Before she took her life, May Pollard was a trans girl living in a torture box devised by the Republican party of Idaho. As reported by Jo Yurcaba in this devastating piece for NBC, the young plaintiff whose death brought an end to the legal challenge to Idaho’s bathroom ban died in January at the age of 16. Pollard had friends who cared and worried about her and wanted her to live. But Idaho Republicans worked tirelessly to ensure that she was not allowed a single day of peace.
Pollard wrote poetry and planned to study psychology at community college. She took care with her appearance, developing a style her family described as goth cottagecore. She played video games with friends online. She was, in other words, a perfectly normal teenage girl. But unlike other girls the stresses and strains of adolescence were dwarfed by the malign influence of politicians who began to dictate every waking moment of her life.
In 2023, Idaho passed a law banning transgender students from using restrooms appropriate to the gender in which they lived. Pollard would have been about 13 then. Going by the timeline sketched out in Yurcaba’s story, the bathroom ban came into effect around the same time Pollard was coming out to her supportive parents, Joseph and Elyse, who are divorced. She lived her whole life as a trans girl under the bathroom ban, and under the Supreme Court validated ban on gender-affirming care, which required her mother to drive her 13 hours round trip twice a year to access the medical treatment her family and doctors felt she needed, care her mother told Yurcaba had brightened her and gave her some reprieve from the suicidal thoughts she had been struggling with.
The reprieve affirming care offered was not enough. As a trans girl in an Idaho school Pollard would never know a day without fear. According to NBC. she stopped eating or drinking anything during the school day because her only options to relieve herself would have outed her as trans.
“I worry about people gossiping and speculating about me being transgender,” she wrote in an affidavit to the court. “I have heard students refer to the single restroom in the main gym building as the “trans bathroom.”
The NBC story contains the caveats any responsible reporting must contain. Suicide is complex, and no single event or factor can be definitively said to be its cause. Simply being forced by political malevolence to live inside a torture box with escape can’t possibly be said to have caused this teenager girl to see death as preferable to remaining trapped. Maybe we should blame it on the rain.
We know May Pollard’s story because she was the plaintiff in a lawsuit that was withdrawn because there were no longer enough trans children left in Idaho public schools for lawyers to defend. Her story took two months to make it to the public, and if it were not for Yurcaba it may have gone untold. Even as “the trans debate” dominates national politics, somehow the consequences of anti-trans legislation on trans people’s lives have barely merited media attention at all.
There are untold teenagers in Pollard’s position, desperately trying to persevere even as the full weight of their government attempts to break them and drive them to despair. There are even more teenagers whose families have been poisoned by propaganda, unable to love their children as they are. How many teenagers like Pollard have taken their lives without the media taking any note at all? How many teenage girls like Pollard have had their deaths recorded as the death of a boy, laid to rest in suits and ties by families whose ideological poisoning closed off any hope of their being seen and loved for who they really were?
In 2024 Nature published a study showing that anti-trans legislation increases suicide attempts among trans youth, and still there’s been no hesitation, no sign of turning back. These laws are coming for our kids, seeking to destroy them for reasons of ideological rigidity and political gain. As we mourn Pollard, seven months late and with a name we only know by luck, the trans community also mourns the many trans girls like her whose names we’ll never know.
