WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. President Donald Trump has officially ended taxpayer funding of LGBT “hotlines” for gender-confused kids.
As of June 17, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has shut down their LGBT extension of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline as part of Trump’s defunding of radical LGBT programs.
“The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline will no longer silo LGB+ youth services, also known as the ‘Press 3 option,’ to focus on serving all help seekers, including those previously served through the Press 3 option,” the press release read.
The LGBT hotline was established in 2022 under the Biden administration and has cost taxpayers over $33 million in just three years.
The program also sponsored the Trevor Project, a prominent national pro-LGBT organization that has long provided an online platform for kids and young adults between the ages of 13-24 to chat about their “gender identities.”
During his first days in office, Trump signed executive order banning federal funds to health entities that “transition” minors.
Since Trump signed the order, many medical associations have announced an end to the dangerous practice of irreversibly “transitioning” minors.
The closure of the hotline has been roundly condemned by LGBT activists, who maintain that it is necessary to prevent gender-confused children from falling into despair and ending their lives.
However, medical research has found that while gender-confused children are more likely to commit suicide, there is overwhelming evidence showing that people who undergo so-called “gender transitioning” are more likely to commit suicide than those who are not given irreversible surgery.
Indeed, a significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
So-called “gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with a 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s “Clinic for Transgender Health,” where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
