Parents say Idaho’s Republican-led anti-trans laws isolated their daughter before her death

An Idaho transgender teenager who challenged the state’s school bathroom law died by suicide earlier this year, and her family says the relentless expansion of anti-transgender laws made her daily life increasingly isolating, according to NBC News.May Pollard was 16 when she died in January. Before her death, she had been identified as Jane Doe in a federal lawsuit challenging Idaho’s 2023 law requiring public schools to separate bathrooms, locker rooms and overnight accommodations based on students’ sex assigned at birth.NBC News reported that Pollard’s parents believe Idaho’s political climate shaped nearly every part of their daughter’s adolescence, from where she could use the restroom at school to whether she could obtain gender-affirming medical care in her home state.Related: Lawsuit challenging Idaho’s bathroom bill dismissed after student plaintiff dies by suicide“There is a huge amount of animosity, every single day, thrown at trans kids,” her father, Joseph Pollard, told a police detective after her death, according to NBC News. “The whole f***ing country. The whole f***ing administration, every single f***ing day.”Pollard told her father while she was in ninth grade that she was having suicidal thoughts and needed to transition, her family told NBC News. Her parents eventually took her to Oregon for gender-affirming care after receiving a referral from their pediatrician and spending months on a waiting list.At school, Pollard could use a restroom in the nurse’s office or another building across campus instead of the facilities used by her classmates. In an affidavit filed in the lawsuit, she described those options as alienating.“While I am transgender, I don’t view it as the defining feature of who I am as a person,” Pollard wrote. “I just want to fit in. 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