Thursday, July 17, will be the last day that the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline will have services available for LGBTQ+ youth. This comes after President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans decided to cut off funds for suicide prevention efforts that they had previously signed off on, the latest step in the Republican campaign to marginalize transgender Americans.
On June 17, in the middle of Pride Month, the Trump administration’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration announced that it “will no longer silo LGB+ youth services.”
The administration’s stated purpose is that the lifeline can now “focus on serving all help seekers,” including those it previously served. However, LGBTQ+ health advocates have noted that the wording of the announcement deliberately erases trans and queer people, referring to LGBTQ+ youth as just “LGB.”
The move is part of a larger push from Trump and the Republican Party to eliminate all references to trans people in American government. The conservative movement has also set more extreme goals, with one CPAC speaker in 2023 saying that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”
Despite the Trump administration’s attacks, resources remain available through private providers.
Nonetheless, since taking office, Trump has issued a slew of executive orders targeting trans Americans, including by eliminating coverage of gender-affirming care under the Affordable Care Act, and attempting to limit access to gender-affirming care for Americans under 19 years of age.
“We knew that there was a possibility of this happening,” Aaron Almanza, executive director of the LGBT National Help Center, told Salon. Still, Almanza said that he believed the end of Lifeline services wouldn’t come until October.
“The decision to cut the LGBTQ+ youth support for 988 is a direct attack on some of the most vulnerable parts of our population and will only cause them to face even more challenges going forward,” Almanza said. “It is a shameful act that a decision was made not out of finances but out of an administration that has, from day one, set their sights on trying to eliminate and disenfranchise our community.”
Almazna noted that Trump’s decision to make the original announcement in the middle of Pride Month was an effort to incite “panic throughout the community.”
The national lifeline was officially launched in 2022 two years after the House unanimously passed the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act. Trump himself signed the bill into law, including the provisions specifically helping LGBTQ+ youth.
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According to data from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Lifeline has received more than 11 million calls in its three years of operation, with about 1.5 million of these being calls seeking specialized services for LGBTQ+ youth.
Mark Henson, CEO of the Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth, told Salon that, according to the administration itself, this isn’t even a cost-saving measure because the 988 hotline will continue. It just now won’t have specialists to help LGBTQ+ youth.
“LGBTQ+ youth are more than four times as likely as their peers to attempt suicide, so this shutdown of this program from the administration is really a direct attack on LGBTQ+ youth, reducing the type of services that they can access that have been clinically proven to support them,” Henson said.
More than 50,000 Americans have signed a petition, backed by the Trevor Project, to keep the 988 LGBTQ+ youth services lifeline open.
Henson argued that it’s crucial to have 988 counselors with similar experiences to the people calling in, because of the stigma attached to being a young LGBTQ+ person and the specific life experiences that members of the community have.
Henson said that it’s “similar to the veteran population. The Veterans Crisis Line has counselors who often come from that community and are trained and understand the different life experiences that veterans have.”
“The 988 counselors who answer at the general state level, they’re good,” Henson continued.. “They can be supportive, but if they lack the specific knowledge of what it would mean to you know, go through family estrangement because of coming out, what it might mean — the discrimination someone experiences when they’re in the process of transitioning as an LGBTQ+ plus youth, if they are transgender or non binary,” Hensons said. “Having a contact have to explain themselves and explain to a counselor who’s supposed to be there to help them why they’re in crisis creates a gap between the ability to have the respect and trust engendered between the contact and the counselor.”
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Henson also noted that eliminating the LGBTQ+ youth services stands to put strain on the rest of the 988 system. The specific LGBTQ+ youth services were established because there was a significant need for these specific services and so people could be directed towards specialists. 988 calls that are not siloed into veterans services or LGBTQ+ youth services, two populations with a higher risk of suicidality, are directed to the closest regional facility.
Almanza, the director of the LGBTQ National Help Center, told Salon that their organization’s hotline had already seen an increase in calls since last year’s election.
“Beyond our normal scope of crisis prevention, coming out concerns, and calls on gender and sexuality, we are seeing burnout from a community that sees a coordinated attack on our very existence in so many aspects of everyday life,” Almanza said. “Calls that may have been in the past an exploration on gender or sexual identity have new added fears of violence, lack of protections, loss of resources, and a rise of hopelessness that we have not seen since the HIV epidemic.”
While the government is ending support for LGBTQ+ youth on the 988 number, the Trevor Project, which was a 988 partner, is still maintaining a privately funded crisis hotline, available for people aged 13 to 24 at (866) 488-7386.
The Trans Lifeline is also available. The national crisis hotline’s US number is (877) 565-8860, and services are available from 1:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time in the United States. The Trans Lifeline warns that it often receives a high volume of calls and recommends people call multiple times.
The LGBT National Help Center also maintains multiple hotlines, with the national Youth Talkline being available at (800) 246-7743. Services are available between 2:00 and 11:00 pm Eastern time Monday through Friday and from 12:00 and 5:00 p.m. on Saturday. A longer list of resources is available at Them.us.
