Trump ends funding for LGBTQ youth option on national suicide hotline
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A part of a US national suicide prevention hotline that caters for LGBTQ young people says it will soon close, after the Trump administration cut its funding.
The administration has accused the service of “radical gender ideology”.
It says it will still fund the wider 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline – of which the LGBTQ youth option is one part – and that all callers will receive “compassion and help”.
The Trevor Project, an organisation that helped to run the LGBTQ option, said the decision would have a harmful impact on vulnerable young people.
“Suicide prevention is about people, not politics,” said Jaymes Black, the organisation’s CEO. He said his service had been told to close within 30 days.
“The administration’s decision to remove a bipartisan, evidence-based service that has effectively supported a high-risk group of young people through their darkest moments is incomprehensible,” Mr Black added.
The decision comes during international Pride Month, which celebrates LGBTQ culture and history.
The news also arrived ahead of a US Supreme Court decision on Tuesday that upheld the state of Tennessee’s ban on transition-related healthcare for minors who identify as transgender.
The general 988 Lifeline offers free mental health support via call, text, or chat. It is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a subsidiary of the US Health and Human Services Agency (HHS).
Currently, LGBTQ young people can select option 3 from a call menu in order to connect with counsellors.
After the changes, the remaining 988 Lifeline services would “focus on serving all help seekers”, including those who previously chose to access LGBTQ youth services, SAMHSA said.
But the hotline would “no longer silo LGB+ youth services”, SAMHSA wrote in a statement, omitting the “T” and “Q” that refers to transgender and queer people in the LGBTQ acronym.
Officials at HHS proposed cutting the 988 Lifeline’s LGBTQ youth services last week.
In a statement to NBC News at the time, an HHS spokesperson described the option as a “chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by ‘counselors’ without consent or knowledge of their parents”.
Legislation passed in 2020 by the US Congress required the 988 Lifeline to provide services and staff specifically for LGBTQ people as well as other at-risk groups like rural and Native Americans.
The legislation noted that LGBTQ youth were “more than 4 times more likely to contemplate suicide than their peers, with 1 in 5 LGBTQ youth and more than 1 in 3 transgender youth reporting attempting suicide”.
The law received bipartisan support – including from Donald Trump, who was then serving his first presidential term, and signed the bill into law.
According to the 988 Lifeline website, LGBTQ communities are “disproportionately at risk for suicide and other mental health struggles due to historic and ongoing structural violence.”
The Trevor Project began providing its services through the 988 Lifeline in 2022. In 2024, it served more than 231,000 crisis contacts, the organisation said in a statement. It says it will continue to provide its own independent services.
The decision to eliminate the 988 Lifeline’s designated LGBTQ youth option comes amid Trump’s push to curtail services, support, and access for transgender people across the federal government.
He has pushed to end diversity, equity, and inclusion policies (DEI) within the federal government, arguing that such programmes are themselves discriminatory.
The president has also ordered the removal of transgender servicemembers from the US military and issued an executive order that the US would only recognise two sexes – male and female.
The US Department of State also announced it would no longer allow applicants to choose “X” as their gender on US passports. Instead, transgender individuals must choose “male” or “female” corresponding to their sex assigned at birth.
If you are suffering distress or despair and need support, you could speak to a health professional, or an organisation that offers support. Details of help available in many countries can be found at Befrienders Worldwide. www.befrienders.org
In the UK a list of organisations that can help is available at bbc.co.uk/actionline
