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I remember reading a story late last year about a nonbinary 16-year-old in Alabama who dialed the LGBTQ crisis line instead of following through on a suicide pact he and three friends had made. The 2024 election had just been called for Donald Trump, and they took it as proof that their lives didn’t count.
Kill yourself over an election? To most adults, that sounds absurd — but most adults aren’t queer teenagers in Alabama. Teens in crisis don’t operate like policy analysts. They’re scared, they’re hurting, and their prefrontal cortexes — the part of the brain that handles impulse control and long-range thinking — are still under construction.
Pile on raging hormones, identity turmoil and the constant hum of feeling unsafe in your own skin, and a single bad headline can feel like confirmation that your worst thoughts are true.
In that fog of panic, one of them did something unbelievably brave: He picked up the phone. A counselor who understood answered, intervened, looped in the others, brought families on board — and the four kids are alive today.
That’s not a story about politics. It’s a story about survival. And it’s why immediate, specialized support matters.
Dial 988. Then press 3 — or text PRIDE to the same number. That option connects LGBTQ youth to counselors trained to understand what they’re going through — often individuals from The Trevor Project, the nation’s leading LGBTQ youth crisis organization. This wasn’t a symbolic gesture. It was a response to the brutal reality that queer youth are at significantly higher risk of suicide, and generic emergency services often miss the mark.
Launched with bipartisan support in 2022, 988 was designed to be the mental-health equivalent of 911: easy to remember, nationally accessible and equipped for specialized help. Veterans press 1. Spanish speakers press 2. Queer youth press 3. Simple and life-saving.
More than a million LGBTQ youth have turned to this service since late 2022 — and now it’s on the chopping block.
According to a leaked draft of the Trump administration’s 2026 budget, that third option will soon be gone. The proposal eliminates all federal funding for the LGBTQ Youth Specialized Services arm of 988, effective Oct. 1, 2025.
I live in Texas, which seems to grow more hostile by the week. My daughter identifies as queer. People sometimes say she’s “lucky” to have supportive parents. I know they mean well, but the fact that anyone calls that luck tells you everything you need to know.
Plenty of kids aren’t so “lucky.” Some get kicked out of their homes for coming out. Others risk suspension just for saying they’re gay — looking at you, Florida. In red states like mine, identity isn’t personal, it’s political.
In that context, a crisis line isn’t just a resource. It’s a critical safety net — a lifeline in every sense that matters.
In late 2023, nearly 10% of all 988 contacts came through via pressing 3, the LGBTQ option. Among texters — the format most young users prefer — it was 16%. More than 188,000 queer youth reached out in just a few months.
Need proof it’s still essential? Look at the spikes. After Trump’s win, The Trevor Project reported a 700% surge in contacts to the organization; on Inauguration Day, another 33%. Some dismiss that as panic, but with this administration rolling out anti-LGBTQ policies, it sounds a lot more like awareness. Or clairvoyance.
“Cutting a suicide lifeline for queer youth is a new low. No public-safety pretext, no ‘parental rights’ fig leaf, just the quiet erasure of help.”
This cut isn’t about cost. The LGBTQ option runs roughly $50 million a year — less than 0.1% of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s discretionary budget. Veteran services stay fully funded, as they should, but the double standard is glaring.
As a combat vet, I can press 1 for specialized help; if my daughter — or any kid like her — presses 3 after October, she’ll get silence. She has support at home; many don’t. For them, that silence could be the final nail in the coffin — and yes, that phrasing was intentional.
It seems we’ve decided some lives warrant tailored help, while others just… don’t.
The Trump team calls this an “efficiency” overhaul. HHS faces a 30% cut, its largest contraction in modern history. Elon Musk’s shiny new Department of Government Efficiency ordered every agency to slash a third of discretionary spending. Killing a $50 million hotline nets about 0.1% of that goal — cheap to cut, gold for culture-war points.
Departments were told to ax anything labeled “woke ideology.” Apparently, suicide prevention for queer kids now falls into that category.
Leadership’s silence is deafening, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no exception. His own wife tragically died by suicide — you’d think that alone would push him to defend a program like this. Instead, nothing but crickets. Maybe he’s just too busy peddling conspiracy theories or reminiscing about the time he staged a fun little prank by dumping a dead bear in Central Park. Who knows.
This isn’t the first rollback targeting basic protections. Since returning to office, Trump has dismantled civil rights rules, choked off health care access and rubber-stamped “religious exemptions” that let providers flat-out refuse care. Cutting a suicide lifeline for queer youth is a new low. No public-safety pretext, no “parental rights” fig leaf, just the quiet erasure of help.
During an adventurous late-night expedition into the depths of Reddit and Twitter, the most common defense I came across was: Well, The Trevor Project still has its own hotline, just like they did before “Press 3” existed. Kids can just use that. Sure — but without federal dollars, Trevor will have fewer counselors, longer waits, a smaller reach.
Meanwhile, 988 will remain — for everyone — minus the specialists who actually know what these kids are dealing with. Telling them that’s good enough is like shutting down the fire department and saying, “Don’t worry, the police still respond to emergencies.”
Who needs fire crews anyway? Just hand the hose to a guy with a badge and hope for the best.
And remember, 988 Press 3 wasn’t for kids who already knew The Trevor Project’s number. It was for the ones who didn’t — the ones typing “help” into Google at 2 a.m. who needed something immediate, national, visible, and easy to remember.
We built that lifeline. Now we’re tearing it down. Not because it failed — because it worked.
I’m not writing this to debate whether queer kids deserve mental health care. That question should have been settled decades ago. I’m writing as a dad who wants his daughter — and every at-risk child — to have support when they need it.
We tell kids to speak up, ask for help, reach out. Then we gut the very system we told them to trust.
Let’s be clear about what this is — and what it’s not. It’s not about money. This program costs a fraction of the federal budget — a rounding error in a sea of billion-dollar line items. This is roughly what Musk makes in two hours. It’s not about effectiveness; the data says it works. It’s not about family values, unless we’re ready to admit some families just matter less.
What’s left is ideology dressed up as thrift. Capitulation. A handout to the evangelical right that put Trump back in office.
It’s a cowardly move by men so wrapped in religious dogma, so desperate to preserve political favor, or so terrified of other people’s identities, that they’re not just willing to let American youth suffer. They’re willing to let them die.
This is a budget proposal — not law… yet.
Nothing’s passed. There’s still time to stop it. So, if this pisses you off — good. It should.
You don’t need to be the parent of a queer kid. You don’t even have to know one. Hell, you don’t have to believe queer kids exist — though if that’s your stance, maybe ask yourself what this hotline has been doing the last few years.
But strip away the politics, the labels — gay, queer, whatever — and what’s left is simple: These are kids. Children who reached out and got help — and we’re taking that away.
Cutting this line won’t balance a budget. It won’t make government leaner. It will leave more kids without support — and some of them won’t survive.
Don’t let it happen quietly. Flood your representatives’ inboxes. Light up their phones. Ask why this is the line they’re willing to cut.
You don’t have to be an activist. Just be louder than their silence.
And if 988 option 3 goes dark, kids can still get help via The Trevor Project. Their hotline number is 1-866-488-7386, and they can also be reached by texting START to 678678 or chatting at thetrevorproject.org/Get-Help.
Even if your kid’s fine, they probably know someone who isn’t. Make sure they know that number. And if you can, donate — because while the government might walk away from these kids, we don’t have to.
Nick Allison is a former U.S. Army infantryman, a college dropout, and a writer based in Austin, Texas. His essays and poems have appeared in CounterPunch, HuffPost Personal, The Chaos Section, The Shore, Eunoia Review, and other places. A center-left political independent with a distrust of all ideologies (including his own), Nick spends too much time reading about history, democracy, and systems in collapse — and not nearly enough time being optimistic about any of it. He also secretly enjoys writing his own bio in the third person — probably because it makes him feel a little more important than he actually is. Follow him on Bluesky @nickallison80.bsky.social.
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