Why Trump Was Right to Defund the Trevor Project
The organization has peddled harmful pseudoscience to vulnerable kids.
Reality’s Last Stand is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.
About the Authors
Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and hosts the “Brad vs Everyone” podcast. His work has appeared in the Free Press, Newsweek, the New York Post, National Review, USA Today, the Daily Beast, the Daily Mail, and many other outlets. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, Sky News, and other national programs including Dr. Phil. He advocates for free-market capitalism, free speech, limited government, and individualism.
Last month, the Trump administration announced that it will end a federal partnership with the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides specialized suicide-prevention support to LGBT-identifying youth through the federally funded 988 Lifeline. The decision, effective yesterday, terminates the “Press 3” option that routes these children’s calls to Trevor Project counselors and will instead direct all callers to the main hotline.
Like other administration moves, this one has triggered a now-familiar round of condemnation. The Trevor Project, which handled some 231,000 crisis contacts in 2024, called the decision “devastating.” The organization is now crowdfunding to replace millions in expected federal cuts. Critics, including seven senators and more than 100 House members, argue that the change will endanger vulnerable children. New York governor Kathy Hochul has accused Trump of “[t]argeting suicidal kids;” Rep. Dan Goldman, also from New York, claims that the GOP is “willing to sacrifice children for their insidious culture war.”
Entirely missing from the partisan reaction is a discussion about why the administration ended the partnership in the first place: the Trevor Project’s promotion of gender ideology and sex pseudoscience, especially toward youth in crisis.
The Trevor Project was once widely considered a lifeline for gay teens facing bullying, family rejection, or isolation. But like many well-meaning groups, it has drifted from its original purpose and transformed into a vehicle for advancing radical and harmful ideologies under the banner of suicide prevention.
On its website, the Trevor Project urges children to “unlearn” the idea that humans are male or female and adopt the false view that “gender and sex exist on a spectrum.” It suggests that children who do not fit rigid gender stereotypes—like a boy who prefers ballet or a girl who prefers sports—may actually be transgender, with an internal “gender identity” misaligned with their bodies.
🎧 Prefer to listen?
Watch or listen to evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright and journalist Brad Polumbo discuss the Trevor Project on the Citation Needed podcast.
This message is dangerous. Instead of reassuring children that there is nothing wrong with failing to conform to stereotypes, the Trevor Project suggests that children’s discomfort may indicate that they are transgender and were “assigned” the wrong sex or gender at birth. This is the first step in a pipeline that can lead to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and disfiguring surgeries.
Later, on the same webpage, the Trevor Project states:
If you decide that your current gender or sex just isn’t right for you, you may want to make your gender identity fit with your ideal gender expression and presentation. This is called transitioning, and can include social (like telling other people about which pronouns you like), legal (like changing your name), or medical (like taking hormones or having surgery).
“Transitioning” is not an evidence-based method of suicide prevention. The organization’s promotion of such medical interventions is based on pseudoscientific claims: that “sex exist[s] on a spectrum,” and that children have a fixed, internal “gender identity” that must be aligned with their bodies to resolve distress.
In reality, biological sex is binary and immutable in humans. Conditions of sexual development—so-called “intersex” conditions—while real, are rare medical disorders that do not constitute additional sexes.
The Trevor Project also argues that using a person’s preferred pronouns—including “ze/zim/zer” or even the dehumanizing “it”—is essential for a child’s mental health. This claim pressures peers, teachers, and parents to affirm a child’s claimed gender identity, entrenching a fragile sense of identity and reinforcing in the youth a false belief that he or she was born in the wrong body.
The Trevor Project and its defenders have suggested that to defund their organization is effectively to wish death upon gay teens. But criticizing and even defunding an organization that peddles harmful pseudoscience to vulnerable youth is not remotely similar to opposing help for suicidal kids. In fact, the Trump administration’s move is an effort to protect these youth and ensure they receive the compassionate, evidence-based care that they deserve.
This article was originally published in City Journal on July 18, 2025.
You made it to the end! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or making a recurring or one-time donation below to show your support. Reality’s Last Stand is a reader-supported publication, and your help is greatly appreciated.
If you enjoyed this article, you may also like…
 | A guest post by
|
What never ceases to appal me is just how deeply sexist these organisations—and the toxic culture they foster—actually are. Their crude, inflexible notions of what it means to be male or female bear no relation to reality. They peddle nonsense like the idea that ballet is somehow unmanly—have they ever seen the sheer strength, poise, and protective power of a male ballet dancer? Or that a woman with a passion for sport is somehow unfeminine—perhaps someone should break the news to Princess Anne’s daughter, or to the many women who have excelled in athletics, like that multi-gold-medallist mother in swimming.
These people are among the most blinkered, bigoted, and fundamentally sexist individuals I’ve come across. They claim to care about children, but in truth they’re more concerned with dragging society toward a crumbling ideological ruin—just to pave the way for Marxist wreckage to do the rest.
"The Trevor Project also argues that using a person’s preferred pronouns—including “ze/zim/zer” or even the dehumanizing “it”—is essential for a child’s mental health. This claim pressures peers, teachers, and parents to affirm a child’s claimed gender identity, entrenching a fragile sense of identity and reinforcing in the youth a false belief that he or she was born in the wrong body."
It also encourages kids who are hyperfocused on gender (perhaps because they are asked about it all the time?!?) to think about it even more--which does not help them. As Az Hakeem has mentioned on some interviews, for many people the way out of gender dysphoria is to stop obsessing about gender, or thinking about it at all--he describes many of them as not realizing they can just walk away from it, instead of worrying which one (defined differently by everyone) they are.