Smack in the middle of Pride Month, the Trump administration has announced it will eliminate services offered through the national suicide prevention hotline that are tailored to specifically provide support for LGBTQ+ youth.
Starting July 17, the 988 National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline “will no longer silo LGB+ youth services,” shutting down what’s known as the “Press 3 option,” the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said in a statement.
LGBTQ+ callers will instead be lumped in with all other calls in order “to focus on serving all help seekers, including those previously served through the Press 3 option.”
The move is part of overall budget cuts being championed by the GOP, whose 2026 federal budget proposal aims to cap total funding for 988 at $520 million.
SAMHSA notified its partners, including the nonprofit LGBTQ+ youth support organization The Trevor Project, on Tuesday.
“This is devastating, to say the least,” Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a statement. “Suicide prevention is about people, not politics. 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.”
In keeping with Trump’s inauguration-day declaration that “there are only two genders,” SAMHSA chopped the “T,” “Q” and plus sign from its description.
“The fact that this news comes to us halfway through Pride Month is callous — as is the administration’s choice to remove the ‘T’ from the acronym ‘LGBTQ+’ in their announcement,” Black said. “Transgender people can never, and will never, be erased.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 49,300 people committed suicide in 2023, about one every 11 minutes. A 2024 CDC analysis showed LGBTQ+ youth to be especially vulnerable, with 26% of transgender and gender-questioning students attempting suicide in the previous year, compared with 5% of cisgender male and 11% of cisgender female students.
The three-digit hotline launched in July 2022, when the original 10-digit 800 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline was converted after Trump signed the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act of 2020 into law. Nearly 1.3 million callers have dialed into the LGBTQ+ youth program since its inception.
With News Wire Services
