If you or someone you care about is struggling with suicidal ideations, there are still hotlines out there. Please call for help if you’re having a hard night:
- 1-866-488-7386 is The Trevor Project‘s 24/7 suicide hotline for queer youth.
- 1-877-360-LGBT (5428) is the SAGE LGBT Elder Hotline, which has confidential support and crisis response for elder queer folk.
- 1-877-565-8860 is the number for Trans Lifeline, a hotline dedicated to trans peer support.
I was 12 years old the first time I had to talk someone I loved, my middle school girlfriend, down from killing herself. We spent math class helping each other with equations and playing MASH. We had matching toy dolls. Our first kiss was standing on the sink in the girls’ bathroom at the middle school dance. She never came out to her family. We dated for two years, and for most of that time, I was holding on to the suicide note she wrote me on college-ruled notebook paper.
According to the Trevor Project, there are 1.8 million American LGBTQ+ teens and young adults (ages 13-24) who contemplate suicide. Every 45 seconds, a young queer person is attempting to end their own life. The Trevor Project’s 2023 U.S. national survey found that 41% of LGBTQ+ young people have seriously considered suicide within the past year. For trans youth, that percentage rises to nearly half.
By the time I was 14, all of my closest friends were in various stages of coming to terms with our gender and sexuality. In our friend group, self-harm was always present. We had bets on whether all of us would make it through high school or not. Maybe that’s just part of growing up queer in the American south — even in a progressive, sexually wild city like New Orleans.
No matter what the shitty right-wing podcasters and pundits claim, it is not being a lesbian, or trans, or nonbinary, or any of the other rainbowed labels that make us want to kill ourselves. The numbers are this high because we live in a world that targets and erases us. Queer kids don’t need to be fixed or set straight. They need supportive parents, safety and connection with peers, financial stability, and bodily autonomy.
Yet our current political climate consistently targets and harms the queer community, especially queer youth.
On June 18, 2025, in a 6-3 majority vote, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee ban on gender affirming care for minors. It is a historic loss for trans rights.
A Trevor Project study from June 2024, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, surveyed a sample of 61,240 young queer people from 2018 to 2022, during which 19 states published anti-trans legislation. They found that two years after anti-trans laws were passed, 13- to 17-year-olds were 72% more likely to attempt suicide.
In 2025, 940 anti-trans bills are being considered in 49 states. One hundred fifteen have passed. Ninety-six have failed. Seven hundred twenty-nine are still undecided.
Someone I loved deeply, in the way you can only love when you’re 16, killed themselves a little over a year ago. I thought we had made it through the worst of it. They had graduated from high school. They were away from their family. Through social media, I watched them seem to live a happy college life with new friends, a new haircut, and a new name. And then they were just gone. They didn’t make it to their 22nd birthday. I had to pay online to find their death certificate and confirm it for myself. Months later, their twin asked me to tell our friends back home because he couldn’t face doing it.
On June 17, 2025, one day before the anti-trans Supreme Court ruling, the federal government announced that the national 988 suicide hotline’s specialized support for LGBTQ+ youth would cease to exist by July 17. This special program for LGBTQ+ youth has only existed since July 2022. In the three years it has existed, the program has had 14,568,848 calls, texts, and chats. In February 2025 alone, they received 373,540 calls.
Ending the 988 suicide hotline’s support for LGBTQ+ youth is going to kill people. Denying trans health care to teenagers is going to kill people. The Trump administration has made it clear we don’t matter to them. That our deaths don’t matter to them. But we are not just numbers. We are human beings. We are not going to disappear, and we are not going to be quiet.
I am not yet 24. I still have two more years of being in the at-risk category of queer youth. One of the kids I work with every year at a summer camp for queer and neurodivergent youth is turning 18 this year. When he was nine, he told me he wanted to die, and I had to stop him from choking himself. When I see him now, grown up and excited about life, I look at him in awe. I’ve never been religious, but it feels like seeing an angel.
I am going to live my life doing anything I can to protect not just my queer friends and family but the queer kids who remind me so much of all the people I loved in elementary, middle, and high school.
We can not let this country erase us. For every support system taken from us, we need to build something stronger — something that will last generations of queer kids.
