Who Can Trust the Trevor Project’s Claims About Transgender Youth Suicide Calls?
Given their history of questionable data practices, how true is their claim?
The day after President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive electoral victory over Kamala Harris, the Trevor Project released a troubling statement in which they claim they received a 700 percent spike in suicide hotline calls. The mainstream media dutifully and unquestioningly passed along the claims as fact. The organization rushed to assure young people of alternate sexual identities that they had their back.
But is it true?
A report by News Nation says, “In the hours following President-elect Donald Trump‘s win, a leading suicide prevention organization for LGTBQ+ youth saw a tremendous spike in outreach.” The report continues:
The Trevor Project‘s data, pulled from Nov. 6, found its lifeline, chat and text features saw an overall volume increase of 700% compared to use in the weeks leading up to the election.
The organization said the content of its calls also took a massive political turn in the day following Trump’s victory. Election-related content in conversations increased by 5,200% compared to averages ahead of Nov. 5.
“The Trevor Project wants LGBTQ+ young people to know that we are here for you, no matter the outcome of any election, and we will continue to fight for every LGBTQ+ young person to have access to safe, affirming spaces – especially during challenging times,” said Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, in a statement.
The News Nation report reads as little more than a reprint of the Trevor Project’s press release, which reads, in part [edited for brevity]:
-After analyzing the full day of post-election conversations across our classic crisis services, The Trevor Project saw an overall volume increase of nearly 700% on Nov 6, compared to the weeks prior.
-In addition, after analyzing the full day of post-election conversations across our classic crisis services, election-related content in convos have increased by nearly 5,200% compared to averages leading up to election day.
. . . .
“The Trevor Project wants LGBTQ+ young people to know that we are here for you, no matter the outcome of any election, and we will continue to fight for every LGBTQ+ young person to have access to safe, affirming spaces – especially during challenging times. LGBTQ+ young people: your life matters, and you were born to live it. The Trevor Project will always be here to support you, to listen, and to offer you the care you deserve.” – Jaymes Black (they/she/he), CEO of The Trevor Project
Multiple outlets picked up these reports, doing little more than copying and pasting the relevant portions of Black’s statement (while leaving out the confusing pronoun jumble). PBS, ABC, NBC, and Mashable all had similar articles, with varying degrees of original commentary. None questioned the underlying premise—as PBS put it, “These pleas for help are not happening in a vacuum. They are the result of a political environment that has brought transphobia into the political mainstream, especially from Trump’s campaign.” ABC at least had the wherewithal to quote another LGBTQ+ youth organization, instead of relying solely on the Trevor Project. NBC 4 in Washington, D.C. reached out directly to the spokesperson for the Trevor Project for comment. So did Mashable.
None of the media outlets would go anywhere near asking for confirmation of the stats provided by the Trevor Project.
(Read more: Big Trans Raked in $4.5 BILLION in 2022 to Groom Kids)
Why Does the Truth Matter?
The press should at least engage in a cursory confirmation of the statements in the Trevor Project’s press release. If one considers LGBTQ+ youth suicide a serious problem and supposed conservative attacks on this group a true threat, then bolstering the claims with a bit of scrutiny only advances their sympathetic cause to the American public. If these questions can’t be asked, it only raises suspicions about the legitimacy of Trevor’s advocacy, and whether the press simply parrots the points with which it agrees.
This applies especially with the Trevor Project. Restoration News has previously reported on their questionable data collection that mimics science-y sounding statistics. Trevor periodically publishes a national survey on the mental health of LGBTQ young people. It makes provocative claims of dubious veracity:
Among the project’s key findings, “41 percent of LGBTQ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year,” while fewer than 40 percent of those surveyed found their home to be “LGBTQ affirming.” Meanwhile, “Nearly 1 in 3 LGBTQ young people said their mental health was poor most of the time or always due to anti-LGBTQ policies and legislation.”
Perhaps most provocatively, the study claims that “nearly 2 in 3 LGBTQ young people said that hearing about potential state or local laws banning people from discussing LGBTQ people at school made their mental health a lot worse.”
And finally, the survey claims greater LGBT acceptance leads to lower rates of suicide.
The Trevor Project has failed to address criticism of its data collection and analysis. Despite the criticism, a litany of governmental agencies, medical associations, and even the NFL rely on the Trevor Project and advance its agenda. These criticisms include the fact the mental health survey relies solely on targeted social media outreach for responses, doesn’t control for a wide swath of variables common to scientific data gathering, and refuses to release its detailed survey results or the algorithms it claims it uses to screen out certain survey results. As Restoration News summarized, “It’s impossible to say whether the respondents were prone to mental health issues independent of their identified sexuality.”
The LGBTQ+ Movement Has Trafficked in Lies for Years
Trevor relies on popular assumptions about supporting LGBTQ+ people that don’t hold up to scrutiny. The most common argument centers around the notion that showing support for LGBTQ+ young people—allyship, as they term it—reduces suicidal tendencies.
Just Facts, a nonprofit research outfit, has collated multiple scientific studies that consistently show the opposite. They reveal the alarming statistics in Sweden, generally regarded as one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world. At least four peer-reviewed journal papers confirm higher suicide rates among LGBT individuals in Sweden than among heterosexuals. “Contrary to the common claim that the higher suicide rates of LGBTs are due to a lack of societal acceptance,” Just Facts reports, “Sweden has been at the forefront of normalizing and celebrating LGBT behaviors. In 1979, Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare ruled that ‘homosexuality is no longer a mental disorder,’ and in 2013, the Swedish government created a webpage declaring that Sweden is one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world." Despite widespread social acceptance of same-sex marriage for several generations in Sweden, the suicide rate for those in same-sex marriages is about double that for people in opposite-sex marriages.
This brings to mind several questions around correlation and causation, as well as cause and effect. As previously mentioned, the Trevor Project’s annual survey of LGBT youth does not consider any of these questions. They only promote the statistics that advance their agenda, without providing context or confirmation.
In October 2024, the New York Times published a bombshell article revealing a massive decade-long cover-up of a federal study on transgender youth medical interventions. Using $10 million in federal funding, an activist doctor attempted to show the benefits of puberty-blockers and other so-called “gender affirming care” on pre-teens. But when the study did not yield the results she sought, she suppressed the information. The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, said she failed to submit the results of her study because she feared “opponents of gender affirming care” would weaponize it:
“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”
“Dr. Olson-Kennedy isn't a disinterested scholar,” writes John Sexton at Hot Air. “She's a vocal proponent of gender affirming care who is involved in fighting state bans in courts across the country. It looks to me like she went into this study in hopes of creating her own private silver bullet which she could use to fight for the efficacy of gender affirming care. But the results didn't work out as she'd hoped so now she's just sitting on the data, nine years and counting.”
Sexton also noted these findings match a similar study in the United Kingdom:
That one was launched in 2011 and also found no improvement in outcomes as a result of puberty blockers, but the results of that study were not made public until 2020. Nine years, during which time puberty blockers became standard treatment in the UK despite a lack of research supporting their use.
Capturing the Medical Establishment
In September, a group of 18 state attorneys general, along with the Arizona senate president and speaker of the house, signed a letter to the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) demanding that the organization stop recommending gender treatments for minors. Referring to it as “medical experimentation on children,” the letter calls it abusive to provide permanently altering medical treatments to children with gender dysphoria when the majority of those diagnosed with the condition ultimate grow out of it. The AGs also accuse the AAP of lying about the “reversibility” of chemical treatments like puberty blockers.
According to Fox News:
Last year, the AAP recommitted its pledge to support "gender-affirming care" and expanded its guidelines for pediatricians to "ensure young people get the reproductive and gender-affirming care they need and are seen, heard and valued as they are," AAP CEO Mark Del Monte said at the time.
AAP has published several reports on reaffirming transgender youth in their preferred gender identities. In January, the AAP published a report titled, "Prohibition of Gender-Affirming Care as a Form of Child Maltreatment: Reframing the Discussion," which claimed many bills aimed at restricting transgender treatments for children lead to poor mental health.
The AAP prominently quotes the Trevor Project on its website, and offers tips from Trevor on supporting LGBTQIA+ youths. They even quote the flawed Youth Survey:
Data from the Trevor Project’s 2024 US National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQIA+ Young People reveals that more than one-third of LGBTQIA+ young people ages 13-17 experienced cyberbullying in the past year, and those who did reported higher rates of suicide attempts in the past year than those who did not experience bullying.
AAP goes so far as to recommend social media for queer youth: “TrevorSpace offers a moderated online social community for LGBTQIA+ young people between the ages of 13-24 years old.”
For those who visit the Trevor Project’s website, they provide a convenient way to hide your tracks:
The assumption, naturally, is that parents are anti-gay and have no right to know when their kids seek out pro-LGBT information online.
So, Is It True?
There’s no doubt that anxiety among certain segments of Americans ramped up before, during, and immediately after Trump’s decisive electoral victory. Undoubtedly suicidal thoughts increased, as well. One must wonder, however, how to take the statistics released by the Trevor Project. Since they refuse to release any details outside of the press release, we can’t know if that 700% figure is real, or what it entails. If one takes it at face value, there are several possible explanations that do not necessarily exclude other causes.
A large swath of people have consumed a steady diet of anti-Trump propaganda, and fully believe his election means the end of all human rights for LGBTQ+ Americans—despite his repeated statements to the contrary. The professional Left has manufactured so much anti-Trump hysteria, based on blatant lies about his policies and positions, many Americans find it difficult to navigate their way back to reality. And, as Restoration News has previously reported, the Trevor Project serves as a key component of the steady stream of misinformation that informs public policy, medical protocols, and the social acceptance of medical experimentations on children experiencing gender dysphoria.
The corporate media that dutifully reproduced the press release from the Trevor Project did the organization and the public a disservice by not asking any questions to verify their claims. Without this type of probing inquiry, Americans are left to wonder if the statement has any validity at all.
