Amy Kane was full of awe when I heard that the national life artery to prevent suicide would stop providing specialized crises for American youth LGBTQ+ and ending his partnership with the West Hollywood Trevor project.
With the end of the service that will end on July 17, Kane, the therapist who is known as lesbian, believes that the Trump administration sends a clear message to the strange Americans: “We do not care whether you live or die.”
Since its launch in 2022, more than 1.3 million young Americans are struggling with a mental health crisis, and the 988 human life has called them suicide and crises, giving them the option to pressure “3” to communicate with a specialist trained to address their unique life experiences. As the seven LGBTQ+ contractors, the Trevor project alone deals with about half of all the size of the Queer to the 988 line.
The government’s decision is another wide from an administration that left its actions advocates and service providers in the field of public health, including at the LGBTQ LosBTQ Center, where Kane works as a manager of mental health services.
Under the pressure from the Trump administration, the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles sent messages to families in early June, saying it was planning to suspend the healthcare program for sexually transformed and youth in late July. The LGBTQ Center and other groups demanded a reconsideration of the hospital.
Almost at the same time, the news about the 988 line and the Trefor project, a non-profit organization founded in 1998 by the Oscar-winning short film “Trevor”-a teenager tries to commit suicide-to address the absence of a large ban network determined by the needs of young mixtures.
“Many have been thrown in the past five months,” said Kane. “It is in all fields. It is not just mental health. We see what is happening with gender assertion care, dramatic discounts in research on HIV and touched ATS … What’s the next?”
Looking at Los Angeles as a resort to LGBTQ+ People – the first permitted Praid procession in Hollywood was shown in 1970 – Kane wonders whether the recent moves are an attempt to intimidate and punish California residents to welcome them.
Threats not only come from Washington. Kane said that she is the other who had to pressure the state lawmakers recently to maintain funding for the preventive health care program offered by the La LGBTQ Center, which will be canceled due to the lack of state budget. Currently, the program was given a temporary postponement.
Kane said: “I used to be this idea,” Oh, yes, this is in the red states, but I am safe in California ” – he no longer feels this way anymore.”
Mark Hinson, the temporary vice president for calling and government affairs, said that employees of the Trefor project are scrambling to know how to save the jobs of about 200 advisers who are paid through the federal contract, including raising private funds to compensate for the unexpected deficiency. The news cannot come in a worse time, given that calls throughout the country are advancing to the top of 700,000 in 2025. This rises from 600,000 in 2024, as a spokesman for his name, cited Measures from the Department of American Mental Drugs and Health Services.
100 other counselors of crises are employed and pushed separately by the Trefor itself. They will continue to make calls through the project 7/24, free crisis line, One of the many options offered by local LGBTQ+ institutions. The response of the alternative crisis of Los Angeles province has Auxiliary line 24/7 in (800) 854-7771 This also provides culturally sensitive support services.
But Alex Boyd, director of the Trevor project to interfere in the Trefor project, said that he was not sure how his institution could compensate for the loss of national vision and federal support provided by 988 partnership.
Young LGBTQ+ may try more than four times more suicide than their peers, according to the Trevor project. Its survey of 2024 found that in California, 35 % of young people in LGBTQ+ seriously thought about taking their private lives and that 11 % of the respondents tried to commit suicide in the previous year.
In defense of the decision to stop working with the Trefor project in a listening session to balance the house in May, the Minister of Health and Humanitarian Services Robert F. said. Kennedy Junior said that while Trump supports the lifestyle of suicide and crises 988 in general, “We don’t want to isolate the various population composition and attract our country.”
Boyd said that the big question will be from American youth who already feel avoiding or misunderstanding them in the suicide prevention line that no longer provides advisers who can contact them easily?
Boyd said that the approach that suits everyone does not work when it comes to people with emotional and mental distress.
Fear the worst.
“The fact that this large amount of our ability to influence has been stripped now – there is no operational method for moving during a moment like this, at least in the short term, in losing lives.”
Boyd said that the Trefor project consultants hear the pain on gay reaction to the voices of young callers who are asking for help through the lifeline. “The data we hear is:” Our government does not support me. The government has an activity of national conversation. “
“Increasingly, the biggest thread we see from young people who communicate to us is this idea that it is already difficult to be a young man in the world – this is another layer that we add to the lives of children,” said Bouade. “They come to us, saying that they are not sure how they were able to move during another years of this before they get a level of autonomy and agency and find some sense of safety.”
In addition to a set of executive procedures signed by the president, thousands of bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community in the legislative bodies of the state, in cities and educational areas in California and all over the country, including calls to prohibit books that mentioned relations of the same sex and sexual identity, removes the science of pride from government buildings and kicking athletes from sport.
In addition to the pressure on the Queer community, the self -portrayed of the self -approval, which was recently passed in both councils in Congress, reduces the financing of public health of low -income Americans receiving Medicaid. Alexandra Kurd, Lambda Legal, said LEGBTQ+ Americans is likely to rely on Medicaid to receive health care from other Americans.
More than 40 % of American adults who live with HIV depends on the Federal Program to meet health care needs compared to 15 % for the public, according to KFF. Kurd said that many beneficiaries depend on non -profit organizations from federal scholarships to obtain HIV and sexual communication and receive HIV prevention drugs such as Prep and PEP.
She said: “Because of the medical aid discounts and the possibility of increasing difficulty in reaching preventive care and emotional support,” we will see the increasing infections of HIV. ”
Kerd said recently in HIV rates among Latin men could get worse. Officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention martyred that there is not sufficient financing, racial bias, linguistic barriers, and lack of confidence in the medical system among the reasons that make Latin gay and decorative men represent a percentage that is not proportional to new HIV.
Lambda Legal’s assistance office has already received requests for health care, employment and discrimination in housing in the first half of 2025 for 2024, with the most urgent need of non -transient callers.
One of the good news of La recently came when Representative Laura Friedman (D -West Hollywood) announced that the Trump administration has recovered more than $ 19 million from federal grants to prevent HIV and sexual communication that was allocated to the Public Health Department in Los Angeles Province, but it was evacuated by the Center for Disease Control. Friedman said that it and others spoke against the pieces that managed to secure an additional $ 338.019 in federal funding for the new fiscal year starting from June 1.
But it is difficult for health care organizations to celebrate the fact that the vital funds for mental health and HIV programs were targeted in the first place.
Manny Zermeño, a behavioral health specialist at the Long Beach office for another community service organization, APLA Health, senses distress among his customers. “There is fear, sadness, and also with those feelings, it is normal for you to have some anger and confusion,” said Zerminio.
Los Angeles -based non -profit organizations focus on providing other free dentistry, medical and consulting services at reasonable prices. It was founded in 1982 as the AIDS Los Angeles project. At that time, a small team of volunteers worked as a hotline for the phone in the Los Angeles Center for gay and lesbians, as he made calls from the population with panic looking for answers about what was at that time a fatal disease that was not cured.
The organization runs the first dental clinic in the United States to meet the needs of AIDS patients from a trailer in West Hollywood. After movie star Rock Hudson announced that he had AIDS in 1985, the organization collected support between Angelinus by hosting the first fundraising campaign ever at Paramount Studios, according to its website.
Kane and other community organizations in Los Angeles said they would gather again, this time to help the Trevor project.
“We all have shoes on the ground – you must literally come out before our ankles in order not to provide care for our community,” Kane said. “I don’t think strange children will not be able to reach resources, because we will not allow this.”