In the wake of her death, I’m calling on advocates and allies to speak up for the trans community.
[Content Warning: This blog post discusses suicide.]
By Elyse Thorpe
My daughter loved sloths, black-razzberry La Croix, and olives. Her cosplay character was Noelle Holiday from Deltarune. Her favorite holiday was Christmas.
She chose her favorite soft pink t-shirt to die in.
My transgender daughter May died by suicide in January of 2026. She was 16, just a few weeks short of her 17th birthday, and she was done with the cruelty of the world. She had the love and support of her father, mother, and brother. But it just wasn’t enough.
May wanted the happy, carefree childhood that every child wants, or to at least have no more than the usual cares of school and chores and relationships. Instead, she spent the last years of her life fighting — fighting for access to health care, fighting for access to safe bathrooms, fighting to be treated with dignity. It’s hard to convey the great cost of that fight to a person, especially a child, and their family.
Though she was extremely sensitive to the injustices of the world, she would have much preferred to just be a kid than to be a warrior. Instead, her trans identity put her body in the political crossfire of health care and bathroom bans in our state. She fought back through her participation in the Lambda Legal lawsuit challenging the Idaho’s K-12 bathroom ban, sharing with the courts what it’s like to have a most basic human need treated like a crime.
It’s so hard to protect your child from a world that looks at them and does not see anything of value. My smart, funny, kind kid didn’t want to wait around to see what rights she would lose next. My overwhelming grief is tightly intertwined with anger at a state and a country that made her life, already complicated by her medical needs, harder and lonelier than it needed to be.
We are well into the stage of persecution where silence is complicity. Children like my daughter need their advocates to be pervasive, especially in education and health care, and they need those advocates to be highly visible and extremely vocal. And it cannot just be the LGBTQ community and their loved ones, because they, and we, are exhausted.
A flag or a pin or a sticker of solidarity is appreciated, but not enough. Allies need to remember that the pin or flag or sticker they show as a sign of safety to others is also a pledge to themselves to be vocal and vigilant against any conversations around trans children that are not firmly grounded in an understanding that the safety and dignity of all children comes first. The fear of making adults uncomfortable cannot be greater than the safety and dignity of trans children.
What gives me hope is that we live in a great age of storytelling. Never before in history have we had so much access to the experiences of so many people traveling many different roads through this life. It’s glorious.
Stories, with their antibodies of empathy, are the great inoculator against disinformation. It’s only a matter of time before we reach herd immunity against ignorance and hatred, which may linger but will have no power to spread.
Those who can offer financial support to the legal aid and community aid organizations working to support trans adults and kids are cherished. Those who can offer their time and energy to those organizations and their enterprises are beloved. But we all can offer our attention to the stories of trans people, whether they are shared through memoir, fiction, comic and graphic art, theater, TV, film, visual arts, or simply creating social media content.
My daughter didn’t live long enough to tell her whole story herself. Now, her family and friends share her story in the hope that we can create a world that would have welcomed May with open arms.
If you are struggling and need help, know that there is a community waiting for you with open arms. You are not alone.
The Trevor Project — 866-488-7386
LGBT National Help Center (Youth Talkline) — 800-246-7743
Trans Lifeline — 877-565-8860