Research and Experience Show LGBTQ+ Crisis Lines are Crucial
For trans people in crisis, speaking to someone from their own community can be a crucial lifeline. The Trump Administration’s attack on LGBTQ+ crisis lines removed this vital service.
Opinion, by Victoria Esposito
In 2022, during the Biden Administration, the U.S. National Suicide Hotline, 988 launched with the option for LGBTQ+ callers to press 3 to be redirected to one of multiple agencies specialized in serving their community. The Trump Administration eliminated that option on July 17 of this year. Now LGBTQ+ callers will have to try their luck with the general pool of operators on 988.
As a trans person who has specialized in the mental health of trans people, I can speak to the immense importance of being with others like you while in crisis. Before I became a psychotherapist, I worked for years as an operator on the Trans Lifeline, a peer support line that is staffed exclusively by trans people.
It’s a deliberate choice to staff the Lifeline with trans operators. Knowing that you are talking with another trans person brings about a feeling of trust that can only come from the belief that the person you’re confiding in can understand what you’ve been through and shares in your vulnerability. Being with your community in this way is an instant game-changer.
I saw this on a regular basis while answering calls. Many who reached out for support were not aware that the Lifeline is exclusively staffed by trans operators, so when they heard the sound of my voice, they frequently presumed I was a cisgender woman who was working as an ally to the trans community
Because of this, I made it a point to come out to callers relatively early in the call—the instant change in tone was always striking. Callers frequently exclaimed how relieved they were to hear that I was trans like them, and even when they didn’t say so, I could hear in their voice how much more at ease they were with me.
This experience really showed to me just how important the shared understanding of our common experiences of oppression were to my work in mental health. It was an essential component of building the kind of rapport necessary to help callers through terrible crisis situations. Now that I’m a therapist, I continue to see this—I can’t tell you how many clients have expressed how much more at ease they feel knowing that I’m trans like them.
But don’t just take my word for it—the research bears out my experience. A study by Gene Lim and colleagues found that trans callers did not access crisis lines specifically because of fears of being misunderstood and invalidated. Two-thirds of respondents said that they opted not to use crisis lines, largely because of exactly such concerns.
A respondent named Mathias made this point, telling researchers:
Getting assigned a random call center operator is a gamble I am not able to risk when I’m already in a heightened state of distress. The chance that I could be matched with someone who is well-meaning but ignorant is high, and even a small misstep or misunderstanding on their part will cut deeply.
People who go through crises around self-harm, suicidal ideation, lack of basic resources and places to live, rejection by family, and other such terrible things tend to be the most oppressed in our community—that means that they are usually the ones least equiped to navigate the complicated chore of assessing if a crisis line operator is safe to disclose to. Moreover, that’s the last thing anyone in crisis should have to worry about.
These are points that I was well aware of while answering calls for the Trans Lifeline. My work often felt like a high-wire act, where I knew that even relatively small acts of invalidation or microaggression would feel enormous to someone facing extreme dysregulation. Having a much greater knowledge of potential landmines than any cis operator possibly could made it much more likely that I would give the caller excellent service that would keep them safe and potentially offer a healing experience.
Lim et al. also found a number of other reasons that trans people fail to access crisis lines: negative experiences of misgendering and deadnaming by operators of cis-majority services, exoticization of trans callers (e.g. trans broken arm syndrome), and anticipation of discrimination.
By taking away trans-inclusive support from 988, the Trump Administration has forced trans people into the position of making these cumbersome assessments at some of their most vulnerable moments—it’s increasing the likelihood of traumatization that will further isolate already marginalized individuals
Trans activist Gillian Branstetter recently highlighted a Pew study released in May 2025, showing that trans people are much more likely to feel very connected to their community than are LGB individuals, who much more easily fold into mainstream society. 41% of trans adults felt “extremely/very connected to the broader LGBTQ community,” compared to 23% of gays and 24% of lesbians. Even more striking, Brandstetter reported the study’s finding that “63% of transgender adults say ‘all or most of their friends are LGBTQ,’ but just 30% of gay and lesbian adults and 26% of bisexual adults say the same.”
That is for a very good reason—she writes:
Transgender people . . . still find purpose in these communities because of our continued (and genuinely worsening) exclusion from broader society. Our nonconforming appearance, our particular health needs, our preponderance in criminalized sex work, our violation of the patriarchal power’s reproducibility (long story), our widespread poverty and homelessness—at every turn we are denied, as the Reverend J Mase III recently put it to me, “the blessings of mundanity.”
I would love to one day live in a world where well-meaning, educated, compassionate cis counselors are just as able to support trans people with their crisis and mental health needs. But the research and my own personal experience shows that this is not currently the case. Eliminating specialized services from 988 is taking away a necessary lifeline from trans people and leading to further experiences of traumatization and marginalization. It is a cruel step that makes life that much harder for some of the most vulnerable in our society.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.