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It’s been a heavy stretch, and if you’re trans or you love someone who is, you’ve probably built a reflex by now, where the notification comes in and you brace a little before you even read it. There’s been a court ruling, and a passport rule, and some statehouse doing something to people it has never met, and it doesn’t really let up.
The Trans Legislation Tracker counted 645 anti-trans bills filed nationwide as of February 9 this year, and the ACLU, which counts a little differently, had close to 400. Whichever number you go with, that’s an enormous amount of paper aimed at a very small group of people.
So I want to put the useful part up top, because it’s the part that usually gets buried underneath all of that. The strongest protective factor in most people’s lives isn’t anything happening in the news, it’s whether they’ve got a room they can walk into where people are glad to see them. I don’t mean that as a nice sentiment, either. I mean it keeps turning up in the research.
A big part of my job is digging through exactly this kind of thing, reading the studies and the trackers and the survey write-ups, and then working out what we can actually build for people around here out of what I find. Some of that means pointing somebody toward a resource that already exists, and an awful lot of it means sitting down and making the resource myself once it turns out nobody ever has. I’ve been at it a while now, and I can tell you the work has gotten more important with every passing day, not less.
The Trevor Project put out its 2025 national survey on the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people back in May, with more than 16,000 people between 13 and 24 answering it, and the headline numbers are about what you’d expect after the last couple of years. Ninety percent said recent anti-LGBTQ+ laws and policies and debates caused them stress or anxiety, 78 percent said those policies made them feel unsafe, and 40 percent of the trans and nonbinary respondents had seriously considered suicide in the past year. Of everyone who wanted mental health care, 44 percent couldn’t get it.
The finding I keep coming back to, though, got almost no coverage at all, and here it is in their words:
LGBTQ+ young people who reported living in very accepting communities attempted suicide at less than a third of the rate of those who reported living in very unaccepting communities.
Less than a third, and that’s the same country and the same news cycle and the same laws on the books for every kid in that survey. What changed was the town they were living in, and the school they walked into every morning, and whether there was anybody within reach who was plainly on their side. That’s a bigger effect than most of what we’re willing to call an intervention, and the best thing about it is that nobody has to approve it first.
When people hear “build community” they tend to picture a committee and a budget and somebody’s slide deck, but the research keeps pointing at something a lot more ordinary than that. An earlier Trevor brief, drawn from a survey of more than 20,000 LGBTQ+ young people, found that having one accepting adult in your life was linked to 40 percent lower odds of a suicide attempt in the past year. Not a perfect family, and not a model school district, just one person who takes you at your word when you tell them who you are.
In the 2025 survey, 85 percent of the LGBTQ+ young people who were in school said at least one adult there was supportive, which is worth sitting with for a second, because it means there are thousands of teachers and coaches and custodians and lunch aides out there quietly doing the most protective thing available to them, and most of them would tell you they aren’t doing anything special. They’re right that it isn’t complicated, but they’re wrong about it not being much.
Here’s what I’d want somebody to tell me if I were new to all of this, which is that community around here doesn’t really look like activism, it mostly looks like an ordinary week.
The Dungeons & Dragons campaign has a full table at the moment, which is honestly the kind of problem we like having. Coffee Connect is a coffee hour for LGBTQ+ folks 60 and up that we run alongside the New Bedford Council on Aging, and it’s worth giving us a call at (774) 775-2656 before you come so we know how much coffee to make.
The craft and connect hour for trans and nonbinary folks 25 and under is a drop-in, so you don’t have to tell anybody you’re coming. Our elders eat together at the supper clubs in Marion and Fairhaven, both of them free, and there’s a bowling night at Wonder Bowl along with a breakfast club at Munchies in Fall River where the seating is open and you sit wherever you feel like sitting.
Up in Taunton there’s a craft night, and the LGBTQ+ ASD social is built to be low-stim and low-pressure, because a loud room is its own kind of closed door for a lot of our folks. Lavender Link-Up has no agenda whatsoever and isn’t trying to get one. Across a month you’ll find something happening nearly every day of the week somewhere between Fall River and Taunton.
I’m leaving the days and times off on purpose, because a fair amount is moving around right now and I’d rather you got the current version than a stale one. The events page on our site has what’s actually running, and calling us works too.
None of that is ever going to make the news, and that’s sort of the whole point, because the Trevor data isn’t measuring whether a town holds rallies, it’s measuring whether a person can name a place where they’re wanted.
We get this question more than any other, usually from a parent, and sometimes from a neighbor who saw something on the news and felt sick about it and didn’t know where to put that. The honest answer is a lot smaller than most people expect it to be.
Use the name and the pronouns without turning it into a project, and don’t make somebody correct you twice. If you run a business, say plainly that everybody’s welcome and say it somewhere your customers can actually see it, which is the whole idea behind our Welcoming Wall, where we list the South Coast shops and churches and clinics and farms and civic groups that have confirmed they welcome LGBTQ+ people. We never add anybody without asking them first, because it’s a celebration and not a scorecard.
And if you work with young people in any capacity at all, go back and read those numbers one more time, because you might already be somebody’s one adult and there’s a good chance you’d never know it.
I don’t want to oversell any of this, because a coffee hour isn’t going to overturn a court decision and a bowling night isn’t going to restore anybody’s passport, and when somebody tells you that community is the answer to a policy problem, they’re usually hoping you’ll stop asking for the policy. The protections we have in Massachusetts exist because people worked years to pass them, and they hold because people keep turning up to defend them, and that work is still very much the work.
But a long fight needs people who are still standing at the end of it, and that’s what those tables are really for, because it’s how somebody gets from this year to next year with their life and their sense of themselves intact.
We put the chairs out most days of the week, and some nights the room fills right up and some nights it doesn’t, and honestly it counts about the same either way. If you haven’t been in a while, or you’ve never come at all, there’s a chair for you, and you don’t have to be doing well to sit in it or know a single person in the room. You can take the seat closest to the door and leave early and nobody’s going to chase you down about it. Come anyway.
Sources: The Trevor Project 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People, the Trevor Project research brief on accepting adults, and the Trans Legislation Tracker.