Emme, a transgender high school student, first started struggling with her gender identity when she was around 11 or 12 years old, she says. When she started going through puberty and her body began changing physically, she realized quickly she was unhappy, and took time to figure out what she needed and wanted to feel better. After coming out to her mother and father, she says they had a lot of questions and had to do their own emotional work about her decisions, but that they were also consistently supportive of her. While she’s grateful for the love and “fierce advocacy” she says her family has provided her, she also says that being young and transgender can be “painfully lonely.”

“In my first years of transition, when people around me knew I was trans because I was visibly trans, I experienced deep discomfort in nearly every situation,” she told Teen Vogue, adding that, “There is an ever-present discordance between the internal conception and external perception, feeling of insufficiency when you try and eventually fail to make the two match. I stopped using the bathroom at school or any other public place, stopped going to gym class, and eventually to the rest of my classes too.”

And research and stories surrounding transgender people’s ability to exist safely in public spaces like schools and specifically bathrooms, is not solely a problem for Emme — in fact, it’s a nationwide issue. That’s why a new back to school season campaign from GLSEN and MAP (Movement Advancement Project) is focusing on telling the stories of young transgender people and highlighting the need for trans youth to have the same access to school facilities as their cisgender peers.

The campaign, which includes a PSA video as well as infographics and a helpful toolkit that give people the facts they need to know about issues that young trans students deal with, highlights that 65% of transgender students in America are harassed at school because of their gender expression, according to the 2015 National School Climate survey. Additionally, about 70% of transgender students responded that they avoid bathrooms at school because they feel unsafe and uncomfortable.

The PSA, titled “Hallway” shows some of the harassment that transgender students face on a daily basis for simply trying to use the restroom at school. In the PSA, Emme is shown trying to enter the women’s restroom and being blocked by a group of students who bully her. She speaks about her experiences as a young trans woman, and asks people to commit to protecting trans students during the new school year, adding that all transgender students want is to experience school and graduate the same way everyone else does. The ad is meant to specifically target the 15 most high-risk policy states where anti-LGBTQ legislation has been proposed or existing supportive legislation is under attack might pop up within the next school year. The 15 state include Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.

Ultimately, the campaign aims to draw attention to how urgently laws and policies are needed to ensure that young transgender people can fully participate in school. According to a statement from MAP and GLSEN, dozens of pieces of legislation have been proposed in dozens of states in the last several years, wich, according to the organization, can potentially deny young transgender people the right to safe spaces in school and using the name and pronouns of their choosing, while these same states allow LGBTQ students to be subjected to conversion therapy. According to the Human Rights Campaign’s equality index, 2017 alone saw at least 100 anti-LGBTQ bills in 29 states, with many of them being specifically anti-trans.