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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*** Personal note*** I ran out of steam early yesterday. I only went back to bed for an hour in the morning, but by 3:30 pm, between the pain and being so tired I went to bed before 4 pm. I got up about 5:30 am. Hugs
Russia began the campaign against LGBTQ+ people by first targeting trans people as a threat to children. Then once the people got used to that line they claimed that any mention of non-cis non-straight way of living was sexualizing kids and so a threat to them. Mentioning or showing a gay person was equated with showing a kid hardcore porn. Fully nude bodies. It worked in their society. That is the play book the right wing haters / Christian nationalists have used against trans people here. How soon until they try to go the entire way to force the entire country / society to be straight and cis and that Christianity be the national religion enforced by white men who force those around them to follow their personal church doctrines. But what these nut jobs really want and understand is removing all mention and signs of being not cis or straight won’t stop LGBTQ+ people from existing. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, questioning / queer / nonbinary, and all others not straight or cis are born to straight cis parents. What these outstanding moral Christians like Congress person Randy Fine from Florida want is that non-straight and non-cis kids be harassed and assaulted like when he was in school making them afraid to come out or be themselves publicly. In other words these haters want the facade of a straight cis country such as when one of the presidents of Iran said they did not have any gay people in his country ignoring a well know community that was there. They want anyone not like them to be afraid to live their lives in case they are discovered. They think that will please their god. The god who they believe created all people also created the LGBTQ+ ones as well. They think that the all knowing god will not know people are faking it due to fear and that they will be rewarded for causing that fear in the LGBTQ+ community. Very Christian of them. Hugs
The designation could mean anybody associated with the group risks years behind bars for supporting an extremist organization — akin to terrorism charges under the nation’s criminal code.
A gay rights activist wearing a headpiece walks ahead of a squad of gay rights activists, during a traditional May Day rally in St.Petersburg, Russia, Thursday, May 1, 2014. The poster reads : ‘Love is stronger than war!’ (AP Photo, File)
A Russian court on Monday labelled the country’s top LGBTQ rights group as “extremist,” effectively outlawing the organization and paving the way to prosecute its supporters.
Russia has for years targeted LGBTQ organizations but has become even more hostile since launching its full-scale assault of Ukraine in 2022, massively accelerating the country’s hardline conservative turn.
On Monday, a court in St. Petersburg ruled in favor of a case brought by the Russian justice ministry to brand the Russian LGBT Network — a top LGBTQ rights nonprofit — “extremist.”
“The public movement has been designated as an extremist organization, and its activities are banned in Russia,” the court’s press service said on Telegram.
The hearing was held behind closed doors.
The designation could mean anybody associated with the group risks years behind bars for supporting an extremist organization — akin to terrorism charges under Russia’s criminal code.
Amnesty International in February slammed the justice ministry’s move to seek the label.
“This move reflects a deliberate strategy by the Kremlin to legitimize and weaponize homophobia in its assault on dissent and equality,” said Marie Struthers, Amnesty International’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia director.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has for years denounced anything that goes against what he calls “traditional family values” as un-Russian and influenced by the West.
In 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court banned what it called the “international social LGBT movement” as an “extremist organisation”.
As part of the crackdown, Russia has in recent years targeted LGBTQ clubs and bars, raiding them and arresting owners.
Courts have also issued fines and short-term jail sentences to people displaying LGBTQ “symbols,” such as clothes, jewelry or posters featuring the rainbow flag.
The idea behind these laws seems to be if they can hide that LGBTQ+ people / kids exist they can prevent the acceptance and tolerance of LGBTQ+ kids / people. In the minds of the haters who write these bills hopefully that will force people who are not straight or cis to stay hidden from society. They are desperate to return to the 1950s when LGBTQ+ people had to stay hidden or risk losing everything they had, their job, housing, and friends. They are pathetic in their need for everyone to be the same as they are, feel the same as they do, and to live as they do. Why I did not know or understand. The irrational hate for LGBTQ+ kids is really weird. That they would rather have kids hurt, harmed, assaulted, ostracized, and possibly driven to suicide rather than give them acceptance or simply tolerance. I don’t undestand what their gain is in this? Hugs
The appeals court vacated two separate injunctions against the law, but advocates promise to keep fighting.
John Russell (He/Him)April 7, 2026, 1:00 pm EDT· Updated on April 8, 2026
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has ruled that Iowa can enforce a 2023 law restricting classroom instruction on LGBTQ+ topics and access to certain books while legal challenges against the law proceed.
On Monday, the three-judge panel overturned injunctions previously issued by lower courts in two separate lawsuits challenging aspects of the Senate File 496, according to the Associated Press and The Des Moines Register.
Passed by the Iowa state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds in 2023, the law prohibits “any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion, or instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation” in kindergarten through sixth grade. It also bans materials featuring “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” from school libraries and classrooms — a provision which critics say is intended to ban books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes.
The law went into effect on July 1, 2023. The following November, the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal sued the state on behalf of LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Iowa Safe Schools and seven students and their families, challenging SF 496’s classroom instruction ban.
Last May, a federal judge issued a split decision, upholding the law’s ban on discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in K–6 classrooms, but blocking its ban on school “promotions” and “programs” that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher also blocked a provision of the law banning schools from providing “accommodation that is intended to affirm the student’s gender identity” without notifying their parents, writing that S.F. 496 was impermissibly vague about what constitutes an “accommodation.”
Writing for the Eighth Circuit on Monday, Judge Ralph Erickson held that the state’s interpretation of the law as requiring school “programs” and “promotions” to only encompass curricular activities does not violate the U.S. Constitution. However, the court did not address whether it is constitutionally permissible for the state to ban specific groups and extracurricular programs, such as Gender & Sexuality Alliance groups, because the Iowa Safe Schools lawsuit did not challenge specific applications of the law, according to the Register.
The court also disagreed with Judge Locher’s ruling that the law’s language around “accommodations” was too vague, restoring S.F. 496’s ban on schools accommodating students’ gender identities without outing them to their parents.
In a separate November 2023 lawsuit, the Iowa State Education Association was joined by publisher Penguin Random House and several prominent authors of banned books in a challenge to S.F. 496’s book-banning provision. Last March, Judge Locher sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a preliminary injunction preventing schools from removing books it considers “obscene” from classrooms and libraries.
Again, writing for the Eighth Circuit in a separate decision Monday, Judge Erickson disagreed w ith Locher’s ruling that school library books are not part a school’s curriculum. Erickson wrote that a school’s library catalogue constitutes government speech and can be restricted by state law, according to the Register.
The decisions on both cases send them back to the district court. But as the Register notes, the Eighth Circuit indicated in both rulings that the plaintiffs could not show a “likelihood of success on the merits” in their challenges to S.F. 496.
At the same time, in a joint press release the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal noted that the rulings narrow “where and how the law may be applied.”
“The prohibition regarding sexual orientation and so-called gender theory applies only to specific, mandatory instruction on these topics during class time. The law, as currently interpreted, does not require schools to prohibit student expression of LGBTQ+ identity nor does it limit the sponsorship or promotion of GSAs,” ACLU of Iowa Senior Staff Attorney Thomas Story said.
“The court’s interpretation of the provision on banning books is that it applies only to those that specifically describe or depict one of those sex acts defined in Iowa’s criminal law. And with the forced outing provision, a report would be made to parents or guardians only if a student specifically requests a school accommodation for the stated purpose of affirming a gender identity different from their registration forms,” Story added.
In a statement responding to the court’s decision, Iowa State Education Association president Joshua Brown told the Register that the case was “about much more than legal technicalities.”
“It is about protecting the freedom of speech and the right to share ideas — values guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Brown said. “Our schools should be safe spaces where students are free to learn, teachers can use their professional expertise without fear, and families can trust that education is based on open inquiry rather than government censorship.”
A spokesperson for Penguin Random House indicated in a statement to the Register that the company intends to keep fighting against S.F. 496. Similarly, Lambda Legal Senior Attorney Nathan Maxwell called the ruling “a setback,” but noted that “it is not the end of this fight.”
“Iowa’s SF 496 is a cruel and unconstitutional law that silences LGBTQ+ children, erases their existence from classrooms, and forces educators to expose vulnerable students to potential harm at home,” Maxwell said in a statement. “We will continue to use every legal tool available to protect these young people. They deserve nothing less.”
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John Russell (He/Him)July 20, 2026, 1:00 pm EDT
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Scottie's Playtime 