This is especially important for LGBTQ+ young people. For many of them, the internet is both a risk and a lifeline. It can expose them to harassment, bullying and harmful content. It is also often the first place where they discover language to describe who they are, see people like themselves reflected positively or find peers who accept and affirm them — particularly if their school or community does not.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, (95%) LGBTQ+ youth have used the internet to find information that helps them better understand their identity. The Trevor Project’s most recent found that nearly 4 out of 5 LGBTQ+ young people go online because connecting with others in daily life is hard and they feel they can be their complete selves online.

Research consistently shows this dual reality: In another Trevor Project study, an of LGBTQ+ youth said social media has both positive (96%) and negative (88%) impacts on their mental health and well-being. Importantly, LGBTQ+ young people who feel safe and understood in at least one online space reported 20% of attempting suicide in the past year and 15% lower odds of recent anxiety, particularly among LGBTQ+ youth of color. In other words, access to affirming online communities is not a distraction from well-being or learning; it can be a protective factor.

Schools, in particular, sometimes struggle to define their role in students’ online lives. But for young people, the boundary between virtual and real life is porous, if it exists at all. Trivializing or ignoring what happens online, both good and bad, misses real opportunities to help young people learn how to engage with one another and the world they are a part of. As native users and early adopters of these technologies, young people have powerful ideas about what tools they need and which protections may actually be helpful.

Safer online experiences do not happen by accident. They are shaped every day by the choices young people make, the guidance adults provide, the policies institutions adopt and the tools platforms design. As a youth mental health advocate and former visiting fellow at the Georgetown of Public Policy, I have heard a wide range of viewpoints. Yet, when drawing on , policy roundtables with youth, observations from LGBTQ+ online platform and conversations with LGBTQ+ young people, five themes consistently emerge about what they and the people who support them can do to help themselves stay safer and healthier online.

First: Seek out moderated, affirming communities.

Young people say that online spaces with active moderation (not mindless censorship), clear expectations for behavior and visible respect for diverse identities feel meaningfully safer. These include forums, chat rooms and platforms where harassment is addressed quickly and consistently, while discussions are allowed to flourish. When moderation is taken seriously, young people are more likely to . Schools and adults in a

position to influence youth can reinforce this by treating online community-building as a legitimate part of young people’s lives, not something to dismiss or discourage.

Second: Use safety tools, and know when to ask for help.

Blocking, muting, filtering keywords and resetting algorithms are concrete steps young people can take to reduce exposure to harmful content. But online safety tools are . Knowing when something feels wrong, how to report abuse and who to turn to offline matters just as much. Schools play a key role here: Treating online harassment with the same seriousness as in-person bullying and clearly explaining reporting options can make a real difference. Parents and caregivers can reinforce this by keeping lines of communication open and judgment-free.

Third: Set boundaries and respect limits.

The internet never sleeps, but young people need rest, food, movement and offline connection to thrive. It’s crucial to set personal boundaries around screen time and take breaks from triggering content. These habits are especially important during periods of high stress, such as exams or college applications, or when current events can overwhelm social media feeds with misinformation or politically motivated cruelty. These boundaries are often easier to maintain with support from friends, families and educators who can provide alternative opportunities for connection and stress relief.

Fourth: Protect privacy, especially around sensitive information.

Young people should be careful what information they share online, including basics like names or locations, as well as sensitive disclosures with chatbots about mental or sexual health. As artificial intelligence-powered tools become more common in schools and daily life, young people need clear guidance about what information is protected by privacy laws and what is not. Schools and parents should help students understand these distinctions, while directing them to services with strong confidentiality protections, such as licensed counselors, therapists, The Trevor Project, or the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Fifth: Check in with yourself.

Students should ask themselves simple questions: Do online activities bring you joy or make you feel drained? Are you laughing or connecting — or just scrolling? Positive online experiences can include finding community and creative expression, learning new things, relaxing or enjoying media that represents their lives and identities in a positive light. Negative online experiences can include doomscrolling, going down rabbit holes or encountering disturbing or upsetting content. Especially recently, with so much hurtful or violent content going around, it’s okay to log off for a while.

These recommendations are not just for young people. Parents, educators, technology companies and policymakers all share responsibility for creating safer digital environments by teaching digital literacy, strengthening critical thinking skills and ensuring clearer protections around privacy.

As debates about online safety continue, it is tempting to focus only on risks and worst-case scenarios, or to feel like there’s nothing that can be done until more laws are on the books. But safer online experiences are built every day through fostering choice, balance, compassion and empowerment. On Safer Internet Day and every day, the most effective place to start is simple: Listen to young people and act on what they are saying.

The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it plans to end support services for LGBTQ+ youth who call a federal 988 Suicide & Crisis Hotline.

Currently, those who call 988 and press 3 are connected with counselors who are specifically trained to assist LGBTQ+ youth. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said in a statement that it would no longer fund this service beginning July 17. The hotline will continue, but without dedicated support for the LGBTQ+ community.

“Everyone who contacts the 988 Lifeline will continue to receive access to skilled, caring, culturally competent crisis counselors who can help with suicidal, substance misuse, or mental health crises, or any other kind of emotional distress,” said the statement.

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The statement said it will no longer “silo LGB+ youth services” — dropping the “T” of the acronym, which stands for “transgender.”

In the last year, the service provided help to over 45,000 callers each month who pressed 3 — or about 1,500 calls a day, according to federal data. The number of LGBTQ+ calls surged to over 61,000 in November 2024. It has served approximately 1.3 million callers.

The federal government began this service as a pilot in 2022 in partnership with the Trevor Project, a West Hollywood-based nonprofit founded to support LGBTQ+ youth experiencing a mental health crisis. Six other groups joined to create a network for LGBTQ+ youth nationwide.

CEO Jaymes Black called the decision “devastating” and called on Congress to reverse the decision.

“The administration’s decision to remove a bipartisan, evidence-based service that has effectively supported a high-risk group of young people through their darkest moments is incomprehensible,” Black said in a statement. “The fact that this news comes to us halfway through Pride Month is callous — as is the administration’s choice to remove the ‘T’ from the acronym ‘LGBTQ+’ in their announcement.”

The Trevor Project continues to offer crisis counselors on its own hotline 24/7 at 1-866-488-7386, via chat at TheTrevorProject.org/Get-Help, or via texting START to 678678.

Organizations supporting LGBTQ students and their teachers in schools saw increases in both their workloads and donations after President Donald Trump’s first election and the recent avalanche of anti-LGBTQ bills moving through state legislatures. Since Trump’s second election, however, there has been a tectonic shift in the landscape. 

LGBTQ advocacy groups, including the top youth-serving organizations, say they have seen their funding decline. They fear this will accelerate even further in reaction to executive orders targeting “DEI” — diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — which may or may not be legal. 

Target, Google and Amazon are examples of corporate backers that have supported LGBTQ student advocacy but recently removed references to “DEI” from public documents or announced they are rolling back inclusion policies.

Meanwhile, needs are mushrooming. The Trevor Project saw a in the number of calls to its suicide-prevention hotline the day after the November election. Now, layoffs are likely as part of a restructuring intended in part to dedicate more resources to crisis intervention programs, . 

The Human Rights Campaign, which offers , is set to lay off about 20% of its employees. In a statement to the LGBTQ news outlet , the organization’s leaders said they hoped the “reset” would allow them to make schools a primary area of focus.

GLSEN, which provides a range of resources for schools working to be inclusive, has laid off 18 people. 

“In comparison to the outpouring of support for nonprofits in response to the first Trump administration, there is a significant difference here,” says Brian Dittmeier, GLSEN’s director of public policy. “We are dealing with a really targeted attack on the community. There are over 2 million LGBTQ students in the country, over 300,000 transgender students in tens of thousands of school districts that benefit from this support. There is a significant need there that will be unmet.”

Because until recently few government agencies collected data on queer youth, these three nonprofits have conducted much of the existing longitudinal research on LGBTQ students and used it to identify settings and policies that determine school safety for gender and sexual minority students and teachers. Among other things, they have established the positive academic impact of welcoming classrooms. 

The organizations also provide resources directly to students and educators. They must now figure out whether they can continue collecting and analyzing that data while focusing on direct services. 

“We were built to build the evidence base for interventions and policy changes, which could then be incorporated into a functioning civil rights regime and education system,” explains Eliza Byard, an education consultant and the former executive director of GLSEN. “At the same time, thanks to a change in culture and the work of many, many years by these organizations, the number of young people who are ‘out’ and seeking services, community and support has grown exponentially.”

As a result, she adds, “the job is enormous in a way that it wasn’t previously.” 

The Obama and Biden administrations began including information on LGBTQ students in numerous federal datasets — efforts targeted by Trump. This makes it especially important that longitudinal research by the advocacy organizations continue, says Dittmeier. 

He says he expects the organization’s 2024 school climate survey — a detailed, biennial report that’s the cornerstone of GLSEN’s research — to be released on schedule in the coming weeks and to be a priority going forward. 

“One of the pieces here is we know that the solutions — what works — is not going to come from Washington,” he says. “The solutions are going to come from communities. So as we have always done in our more than three decades’ history, we are going to continue to rely on what we’re hearing both in our larger-scale research projects but also in direct engagement with educators and students on the ground.”

Correction: Eliza Byard is an education consultant and the former executive director of GLSEN.

Clarification: After Âé¶čŸ«Æ· published a reported number of layoffs at GLSEN, the organization emailed to clarify that the actual number is 18.

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to The Trevor Project and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

In the , conducted in October and November by Morning Consult, 71% of 716 LGBTQ respondents ages 13 to 24 said rhetoric surrounding the legislation has had a negative or very negative affect on their mental health, as did 86% of transgender and nonbinary young people. Three-fourths of LGBTQ youth, and 82% of gender-nonconforming respondents, reported stress and anxiety over threats of violence at LGBTQ community centers or events. 

At the time the findings were released, three weeks into 2023, more than 150 anti-LGBTQ bills — most of them targeting transgender and nonbinary children and youth — had been filed in state legislatures. As in the last few years, youth reports of bullying and harassment remain very high.

The new report includes student responses to a number of questions about aspects of LGBTQ youth well-being that are less commonly discussed, including the emotions evoked by various controversies as well as the distress caused by current events such as racism and police brutality. Rates of anxiety were highest among Latino students.

In the last year, as a result of anti-LGBTQ policies and debate, one fourth of the young people surveyed stopped speaking to a family member, a figure that rises to 42% for trans and nonbinary respondents. One fifth of LGBTQ youth and 29% of gender-nonconforming youth say a friend stopped speaking to them. 

The survey also gauged students’ experiences in school over the last year, with 9% saying their schools removed pride flags and other LGBTQ symbols, 5% reporting their school outed them to their parents, and 4% of LGBTQ students and 7% of trans kids saying they were disciplined for expressing their identity.

Two percent said their family decided to change their school, while 2% of gender-nonconforming kids and 1% of LGBTQ youth overall reported their family moved to another state. Twenty-nine percent of trans and nonbinary youth said they do not feel safe going to a doctor or hospital, a rate more than seven times as high as for cisgender LGBQ young people.

While the youth reported experiencing a range of emotions, anger was the dominant response to current events in every category surveyed. Two-thirds reported being angry about school library book bans, a figure that rises to 80% among trans and nonbinary students.

Young people also report high levels of anger, sadness and feelings of hopelessness in response to bans on gender-affirming medical care and transgender sports bans, policies that require schools to out them to their parents and “Don’t Say Gay” laws that prohibit classroom discussion of LGBTQ topics. Four-fifths have heard of The Trevor Project. 

The pollsters asked what popular media young people turn to for affirmation. The top response was the Netflix series Heartstopper, followed by The Owl House, Euphoria, RuPaul’s Drag Race and Queer Eye.

Under the proposed changes, announced Thursday, the law would protect victims against discrimination based not just on sex but on sexual orientation and gender identity, in effect adding transgender students as a protected class. Current regulations are silent on these students’ rights.

But the proposal sidesteps the question of transgender athletes’ rights to compete in girls’ sports, an explosive issue administration officials said will get its own set of regulations at a later date.

“This is personal to me as an educator and as a father,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said during the announcement. “I want the same opportunities afforded to my daughter and my son — and my transgender cousin — so they can achieve their potential and reach their dreams.”

The changes come 50 years to the day after President Richard Nixon signed the federal civil rights law that bans sex discrimination in education.

Cardona on Thursday noted that LGBTQ youth “face bullying and harassment, experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide, and too often grow up feeling that they don’t belong.”

The proposed regulations, he said, “send a loud message to these students and all our students: You belong in our schools. You have worthy dreams and incredible talents. You deserve the opportunity to shine authentically and unapologetically. The Biden-Harris administration has your back.”

Education and civil rights groups welcomed the proposed rules, with Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the saying they “greatly strengthen principals’ abilities to ensure schools provide what students need.” 

Amit Paley, CEO of, a suicide prevention and mental health organization for LGBTQ youth, applauded the administration’s bid to extend Title IX protections to sexual orientation and gender identity, saying, “School should be a place where students learn and are comfortable being themselves, not a source of bullying and discrimination.”

But the proposed rules irked some conservative groups. In a, Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, called the move a “federal overreach” and dubbed the proposed regulations “The Biden administration’s ‘Must Say They’ rewrite of Title IX,” refering to the preferred pronoun of some who are transgender. 

“American families should be deeply concerned by the proposed rewrite of Title IX,” Neily said. “From rolling back due process protections, to stomping on the First Amendment, to adding ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ into a statute that can only be so changed by Congressional action, the Biden Administration has shown that they place the demands of a small group of political activists above the concerns of millions of families across the country.”

Taken together, the proposed regulations would create a sharp contrast to Trump administration rules adopted in 2020 under then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Under DeVos, for instance, schools were prohibited from opening Title IX cases if an alleged assault took place away from school grounds. Under the new rules, schools would be required to address “hostile environments” in programs and activities, even if the conduct that contributed to the hostile environment “occurred off-campus or outside the United States,” a senior official told reporters.

“Our view now is that the existing regulations do not best fulfill Congress’ mandate in Title IX,” the official said. “There is more we can do to ensure that students do not experience sex discrimination in school.”

Cardona’s proposed changes both expand the definition of sexual harassment and potentially limit opportunities for students accused of sexual assault or harassment to confront their accusers. Administration officials said the new regulations would require schools to take “prompt and effective” action on campus sex discrimination.

But they also said the regulations in effect loosen requirements on schools’ sex assault investigations: The proposed rules, for instance, would “permit but not require” schools to hold live hearings in which accused students can directly confront survivors.

A senior department official, who briefed reporters Thursday on background, said the administration has concluded that a live hearing, which resembles a courtroom procedure, “is one, but not the only way, to address investigation and to determine what has occurred.” The official noted that the vast majority of schools were not conducting live hearings before the Trump administration began requiring them in 2020. “And it was clear to us that a live hearing was not essential to determination of outcomes and a fair process,” the official said.

In a statement, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), said the move “returns to the deeply flawed campus disciplinary process of the Obama Administration, which led to hundreds of inconsistent judgements and more than 300 legal challenges. The existing rule struck a balance that follows the law and is fair to both parties.”

Notably absent from Thursday’s announcement was any mention of Title IX’s application to athletics, which has caused a furor due to a handful of transgender athletes’ bids to compete in girls’ sporting events.

The administration said it will engage in a separate rulemaking process to address the law’s application to athletics and gender, but offered no immediate timeline for the process. A senior department official said the topic “deserves its own separate rule-making process.”

Administration officials have previously said Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination and harassment in programs receiving federal funds, will echo the in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which extended protections against sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace to LGBTQ employees.

While the department’s interpretation of the Bostock ruling doesn’t mention sports, the Biden administration last year filed in a West Virginia case in which a transgender girl who wants to compete with girls on her middle school cross country team is challenging the state’s 2021 law banning students born as male from participating in girls’ sports. 

A group of 15 Republican-led states, led by Montana Attorney General, has threatened to challenge the regulations in court,. Since last year, a dozen states have passed legislation prohibiting trans females from competing in girls’ and women’s sports. 

Last week, the , the world governing body for swimming, voted to prohibit transgender athletes from competing in high-level women’s competitions unless they began medical treatments to suppress testosterone production early in their lives.  

The group, known internationally as FĂ©dĂ©ration internationale de natation, or FINA, said it would also a new, “open” category for athletes who identify as women but do not meet the requirement to compete against people who were female at birth.

By contrast, World Cup and Olympic soccer star Megan Rapinoe last week that she is “100 percent supportive of trans inclusion” in sports, noting that what most people know about the topic comes from “relentless” conservative talking points that don’t reflect reality. 

“Show me the evidence that trans women are taking everyone’s scholarships, are dominating in every sport, are winning every title,” she said. “I’m sorry, it’s just not happening. So we need to start from inclusion, period. And as things arise, I have confidence that we can figure it out. But we can’t start at the opposite. That is cruel. And frankly, it’s just disgusting.”

The public has 60 days to send comments on the new proposal, which could take several months to finalize.