Stonewall after Skrmetti: Transgender people refuse to be erased
The transgender community fights back after Trump cut off a suicide crisis line that helped 70,000 LGBTQ kids every month.
To understand more about the effects of Trump’s decision to end specialized counseling for LGBTQ youth on the national suicide hotline, All Rise News reached out directly to the nonprofit group operating that system.
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Today, on the 56th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the transgender community is fighting back against the Trump administration’s attempts to write them out of the national story.
Just before noon on Feb. 13, 2025, the Stonewall National Monument’s official government website still celebrated “LGBTQ+” history. Sometime before 7:15 p.m. Eastern Time, Trump administration censors chopped off the “T” and the “+” from that acronym. By 9:45 p.m. ET, only the letters “LGB” were left standing.
That symbolic act of erasure has been emblematic of Donald Trump’s attacks on transgender people in his second term. On Day 1, Trump issued an executive order prohibiting so-called “gender ideology,” a phrase that seemed to refer to the existence of transgender and gender nonconforming people.
Trump’s anti-transgender onslaught ramped up from there in every area of public life within his reach: the military, prisons, passports, classrooms, healthcare and even crisis centers. The day before the Supreme Court’s opinion upheld Tennessee’s ban on transgender care for minors, Trump announced that he would end specialized LGBTQ care on the national suicide hotline on July 17.
Possible action item:
The Trevor Project will lose substantial funding next month, once Trump’s plan takes effect, but they will still provide services. Their donation page is here, and they also urging people to call their lawmakers to defend this long-bipartisan initiative.
“Taken away for political posturing”
The Trevor Project provides the specialists that LGBTQ youth would receive when dialing the third option on the 988 suicide crisis hotline, and the nonprofit group is preparing for how to help children in crisis once the Trump administration cuts off the service.
For Casey Pick, the Trevor Project’s director of law and policy, the snub is personal.
“I do this work because I remember being a lonely kid in Iowa who would sometimes walk across a bridge, stop in the middle and wonder if it was worth going to the other side,” Pick said in an interview. “That's my story.”
When she returned to Iowa City a few months ago, Pick saw a sign for 988 on the same bridge.
“Knowing that kids like me could call it and be connected into services like the Trevor Project just meant the absolute world,” Pick added. “That's why things like 988 matter. That's why it is so devastating to see this taken away for political posturing.”
Even after their hotline option expires, The Trevor Project will still continue their own crisis counseling by calling 1-866-488-7386, but it won’t have the same reach as the widely remembered three-digit alternative.
“Because of our involvement with 988, we were able to double the number of LGBTQ youths we served in crisis — serving more than half a million contacts last year,” Pick said, adding that almost half came through the three-digit hotline.
Pick said that roughly 70,000 kids have dialed option three every month this year.
“We remember what Stonewall was”
During the Google Meet interview, Pick wore a T-shirt from the Stonewall Inn, where she noted that the institution honors transgender people, even if the government website does not.
On Feb. 14, protesters gathered in front of the historic Stonewall Inn to protest Trump’s decision to delete transgender people from the history of the uprising. Multiple demonstrators held up signs pointing out that there is no Stonewall without the “T.” The sign marking the Stonewall National Monument site was cluttered with hand-drawn hearts and trans pride flags.
Next to a broken patch of sidewalk, someone chalked the message “take a brick.” Legend has it that one of two trans women of color, Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera, threw the first brick at Stonewall, starting off the uprising that set off the gay liberation movement, but definitive proof has been hard to come by in tracing the dayslong riot.
When Pick visited there, she saw a brick painted in the trans flag colors: pink, blue and white.
“So, the reality is our community cannot be erased, and we remember what Stonewall was,” Pick said.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Skrmetti itself functioned through an act of negation: Chief Justice John Roberts found Tennessee’s law was about age and medical care, not gender identity. Yet the law, SB 1, allows children to access hormone therapy and puberty blockers for any purpose other than gender dysphoria. In short, the conservative supermajority found that transgender children were, for legal purposes, irrelevant to a ruling blocking their access to medications prescribed by their physicians.
“The Supreme Court upheld the ability of states to ban best practice healthcare — healthcare that we know allows transgender young people to live full, happy, successful lives,” Pick said.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that withholding that care could lead to an increase in suicidal ideation, and that ruling came down a day after Trump’s decision to cut off LGBTQ youth care on the suicide hotline, a combination of events that the Trevor Project realized would be “tremendously harmful.”
Pick said there’s still time to urge lawmakers to save the specialized services.
“Congress can still act to reverse this fatal decision,” Pick said. “We are fighting back with everything we've got. We are reaching out to our allies in Washington, D.C., in both parties. The 988 specialized services program, which was signed by President Trump in his first administration, has been a remarkable bipartisan success. It came into being with strong bipartisan majorities. It has been renewed every year. Funding has even been increased every year.”
Excellent, Adam. Simply excellent.
Thank you. It's just astounding that this is what they choose to spend their, and subsequently our, time on while the country is literally burning and flooding because of climate change. Stupidity and cruelty and chaos.