By Kaeley Harms,
This week, while enjoying my vacation with my family, I made the unfortunate decision to mindlessly scroll through my social media feed. I think it took all of 10 seconds before the eerily all-knowing algorithm dropped a headline in front of me that almost made me spit out my coffee:
An NBC exclusive: “Idaho pushed anti-trans laws for years. Then a teen died.”
Then came the sub-headline, which essentially functioned as the thesis of the piece: “The life and death of May Pollard, 16, provides a window into the tragic effect that legislation and political rhetoric have had on trans people in America.”
What followed was an emotionally evocative article about a teenage boy from Idaho who found himself caught between his own personal desires and Idaho’s legal restrictions. He identified as a girl named May and wanted to take synthetic estrogen and use the girls’ locker room at his high school. Idaho law wouldn’t allow either.
According to the article, that disenfranchisement is what ultimately led to his suicide, and if we want to keep more kids from dying, we need to strip the restrictions around boys in girls’ locker rooms, girls’ sports, and hormone access. We need to play along. Tell them they’re girls when they’re not. That, apparently, is the only loving option, the only way to keep these kids alive.
A child is dead. I’m not going to pretend that’s not the point, even as I pick apart how his death got used.
Now I made peace with the reality that the golden age of journalism, where writers knew their primary job was objectivity, not activism, exists only in the distant past. One need only watch the two-year span of wildly politicized COVID headlines emerging from the New York Times to see this fully on display.
Still, a gal can hope for a little fairness instead of puppeteering. This headline irritated me on two fronts. First, as an Idahoan, I’ve grown accustomed to the mainstream media treating us like backwards rednecks whose gun collections outnumber our IQ points. Second, as a women’s rights advocate, I’ve spent the better part of a decade fighting for the very legislation I’m now being told is responsible for the literal deaths of children.
I stopped saving the screenshots calling me an “accessory to murder” a while ago, along with the ones telling me I have blood on my hands. I can assure you neither is true. I also understand persuasive writing, because I do a lot of it myself, which is exactly why I don’t try to pass my work off as investigative journalism. My goal is persuasion, and I’m honest about that. My work belongs in the op-ed section. So does the writing in this piece about the kid who died in Idaho. So, let’s do a deep dive, writer to writer, on why.
Start with the headline. The writer, who uses they/them pronouns herself, has already decided causation before a single fact is on the page. It’s Idaho’s laws that killed this child. It’s bigotry. That’s the story, full stop.
Then comes the sympathy preload. The piece opens with a detective asking May’s parents whether anyone wanted to hurt him, and his mother answering, “A lot of America.” Then his father, voice rising, saying the whole country and the whole administration had it in for his kid, every single day. We’re introduced to grief and rage before we’re given a single fact about the actual laws in question. By the time the substance shows up, you’re already reading through the lens of a murder that didn’t happen. You’re grieving and angry with May’s parents, and you’re fully onboard to join them in furiously opposing a shared enemy before you know a single thing about what that enemy actually did.
Then the word choices. Idaho’s laws get called “draconian” and an “aggressive testing ground.” “Draconian” is hardly a neutral word. It means “excessively harsh and severe.” But according to whom? Is it excessively harsh and severe to require the people with the penises to use the bathrooms with the urinals? It’s excessively harsh to say, “Hold the phone. We should probably do some long-term studies before we pump your body full of hormones that can give you the brittle bones of an 80-year-old by the time you’re 25?” Really?
The phrase “anti-trans” gets applied repeatedly to a handful of separate, distinct policies, laws about locker rooms, laws about sports, laws about hormones, until they all blur into one category with the same negative moral weight. We read at length about a kid who limited his own fluid intake so he wouldn’t have to use the boys’ restroom. Not one sentence is spent on the countless girls across the country, many of them survivors of sexual abuse, who have done the exact same thing to avoid locker rooms where teenage boys now have free rein.
Then we should pay attention to the airtime. As I often tell my friends, if you really want to know whose opinion a journalist favors, pay attention to who gets the first and last word in their article. This piece is no different. The deceased boy’s family and advocacy voices get the first word and the last word, along with all the emotionally loaded language in between. The opposing view gets one sterile, clinical quote from an attorney general who comes across as distant and a little unconcerned.
There’s no attempt to represent the substance of the actual policy debate, no mention of the medical establishment’s own concerns about pediatric transition, no mention of the fairness questions in girls’ sports. Apparently, it couldn’t be that there are real, substantive arguments against handing cross-sex hormones to kids. It couldn’t be that the research increasingly cuts against these interventions, or that a growing number of de-transitioners are suing the doctors who treated them, saying the treatment didn’t save their life, it ruined it.
It’s genuinely reckless to use a platform the size of NBC’s to insist that kids will die without these drugs and never once stop to explain why serious people have real reservations.
England spent four years and eight systematic reviews finding the evidence for pediatric gender medicine too weak to build medical decisions on. Sweden and Finland reviewed it and agreed. The WHO called it “limited and variable” and still hasn’t issued guidelines for treating minors because of it. And in 2024, WPATH’s own leaked internal chats showed its clinicians privately wondering whether a kid who hasn’t had biology class yet can actually consent to any of this. That’s the group that writes the rulebook every gender clinic in the country follows.
None of that made the piece. Not one sentence. Instead, readers are expected to accept its framing without stopping to consider what else might have contributed to the decline of an already vulnerable teenager.
The article names the reality that May was autistic but failed to mention that autistic teens are disproportionately represented among kids susceptible to gender confusion, a pattern Abigail Shrier has written about at length.
No curiosity about whether SSRIs and synthetic estrogen are a good match for a teenage boy’s developing body. No interest in the suggestibility of the internet, or social contagion, or what teenage boys are being exposed to online that didn’t exist for any generation before them. No mention that Idaho’s teen suicide rate is already roughly double the national average for 15-19-year-olds, independent of any of this. No wondering at all what might have happened if, when this poor kid told his parents he wanted to be a girl, they had simply responded with, “I love you, but that’s not possible. Let’s help you make peace with the reality of your sex.” Any one of those threads might complicate the tidy version of the story. So, none of them get pulled.
I don’t take any pleasure in picking apart the reporting on a dead kid. I have kids of my own. I know what it is to love them so much it terrifies you, and I can’t imagine the particular Hell of finding your child gone. Whatever else is true about how this story got framed, that family’s grief is real, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise or scoring points off it.
But compassion for a grieving family and honesty about what actually happened aren’t in competition. They’re actually the same obligation. If we sincerely want fewer kids to die, we have to be willing to look at the whole picture: the mental health comorbidities, the autism, the internet, the medications, the lack of long-term evidence behind the treatments we’re told are lifesaving. Circumventing all that work to arrive at the conclusion that “the anti-trans legislature did this” is wrong.
When a major news outlet tells the public, explicitly or implicitly, that common-sense laws protecting women’s spaces or urging caution before medically transitioning children are what killed this teenager, it is weaponizing a child’s suicide to morally blackmail the public. The message is unmistakable: “Agree with us, or children will die, and their blood is on your hands.”
No, it is absolutely not.
Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.
