Update: Golfing through LGBTQ teen suicide
Trump administration finalizes the end of special counseling services for callers to 988 hotline
By Sam Bellamy
Near the end of his first term, President Trump signed legislation establishing 988 as the new contact point for the nation’s suicide prevention hotline. The legislation also authorized specialized hotline services for LGBTQ youth, who “are 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.”
In his second term, Trump will oversee the end of those services.
On July 17, when troubled LGBTQ individuals contact the hotline, they will be routed to the same counselors who handle all other calls – not to the Trevor Project and other counseling groups with a greater understanding of the problems faced by the LGBTQ community.
Problems such as rejection by their own families – and now, their own government.
Eliminating these services is business as usual for an administration that routinely engages in cruelty against gay people, minorities and other groups. All encountered daily discrimination long before Trump and MAGA, but this administration is working hard to re-institutionalize and re-codify it. Diversity, equity and inclusion are out; blaming The Other for the nation’s problems is most definitely in.
The end of the program, discussed in an earlier Fight the Fire piece below, has been expected for months, but advocates for the services had hoped to sway the administration to change course. According to The New York Times, “more than 100 House members signed a letter urging the health department to preserve the LGBTQ option, and seven senators signed a similar letter.”
The program cut, announced by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, included multiple twists of the knife. The Times reported, “In a statement that referred to ‘L.G.B.+ youth services’ — omitting the ‘T’ for transgender — SAMHSA said the decision was based on a desire to ‘no longer silo’ those services and to ‘focus on serving all help seekers.’ ”
Note the Orwellian newspeak that makes it sound as if this decision is somehow inclusive. According to NBC News, administration officials also falsely claimed the specialized services have been operated by “radical grooming contractors” to try to lure young people to become transgender or somehow turn gay.
Compelled by a mix of ignorance and malice, Trump and MAGA routinely spread such lies, demonizing transgender and gay people. Turn on Fox News at any time of the day, and it won’t be long before you’ll see talk shift to the supposed urgency of responding to a manufactured crisis involving transgender Americans and this vast, mysterious army of “groomers.”
We could play games all day pointing to government expenditures that could be eliminated to provide money to keep these critical services for young people.
But as the Trump administration is quick to point out, funding for the national suicide prevention hotline isn’t being cut – the estimated $33 million that goes toward services for gay youth (an even lower total than cited below) is simply being redirected to the overall hotline budget. What’s being cut is the specialized attention Trumpers find offensive.
Of course, the administration could keep that hotline budget intact and add money from other sources to keep the services for LGBTQ youth.
One such source: Trump’s many golf excursions.
Using figures from the Government Accounting Office, the Huffington Post and others have estimated that the cost of all that golf is about $30 million – and that’s just for the rounds played from Jan. 20 through March.
The estimates are likely low because the GAO figures are from 2019, and the totals don’t include the cost of increased local law enforcement for the president’s golf outings.
Fortunately, the Trevor Projects and groups will continue to provide help to young people experiencing distress. The hotline for the Trevor Project is (866) 488-7386; the group also can be reached by texting START to 678678.
“I want every L.G.B.T.Q.+ young person to know that you are worthy, you are loved, and you belong — despite this heartbreaking news,” Jaymes Black, the group’s chief executive, said in a statement. “The Trevor Project’s crisis counselors are here for you 24/7, just as we always have been.”
As for Trump, he’ll be on the links – or pondering a new cruelty to inflict on Americans.
The following piece, headlined Cutting funds for LGBTQ+ services will cost lives,” appeared April 25 at Fight the Fire.
By Sam Bellamy
Junk science impresario Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is apparently content with his progress reviving measles, so he’s moved onto a new project – increasing the risk of suicide among the nation’s LGBTQ+ young people.
A draft budget for Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services calls for eliminating funding for specialized mental health services for LGBTQ+ youth who call the national 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. The savings would be about $50 million a year.
The 988 line has received 1.3 million calls, texts or chats from young people experiencing a crisis related to their sexuality or gender identity since the program went into service in 2022. In all, the toll-free line has had 14 million contacts with people in distress.
In February, the 988 line received an average of 2,100 contacts a day from LGTBQ+ young people. They were connected with trained staff at one of several organizations in what’s called the LGBTQ+ Youth Subnetwork. About half the contacts were routed to the Trevor Project, a group founded in 1998 to reduce the risk of suicide among gay and transgender youth.
There should be little argument that such services are necessary in a society that’s yet to allow gay and transgender people be who they are, but – in Trump’s America – the common sense and compassion are in increasingly short supply.
Not long ago, I had a conversation with a MAGA neighbor who was lamenting the time, money and energy that some churches and, until January, the federal government have expended on outreach to the LGBTQ+ community. He was particularly disturbed by the attention paid to transgender people – who, based on what he’d seen on Fox News, were menacing America in large, roving mobs. (Along with immigrants, of course.)
The neighbor, who’s a reasonable and kind fellow in many other ways, is convinced that the Bible makes clear that homosexuality is a sin. But just as many bigoted white people claim that some of their best friends are Black, he echoed the tiresome “love the sinner but hate the sin” argument.
I explained to him that translations of the Bible aren’t terribly reliable – early versions called for stoning gay people to death, and surely he didn’t support that, right? No, no, of course not, he said.
I also told him there’s an elevated risk of suicide among young LGBTQ+ people, a fact he didn’t seem to be aware of. Surely, I said, you don’t want those young people to kill themselves? No, no, of course not, he said.
My neighbor likely left the conversation unconvinced that his church’s reading of the Bible is incorrect, but I can only hope he’ll ponder the topic more deeply. Maybe someday he’ll see that such views conflict sharply – and too often tragically – with the teachings of Jesus and with his own otherwise gentle demeanor. (The same dissonance, of course, is true of the rest of the Trump presidency he embraces.)
I didn’t have the statistics about the suicide rate among LGBTQ+ young people at hand when my neighbor and I spoke, but I’ve since looked them up. They are as chilling as I’d expected.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 10 to 14, and the third leading cause of death among 15-24 year olds, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. LGBTQ+ young people are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
According to estimates from the Trevor Project, more than 1.8 million LGBTQ+ young people in the United States seriously consider suicide each year. At least one attempts suicide every 45 seconds.
And the Trump administration’s thoughtless cuts to the 988 line will exacerbate a mental health crisis to which Trump himself has contributed.
Trevor Project officials reported that calls and messages jumped 33% on the day of Trump’s inauguration and 700% on Nov. 6, the day after it was announced he had won the election.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that publication of those numbers in the early days of the administration is the very reason that LGBTQ+ services – and the Trevor Project’s involvement – have been targeted for elimination. Trump and many around him are petty, vindictive and wholly unburdened by a conscience.
Of course, whenever a government’s budget is cut, tradeoffs must be made. One person’s gotta-have program is dispensable to another person, who has another gotta-have program in mind.
But in a budget as sprawling as the U.S. government’s, coming up with $50 million would be easy if administration officials gave any thought at all to it.
RFK Jr. wants to redirect $20 billion of HHS funding to a new agency he’s calling the Administration for a Healthy America. Given his addiction to quackery and miracle cures – like castor oil for the measles – it’s safe to say a sizable percentage of that money will be utterly wasted if Congress doesn’t intervene.
There are many other places the money could be found. For instance, $50 million is the equivalent of about 15 of Trump’s taxpayer-funded jaunts to Mar-a-Lago to play golf. Surely he can skip less than a third of his weekend jaunts for a year?
As we all know, money roars through the doors of the Pentagon, sometimes to questionable endeavors. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for instance, reportedly got cost estimates of about $10,000 to $15,000 for construction of a makeup room at the Pentagon – I kid you not – but reportedly settled for a new countertop for a few hundred dollars. Whatever happened … watch that man’s budget. (And while we’re at it, look into JD Vance’s eyeliner expenditures and the orange glop that’s so generously applied to the president’s face.)
We could play this game all day, finding questionable or outright ridiculous spending by individuals in the Trump administration, then arguing for the money to be redirected a hundred times over to our own gotta-have programs.
The point is that it appears no one in the administration – certainly not the supposedly reformed hacker teenagers at DOGE – is giving much thought to what they’re cutting. It’s blind, sometimes malicious, with no apparent thought to the repercussions.
Surely there are still enough intelligent and compassionate people left in Congress to stop all of this, to insist on greater care, to speak up – in this case – for LGBTQ+ people they’d say no, no, of course they don’t want to die.