A school board member and a former law enforcement officer specializing in human trafficking tried to sound the alarm in the California State Senate regarding an anti-suicide bill for public school students, but their concerns were brushed aside, and their motives maligned. During last week’s Senate Education Committee hearing on AB 727, Assemblyman Mark Gonzalez’s bill to mandate The Trevor Project suicide hotline on student ID cards, critics raised serious concerns about the bill’s connection to a controversial online platform for LGBTQ youth called TrevorSpace. In response, the bill’s author shockingly claimed that any opposition to the measure was tantamount to being okay with kids killing themselves.
“Not passing this bill today signifies that folks are okay with that [youth suicide], and I’m not,” Gonzalez declared from the dais, casting moral judgment on the very people who had just pleaded with lawmakers to consider student safety.
Brenda Lebsack, a retired teacher, former state delegate for the California Teachers Association, Founder of the Interfaith Statewide Coalition, and a member of the Santa Ana Unified School Board, warned that TrevorSpace, an online chat network affiliated with The Trevor Project, “places all students, especially those who identify as LGBTQ, at a higher risk of human trafficking and sexual exploitation.” Lebsack described posing as a 13-year-old on the Trevor hotline. Once the counselor confirmed she wasn’t suicidal, they encouraged her to join TrevorSpace. What she found alarmed her.
“I had immediate access to chat rooms like ‘Guilt and Secrets,’ ‘Furries,’ ‘Witchcraft,’ and a ‘Gay Men’s Club’ with the tagline *‘Let’s talk about boys!’” Lebsack testified. “One chat said, ‘I’m lonely and need a friend,’ with responses like, ‘I’ll be your friend.’ ”
Kevin Brown, a 30-year law enforcement veteran and founder of Lives Worth Saving, backed her warnings. Brown, who has spent over a decade rescuing sex trafficking victims, including minors groomed online, called TrevorSpace “dangerous.”
As a trained SWAT officer and anti-trafficking expert, Brown created a fake TrevorSpace account posing as a 14-year-old boy. “I quickly accessed unmonitored chat rooms… [and] observed conversations moving to platforms like Discord, a communication platform I have personally used in the past when dealing with persons who sell and distribute child sexual abuse materials,” Brown testified. “Based on my experience of debriefing over 100 sexual abuse survivors, I know how sexual predators use such spaces to groom vulnerable youth.”
Brown explained that TrevorSpace, despite being linked to a suicide prevention hotline, explicitly states it is not for crisis support, is not age-verified, and provides a place for traffickers to use “patience” and “manipulation” to “build trust with victims.” California public school IDs already have the 988 suicide hotline. “That is enough,” he said. “We should not be sending children to platforms that increase their risk of exploitation.”
Yet these warnings were dismissed by bill supporters, who downplayed the risks and accused critics of spreading “disinformation.” Assemblyman Gonzalez doubled down, telling his colleagues that failing to pass AB 727 would mean you’re “okay with [kids dying].”
Education Committee member Senator Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, while sympathetic to the cause of suicide prevention, expressed strong reservations about the dangers of TrevorSpace. “There are other organizations addressing [suicide] from a different perspective,” including “religious” ones, she said. “I won’t be able to support this bill today” because of the safety concerns linked to TrevorSpace.
California Family Council (CFC), which has been organizing opposition against the bill, was disappointed that its warnings continue to be ignored, with 5 Democrats voting yes, and the two Republicans on the committee voting no. “We all want to prevent suicide. But funneling vulnerable children into an unmonitored chat room is not the solution. Ignoring law enforcement and teachers who’ve uncovered real dangers is legislative malpractice,” said Greg Burt, CFC Vice President.
The hearing revealed the deep divides. While supporters framed AB 727 as a lifeline for struggling LGBTQ youth, critics emphasized that no one was objecting to suicide prevention, but rather to the risks posed by the specific organization and its chat platform. Even as law enforcement groups and bipartisan community leaders warned of potential grooming risks, legislators appeared unwilling to confront those facts.
Senator John Laird dismissed the concerns entirely: “It has been really rebutted that these are unmoderated or that the space is an unsafe space.” Others, including Committee Chair Senator Sasha Perez, said the TrevorSpace is a separate website from the Trevor Project Hotline website, so there shouldn’t be a problem.
Yet the Trevor Project counselors refer students to the TrevorSpace routinely. The Trevor Project hotline website has a link to TrevorSpace at the top of its website behind a link that says, “Meet Friends.” On top of this, The Trevor Project’s own Annual Report on a page titled, “Preventing Suicide” acknowledges that TrevorSpace is closely tied to its suicide prevention mission. The organization describes the chat network as “integral to our efforts to positively impact LGBTQ+ youth development” and boasts of a user base spanning 160+ countries with over 81,000 users.
In the end, AB 727 passed the Senate Education Committee and now heads to Senate Appropriations Committee. But the questions raised remain unanswered: Should the state mandate a resource tied to an online platform that educators, law enforcement, and anti-trafficking experts warn could be exploited by predators?
Or, as Burt put it, “Should we really be ignoring the red flags and accusing good people of wanting kids to die just because they want to protect them in a different way?”
