The Lifeline That Cannot Say Your Name

Press 3 may return under an order that erases trans youth.

Photo by Valery Arev on Unsplash

In June 2025, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration announced the end of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline’s dedicated option for LGBTQ+ young people with a statement that read, in part: “the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline will no longer silo LGB+ youth services.” Read that sentence again. LGB+. The agency deleted the T from the name of the population whose suicide-prevention service it was shutting down. The deletion was the policy.

Now the same agency says the service is coming back, and the deletion is coming back with it.

On June 9, SAMHSA sent a letter to a bipartisan group of House members on behalf of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Christopher Carroll, the agency’s principal deputy assistant secretary for mental health and substance use, wrote that SAMHSA is “currently assessing the most appropriate approach to implementing this congressional directive for the ‘Press 3’ option within the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, while ensuring compliance with Executive Order 14168.” An HHS spokesperson told The Advocate the agency is “working with the 988 Network Administrator Vibrant Emotional Health to reactivate Press 3 operations by the end of the year.”

The congressional directive is real and funded. The fiscal year 2026 Labor-HHS appropriations law directs HHS to support Press 3 at $33.1 million. A February 11 letter from Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi, Seth Moulton, Sharice Davids, and colleagues told Secretary Kennedy the services had logged nearly 1.6 million calls, texts, and chats and were averaging about 2,100 contacts a day when the administration pulled the plug on July 17, 2025. Per Christopher Wiggins’s reporting in The Advocate, the law requires two things beyond the phone tree: cultural competency training for counselors, and a routing system that connects LGBTQ+ young people to specialized providers.

Then comes the condition. Executive Order 14168, signed January 20, 2025, and published at 90 FR 8615, is titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It directs every federal agency to define sex as binary and fixed at conception, to strip gender identity from federal policy, and to remove materials that “promote gender ideology.” A Press 3 rebuilt inside that order is a Press 3 whose script cannot acknowledge that the kid on the line is transgender. Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, named the contradiction without decoration: “The administration’s executive order rejects these youth entirely; they cannot be supported if they are not included.”

The arithmetic of who gets failed first

Crisis services exist where risk is concentrated and not evenly distributed. The Trevor Project’s 2025 national survey of more than 16,000 LGBTQ+ young people, released May 6, 2026, found that 36% of LGBTQ+ young people and 40% of transgender and nonbinary young people seriously considered suicide in the past year. About 11% reported an attempt.

Break the attempt numbers down by race, and the gradient steepens. The organization’s 2023 survey of more than 28,000 LGBTQ+ young people found past-year suicide attempt rates of 22% for Native and Indigenous respondents, 18% for Middle Eastern and North African respondents, 17% for multiracial respondents, 16% for Black respondents, and 15% for Latinx respondents, against 11% for white respondents. The same survey found 18% of transgender and nonbinary young people had attempted, against 8% of their cisgender LGBTQ peers. Stack those two gradients, and you can see the caller a restored Press 3 will fail first: a Black or Indigenous trans teenager, the young person carrying the most risk in the dataset, dialing a federal line whose governing order says she does not exist.

Executive Order 14168 never mentions race. It doesn’t have to. A rule that erases gender identity from a federal crisis script erases it for every caller, and the callers at highest risk are disproportionately young people of color. The pattern is an old one, familiar from voting rules that never say Black and zoning maps that never say poor. The text stays neutral. The harm knows the address.

The Trevor Project’s bind

The Trevor Project piloted Press 3 and, per The Advocate, handled more than half of all contacts routed through the specialized services. The organization says those services helped more than 1.5 million LGBTQ+ young people before the shutdown. It now faces a choice with no clean exit: rejoin a restored network and lend its credibility to a framework whose authors named trans existence as the problem, or stay out and leave the 2 AM calls to counselors working from a script written by Executive Order 14168. Black’s statement holds both truths at once: gratitude for the “preliminary indication” of reinstatement, and skepticism, “as the administration has now plainly said the lifeline must ensure compliance with President Trump’s January 2025 anti-transgender executive order.”

That is the sound of an organization staring at the kids behind the call volume.

Competence is the word they chose

SAMHSA’s answer to every objection is one sentence. Carroll’s letter closes with the promise that the 988 Lifeline will continue to serve all callers with “skilled, caring, and culturally competent crisis counselors.” Hold that phrase up to the light. Congress explicitly ordered cultural competency training for LGBTQ+ youth; the appropriations language requires it. Cultural competence means competence regarding the caller’s culture, including identity. An order barring federal acknowledgment of that identity guts the training and keeps the label. A counselor who cannot say the word transgender to a transgender caller is not culturally competent. She is culturally gagged.

If your representative signed the February 11 letter, thank them. If they didn’t, ask why a program Congress funded on a bipartisan basis, with a February 28 operational deadline the administration blew past, still sits dark in June.

What this looks like from Sioux Falls

I am a transgender woman in South Dakota. I came out at fifty-three, and I serve on the board of the Transformation Project, a Sioux Falls organization that supports trans kids and their families across this state. I know what the upper Midwest sounds like at 2 AM when you are the only person awake who knows who you are. The distance between hanging on and letting go can be the length of one phone call, and what carries that call is not the phone number. It is the certainty that the stranger who answers will not flinch at your name.

Congress understood that. Lawmakers in both parties put $33.1 million back into a budget this administration wanted zeroed out. The money is appropriated. The training is required by law. The routing system is required by law. The one thing standing between a trans kid in crisis and a counselor allowed to know her is an executive order that calls her existence an ideology.

Restore the line. Restore the funding Congress already wrote into law. And put the T back.

A lifeline that cannot say your name is just a phone number.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call, text, or chat at 988lifeline.org. The Trevor Project’s counselors are available to LGBTQ+ young people at 1–866–488–7386, by texting START to 678678, or at thetrevorproject.org/get-help.

Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.