I am furious!
Not mildly irritated. Not disappointed by another questionable government decision.
Furious!
The Trump administration eliminated the specialized LGBTQ+ youth services within the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in 2025. Congress forced the issue by directing the federal government to restore those services and providing $33.1 million to do it. Now, as that service is being rebuilt, The Trevor Project — the organization that piloted the specialized LGBTQ+ service and once handled nearly half of its crisis contacts — has been excluded from participating.
How dare they.
How dare this administration dismantle a suicide-prevention service used by LGBTQ+ young people and then participate in a process that leaves one of the organizations most closely identified with creating and operating that service standing outside the door when it returns.
How dare anyone in Washington treat this like an ordinary procurement dispute.
And how dare an administration whose policies have repeatedly targeted transgender people expect us to look at this decision, shrug our shoulders, and pretend there is nothing here worth questioning.
There damn well is.
The Trevor Project Did Not Wander Into This Story Yesterday
Let us get something straight from the beginning.
The Trevor Project is not some random advocacy organization that decided it wanted a federal contract.
It helped create the specialized LGBTQ+ crisis service.
When the specialized LGBTQ+ service began, The Trevor Project was its original provider. After the program grew into a larger network, Trevor continued carrying an enormous share of the workload. According to The Advocate, Trevor handled nearly half of the LGBTQ+ service’s contacts and handled more than 231,000 crisis contacts in 2024 alone.
That is 231,000 human interactions.
Not clicks.
Not impressions.
Not campaign slogans.
Crisis contacts.
Behind those numbers were young people who were frightened, desperate, isolated, overwhelmed, suicidal, or simply trying to survive another night.
Trevor answered.
Trevor built institutional knowledge around those conversations.
Trevor trained people to have them.
Trevor learned how LGBTQ+ young people communicate distress and how rejection, bullying, isolation, discrimination, homelessness, family conflict, religious condemnation, and fear can collide inside one young person’s life.
Then Washington killed the specialized service.
Now Washington is bringing it back.
And somehow Trevor is not good enough to participate in the program it helped establish.
Give me a break.
You Cannot Burn Down the House and Then Blame the Firefighter for Not Being Inside
The procedural absurdity here should make every taxpayer furious.
According to The Advocate’s reporting, Vibrant Emotional Health, which administers the 988 network, limited applications for the restored specialized service to organizations that were current and active 988 network members.
Trevor was no longer an active network member.
Why?
Its role within 988 had been tied to the specialized LGBTQ+ service the Trump administration terminated.
Trevor was reportedly the only one of the seven original specialized-service centers dedicated exclusively to LGBTQ+ young people. Other participating centers remained within 988 serving broader populations after the LGBTQ+ program disappeared.
Read the sequence carefully.
The government eliminates the service.
Trevor loses its place within that service.
Congress orders the service restored.
Eligibility for participating in the restoration favors organizations still operating inside 988.
Trevor submits a proposal anyway.
Trevor gets rejected.
That is not merely ridiculous.
That is the kind of bureaucratic circular logic that would be funny if suicide prevention were not sitting at the center of it.
You cannot burn down somebody’s workplace and then reject their job application since they have not worked there lately.
Yet here we are.
And I Am Supposed to Believe Politics Had Nothing to Do With This?
No.
The administration does not get the benefit of pretending this decision occurred inside a political vacuum.
President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168 directs the federal government to recognize two sexes and rejects federal recognition of gender identity in sweeping terms. The administration has said the restored LGBTQ+ crisis service must comply with that executive order.
That makes the exclusion of The Trevor Project impossible to examine without asking whether transgender-inclusive care became politically inconvenient.
The Trevor Project openly serves transgender and nonbinary young people.
It calls them what they ask to be called.
It recognizes their identities.
It conducts research involving them.
It advocates for them.
It treats transgender young people as human beings deserving dignity rather than ideological problems Washington needs to solve.
So yes, I want answers.
Was Trevor’s unequivocal support for transgender and nonbinary youth considered during this process?
Did Executive Order 14168 affect the standards applied to applicants?
Were providers expected to change how counselors talk to transgender callers?
Can counselors use a transgender teenager’s chosen name?
Can they use that child’s pronouns?
Can they acknowledge gender identity?
Can they discuss anti-transgender harassment?
Can they tell a terrified transgender teenager, without qualification or political doublespeak, “I see who you are, and your life has value”?
These are not peripheral questions.
They go straight to whether the reinstated service deserves to call itself an LGBTQ+ specialized service at all.
The Advocate asked SAMHSA questions concerning Trevor’s exclusion and how transgender and nonbinary young people would be treated under the restored program.
The agency did not provide substantive answers to those questions.
That silence is infuriating.
If Trevor Was Not Qualified, Prove It
Here is my challenge to the administration.
Show us the scoring.
Show us the evaluation.
Show us the criteria.
Show us exactly where The Trevor Project failed.
Show us which organizations demonstrated greater qualifications.
Show us how an organization with nearly three decades of LGBTQ+ youth crisis-intervention experience, which piloted this federal service and handled hundreds of thousands of contacts, suddenly became an unacceptable choice.
Maybe there is a legitimate explanation.
Then publish it.
Government contracts are not lifetime achievement awards. Trevor is not automatically entitled to federal money simply from having helped establish the program. Any organization receiving taxpayer dollars should have to demonstrate performance, financial responsibility, clinical competence, staffing capacity, technical capability, accountability, and compliance with legitimate program requirements.
I have no problem with that.
What I have a very serious problem with is watching an administration dismantle an LGBTQ+ suicide-prevention program, seeing Congress force its restoration, discovering that one of the country’s best-known LGBTQ+ youth crisis organizations has been excluded, and then receiving bureaucratic silence when obvious questions are asked.
That does not pass the smell test.
Stop Playing Politics With Kids Who Are Trying to Stay Alive
This is the part that makes me angriest.
Somewhere tonight, an LGBTQ+ teenager is sitting alone.
Maybe that kid is 14.
Maybe they have not told their parents they are gay.
Maybe they are transgender and terrified someone will discover it.
Maybe they live in rural Iowa where the nearest LGBTQ+-affirming mental-health professional is miles away.
Maybe their church told them they are sinful.
Maybe classmates have been tormenting them.
Maybe their parents have threatened to throw them out.
Maybe they have been staring at their phone for twenty minutes trying to decide whether asking for help will make things better or worse.
That is who this program is supposed to serve.
Not Donald Trump.
Not Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Not a political movement.
Not culture warriors.
Not federal bureaucrats trying to reconcile crisis intervention with an executive order.
That kid.
The federal government has one job at that moment: get qualified help to that young person.
There should be no political purity test between that teenager and the person answering the telephone.
There should be no debate over whether acknowledging a transgender child’s identity offends somebody sitting safely inside an office in Washington.
There should be no culture war.
There should be a trained crisis counselor saying, in whatever words are appropriate at that moment:
Stay with me. We are going to get you through tonight.
That is suicide prevention.
Everything else is politics.
Do Not Erase the T and Call It LGBTQ+
Congress appropriated $33.1 million for the restoration of specialized LGBTQ+ youth services.
Those words mean something.
LGBTQ+ is not a decorative acronym.
The T is not optional.
Transgender young people are not an inconvenient footnote the government gets to delete when their existence conflicts with an executive order.
Nonbinary young people do not disappear when the White House says they do.
A teenager experiencing suicidal thoughts does not become less transgender when dialing 988.
If the government wants to advertise a specialized LGBTQ+ crisis service, then every young person represented by those letters must be able to contact that service knowing the counselor on the other end is permitted to recognize who they are.
Anything less is false advertising with potentially devastating consequences.
You cannot put LGBTQ+ on the sign and tell the transgender kid at the door that Washington has some conditions attached.
Trevor Is Apparently Qualified Enough to Train People — Just Not Qualified Enough to Answer the Calls
Here is another piece of this insanity.
Trevor CEO Jaymes Black told The Advocate that the organization is already working with state governments in California and Illinois to train 988 counselors in LGBTQ+ cultural competency.
Think about that.
Trevor can help train the people answering crisis calls.
Yet Trevor itself was rejected from participating in the restored federal specialized service.
Make that make sense.
The organization possesses enough expertise that governments want its knowledge transferred to counselors.
It has operated crisis services for decades.
It piloted the specialized 988 service.
It handled nearly half of the contacts after the network expanded.
It answered more than 231,000 contacts through the program in 2024.
Yet when the federal government rebuilds the service, Trevor gets a rejection.
That deserves far more than a press release.
It deserves congressional questions.
It deserves oversight.
It deserves journalists demanding procurement records.
It deserves LGBTQ+ organizations refusing to accept vague answers.
And it deserves taxpayers asking precisely what happened to the $33.1 million Congress appropriated for this purpose.
Congress Needs to Drag This Decision Into Daylight
Congress ordered this service restored.
Congress funded it.
Congress now has a responsibility to determine whether the administration is faithfully carrying out that directive.
Members of Congress should demand the complete solicitation criteria, applicant scores, evaluation records, conflict-of-interest disclosures, correspondence surrounding Trevor’s application, names of decision-makers, reasons for rejection, selected providers, training requirements, standards governing transgender callers, and every directive explaining how Executive Order 14168 applies to the restored service.
Put it on paper.
Put people under oath if necessary.
Let the public see what happened.
If Trevor simply lost a fair competition, the documentation should demonstrate that.
If politics influenced the process, Americans deserve to know that too.
If transgender inclusion played any role in excluding a provider with Trevor’s history, then this story becomes far larger than a contracting dispute.
It becomes a question of whether an administration used control over a suicide-prevention program to impose its political ideology on crisis care for LGBTQ+ children.
That possibility demands scrutiny.
The Trump Administration Does Not Get Credit for Giving Back What It Took Away
There is something obscene about the government expecting praise for restoring this service in the first place.
The Trump administration eliminated it.
Congress had to direct the administration to bring it back.
Now we are supposed to celebrate its return after one of the organizations most responsible for its existence has been excluded?
No.
The administration does not get a medal for returning the fire extinguisher after setting the building ablaze.
It does not get to destroy infrastructure, rebuild part of it under politically convenient conditions, and declare victory.
And it certainly does not get to rewrite the history of who built this service.
The Trevor Project was there.
The receipts exist.
The call records exist.
The experience exists.
The young people Trevor helped exist.
Those lives count.
How Dare You
So yes, I am angry.
How dare you.
How dare you shut down specialized LGBTQ+ suicide-prevention services and then create conditions under which The Trevor Project is excluded when Congress forces those services back into existence.
How dare you treat nearly three decades of crisis-intervention experience like disposable institutional history.
How dare you make LGBTQ+ young people wonder whether politics has infected the place they are supposed to call when they are considering suicide.
How dare you expect transgender children to trust a federal service when the same administration overseeing it has spent enormous political energy attacking federal recognition of their identities.
How dare you hide behind process instead of answering basic questions.
And how dare you expect the LGBTQ+ community to remain quiet about it.
We have buried too many people.
We have watched too many parents bury children.
We have watched too many queer kids get bullied, rejected, thrown out of their homes, abused, assaulted, humiliated, legislated against, preached against, and turned into political campaign material.
We know what silence costs.
So no, I will not politely accept this.
The Trevor Project helped build this lifeline.
Trevor proved that it could answer these calls.
Trevor answered hundreds of thousands of them.
Trevor developed decades of experience serving the exact population Congress ordered this program to serve.
If the Trump administration and the organizations administering 988 believe Trevor should be excluded, then they owe LGBTQ+ young people, their families, Congress, taxpayers, and the American public something considerably better than silence.
Show us why.
Release the records.
Release the scores.
Name the decision-makers.
Explain the rejection.
Explain how transgender children will be treated.
Explain how excluding Trevor improves suicide prevention.
And explain it without hiding behind another pile of federal bureaucratic garbage.
Until then, I am going to call this what it looks like:
An outrageous decision involving a lifesaving service, made by an administration that has already demonstrated its willingness to place its political agenda ahead of LGBTQ+ people.
Our children are not bargaining chips.
Their identities are not executive-order language.
Their lives are not culture-war ammunition.
And a suicide hotline is sure as hell not the place for the Trump administration to wage another battle against transgender America.
Hands off the lifeline.
Put qualified LGBTQ+ crisis specialists on those phones.
Give The Trevor Project a fair shot at the program it helped create.
And above everything else:
Stop playing politics with kids who are trying to stay alive.
