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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | FEBRUARY 2025 51 During the entire month of February 2025, the Rainbow Group will have a fundraising campaign for e Trevor Project, a nonprot organization which provides suicide prevention and crisis intervention services for LGBTQ young people. e Famous LGBT Americans series will resume in March. Last year, for our rst fundraising campaign for e Trevor Project, we provided data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) 2021 published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which examined the lives of LGBQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, questioning or another non-heterosexual identity) students. Excluded in that survey were students who identied as transgender. In 2023, for the rst time, the YRBS assessed transgender identity, providing the rst nationally representative data about transgender students (whose gender identity diers from their sex assigned at birth) and students questioning whether they are transgender. eir experiences were compared to cisgender students (whose gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth). is article focuses on transgender and questioning high school students. To better understand the following data on transgender and questioning students, it is important to be aware of the present national context in which these students live. To date, 24 states have banned essential health care for transgender young people. One case from Tennessee is presently under review by the Supreme Court. Some signicant ndings from the CDC YRBS 2023 are the following: In 2023, 3.3% of U.S. high school students identied as transgender, and 2.2% identied as questioning. … Compared with 8.5% of cisgender male students, 25.3% of transgender students and 26.4% of questioning students skipped school because they felt unsafe. An estimated 40% of transgender and questioning students were bullied at school, and 69% of questioning students and 72% of transgender students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a marker for experiencing depressive symptoms. Approximately 26% of transgender and questioning students attempted suicide in the past year compared with 5% of cisgender male and 11% of cisgender female students. Intervention opportunities for schools to create safer and more supportive environments for transgender and questioning students can help address these disparities. ese facts motivate the Rainbow Group's fundraising campaign for e Trevor Project (https://www.thetrevorproject. org/). Please consider contributing. Your donation could make a real dierence. You may use the QR code (at right) or https://give.thetrevorproject.org/ team/627146 to make your contribution to the Rainbow Group's fundraising page at e Trevor Project's website. ank you. ~ Dan Hazeltine and Frank Galvan Rainbow Group

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