal moved to dismiss the case after the final plaintiff graduated.
But Thorpe has continued to protest Idaho’s anti-trans laws. According to NBC News, she stood outside Gov. Little’s office during a March 31 protest holding a photo of her daughter.
“I wanted to support the protesters and remind everyone, including the governor,” Thorpe told the outlet, “that the stakes are real.”
“The parents go and testify, and we say, ‘Children are going to die,’” she said. “We tell the legislators that, and they dismiss it. I guess they think it’s hyperbole, or they think it’s hysteria, or they think it’s an acceptable outcome, probably some mix of those things. So I don’t understand why there is an unwillingness to connect these laws to these outcomes. It was right there from the start.”
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I watched this three times because the message is so good. The fact that the reverend of this faith can rejoice in diversity makes me wonder what hater preachers and haters get out of their faith, out of their hate? I have been listening to the book Separation of Church and Hate by John Fugelsang. He is like Dan McClellan in that he is a biblical scholar; he knows the original manuscripts, times of use for each edition, and where different translations screw things up, and Fugelsang is a comedian, so he can throw it all out there with humor. I recomend everyone try to find the book or the audio book. He has whole chapters taking on the different haters and the clobber verses of the bible. He shows what the original meaning, as far as can be known of each of those verses was, correcting the misunderstand and hate. He like me feels that Christians follow Christ, biblcians follow the bible and they get that wrong because they don’t know the subtext or original intent; they hear only what the weekend preacher said who is preaching his version of the bible, not Christ’s. Happy Pride week Halifax. Long may your flags fly. Hugs
I watched this the day it aired on the show. My gods how horrific and horrifying. The out of control settlers try to kill these people because they are recording the stealing of Palestinian lands and murdering Palestinians. If the driver had been any slower these people in the cars would have been killed. And the IDF supported the attacks on helpless people. US citizens. The Israeli government takes our taxpayer money and supports the killing of US citizens and reporters. If there is anything that says the Israelis know they are committing war crimes it is the killing of the reporters for showing their crimes. The place these attacks took place is in a zone that no Israeli is supposed to be even allowed in. Israeli is out of control and they use our taxpayer money to do it. The reason the reporter wanted to go to that spot was because a palestinian man’s son was killed and those with him hunted for 2 hours by settlers. The settlers live in the homes that the Palestinians built for themselves. Israeli settlers are nothing more than thieving thugs, and the population of Israel supports them which makes all those in Israel supporting this nothing more than thieving thugs. The people in these cars were terrified. You can hear it in the cries of the people in the car. The US ambassador supports Israel in this killing of US people. Please watch and do what you can to stop these lawless attacks against innocent people by Israeli settlers. Hugs
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Billionaire TERF influencer J.K. Rowling has announced that she will cover the legal costs of anti-trans groups named in a report by Amnesty International (UK), which called them “anti-rights.”
The report was retracted shortly after publication and replaced with a statement from the organization saying the report was uploaded “without going through the established internal review processes” and that its “language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK, which is why it was promptly removed.”
But the withdrawal and public acknowledgement was not enough to sate the organizations that have fought tooth and nail to exclude and/or antagonize the transgender community in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is notoriously more perilous for free speech than the United States. For our neighbors across the pond, the burden of proof lies with the defendant to prove the statement is true; here in the United States, the burden of proof lies with the aggrieved to prove that a statement is categorically false, and published knowingly or at least recklessly regardless. The US also benefits from “anti-SLAPP” laws to prevent such frivolous lawsuits waged by wealthy individuals or powerful corporations against those who criticize them.
So Rowling capitalized on the spectacle to, in essence, help dozens of groups in what appears to be an attempt to sue Amnesty into oblivion.
CAPTION: Screenshot from Rowling’s Twitter, where she offers “women’s organizations” backing to sue Amnesty International (UK) through her own charitable fund. She quote tweets a group of people who self-identify as “trans widows”—referring to cisgender people whose spouses or ex-spouses came out as transgender.
The saga began earlier this month, when Amnesty International (UK) released a report titled “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.” It released a similar report last year, but this year, it added a new category for what appears to be the anti-rights movement’s most rapidly growing sector: “Gender critical” groups, or groups that are antithetical to transgender rights and inclusion.
Rowling rushed to tweet about the situation.
CAPTION: Rowling tweets a group’s response to Amnesty International (UK)’s report on “anti-rights” groups.
She lauded “LGB” groups—another anti-trans buzzword, which, as the name suggests, describes groups that wish to erase transgender people from the queer liberation movement—like the Gay Men’s Network, an organization that has pushed for anti-trans policies. That group posted a public letter indicating it might sue Amnesty International for defamation. The Network demanded a retraction of the report and then claimed that Amnesty is guilty of “trying to control gay and lesbian free speech.”
In the day or so that followed, Rowling retweeted around a dozen similar letters. The posted letters include groups like Genspect, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that threatened Amnesty International with legal action, as well as groups like LGB Alliance and Sex Matters.
Amnesty International (UK) did not formally reply to a request for comment for this piece.
Gender critical activists, often financed by Rowling, rely on legal “guerilla warfare” said one U.K.-based trans rights organizer, who could only speak to Erin in the Morning if granted anonymity. The tactic is familiar: Wear down non-profits and individuals who dare speak out against anti-trans and anti-rights groups. They don’t have to win a lawsuit; they can just file again, and again, and again, draining valuable time and resources.
“They have sued organizations into the ground,” the advocate said.
Some context for just a handful of these groups so up in arms about being labeled as hateful: Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy for Sex Matters, gave a speech at a Genspect conference (both are groups on the anti-rights list) about how “beauty” is “inimical to trans bullshit.
She also boasted about manufacturing a moral and medical panic about how, although only a “small” segment of trans kids are prescribed puberty blockers, it has been a strategic “rhetorical device” to erode the rights of transgender people more broadly.
Depending on who you ask, TERFs are considered either a self-branded liberal faction of gender critical ideology, or a different term for what is essentially the same movement. TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” a term to describe self-proclaimed “feminists” who oppose giving transgender women and cisgender women equal rights.
Many of these TERF or “gender critical” groups have close ties to far-right Christian groups. DonorsTrust, the conservative donor behemoth and primary financier of initiatives like Project 2025, also forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups like the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and Thoughtful Therapists, both of whom made the “anti-rights” list because, as Amnesty International (UK) among many others have put it, they promote “conversion practices.”
One major point of contention was the inclusion of Rowling’s own organization, Beira’s Place. It does not primarily seem to function as any sort of advocacy organization. Rather, it’s a women’s shelter for those fleeing domestic violence, but it also has an explicit anti-trans policy, banning transgender women from accessing its services.
However, as the report explained, none of these groups exist in a vacuum. “These entities must be understood as an ecosystem sharing values, goals, strategy and tactics and, for some of them, formal collaboration,” it reads.
Amnesty isn’t the first or last institution or expert to call out gender critical ideology for being anti-rights. UN Women has published materials saying as much.
Meanwhile, University of Sheffield sociologist Dr. Sally Hines has called this framework “deeply conservative.” In the Journal for Gender Studies, she writes that “despite its origins within a branch of radical feminism, [gender-critical ideology] has a profoundly misogynist agenda that stands opposed to the rights of women.” It is a “key force within a current conservative pushback against the rights of women and minoritized sexual groups.”
Gender critical activists continue to use the language of oppression to characterize their plight. Many say “TERF” is a slur. Others believe criticizing a group because of its arguably regressive politics is grounds for a lawsuit.
Despite the fact that the report was pulled down, Erin in the Morning was able to retrieve a copy reposted by an anti-trans news outlet. You can read a full version of that archived version below.
Report A Growing Threat The Anti Rights Movement In The Uk July 2026
I watched this on one of the sunday news shows. From the way he describes it the event was very scary and he was afraid. The settlers were damaging the vehicles. Pointing machine guns at the congressman. The IDF soldiers that were there said they agreed with the settlers and wouldn’t get involved. This is an official of the US government. Think of what would be the outcry from Israel if the situation had been reversed. I want all funds for the israeli military stopped until they apologize at the highest level for this and promise it won’t ever happen again. Hugs
Please notice the brutality towards the ones they detail and those bystanders. They assault the people recording them and they threaten them with more violence and arrests. To the ICE no one has rights. How long will we tolerate this lawless militia type behavior towards the people? No law enforcement would get away with this. They do it because they are masked and Stephen Miller will do anything to protect the ICE thugs doing his dream of a country of only white people who follow every order of the authoritarian government. Warning it is a hard video to watch. But we must. Hugs
Again more information is coming out. Details that give credit to Platner’s side of the story. The news doesn’t excuse him, but it sets up why he was at her house and why he was touching her. Again the media has a bias and it is being reported with that bias totally one sided. This report says he was wasted out of his mind black out drunk but again no proof of that. Was the woman here drinking also like the first woman was? I think Saagar is trying too hard to brand Platner, again we need more facts. As he said the woman is accusing Platner of a serious felony and now we need to see if this is going to be a trial in the media which is a slander hit job or a trial in court. The question I have is more going to come out. I like that on morning Joe the host asks for colaberating evedince. She asks what do you have to show him raping the victim? Again if he did it he needs to pay for his crime, I just don’t like how it is coming out, being played up in media, and the timing. Again the reporter admits he can’t produce any evidence. The therapist did not verify that it happened, yet that was reported. The very account I had heard about the exchange between the therapist and the victim has been proven out, it was not about the assault or at the time or the assault. The therapist said she did not recall the victim’s account of the assault but said she vaguely supports women who say they are assaulted. Therrapest keep notes, mine always have so why did she blank on the case details. This is looking a media hit job to drive a progressive candidate out of politics. Hugs
NOTE: Politico’s response to Breaking Points and Drop Site News on the gaps in reporting follows: “This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews and reflects our editorial standards. In interviews with us and in accounts she gave to other outlets, Jenny Racicot said that she told Graham Platner not to come to her home and that he nevertheless showed up there uninvited. POLITICO gave Platner and his campaign ample opportunity to respond to our reporting and to provide any information or documentation they believed contradicted it. If presented with information that materially challenges our reporting, we will report it.” Ryan and Saagar discuss exclusive reporting on key details missing from the Graham Platner story.
I love how the Rev. talks about the remarkable strength of trans people for just trying to live as who they really are, not as who some on the right want them to be. He sees trans people for the people they are. He is realistic about the circumstances for them and others in their lives. Hugs
John Russell (He/Him)July 20, 2026, 1:00 pm EDT
Scottie's Playtime 
