Editor‘s note • This article discusses suicide. If you or people you know are at risk of self-harm, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for 24-hour support. You can also reach The Trevor Project, which specializes in helping LGBTQ+ youth, by calling 1-866-488-7386, or by texting “START” to 678-678.
Utah’s transgender teens have previously indicated to state officials they are 3 ½ times more likely than their peers to consider taking their own lives, almost 4 ½ times more likely to experience severe depression and are two to three times more likely to experiment with drugs and alcohol.
But those figures documenting transgender students’ emotional struggles in conservative Utah are no longer available to the public, having been quietly purged from a state website.
Links to data on how transgender students’ mental health is faring on the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Substance Abuse and Mental Health site have been deleted, while other demographic-specific reports remain accessible.
After this story was first published, and more than a day from when The Salt Lake Tribune first contacted DHHS, the agency said the data was removed due to “privacy concerns.”
Changes to the website come as orders from the White House increasingly act to erase the visibility of transgender Americans, including ordering public health data that President Donald Trump’s administration has labeled “gender ideology” taken down.
According to web page snapshots preserved by the Internet Archive, “Transgender Student Profile Report[s]” compiled from the statewide Student Health and Risk Prevention survey, commonly known as SHARP, were available on the Utah Office of Substance Use and Mental Health site on Feb. 2. By March 4 those reports had disappeared.
The Tribune accessed copies of the reports prior to their removal.
When reached Wednesday with questions about where the directive to remove the links came from, as well as whether other datasets were affected, a spokesperson for DHHS said the agency would not be able to provide answers until Thursday.
On Thursday evening, after saying earlier in the day the department did not know why the reports had been taken down, and that the “report should have never been off of the website,” a spokesperson attributed the removal of the 2023 report to privacy concerns.
It remains unclear why the 6-year-old 2019 report was taken down. The spokesperson also did not have immediate answers on how and when the department was made aware of possible privacy issues.
Amended reports, the agency said, will likely be reposted Monday — months after they disappeared.
“The 2023 SHARP report for transgender youth was removed due to privacy concerns arising from small participant numbers for these questions, despite anonymization efforts. This decision, made out of caution by DHHS staff, prioritizes the confidentiality and well-being of the young participants while the report is being reviewed to address these privacy and reliability issues,” the department said in an email Thursday evening.
The spokesperson added, “The department had no ill intent or political motivation to remove the report.”
Surveys are conducted every other year, and Utah’s most recent survey data published in 2023. In 2021, the state reportedly didn’t have adequate data to complete a report on transgender students. The first report focused on transgender students published in 2019.
In 2023, 729 students who took the survey responded that they were transgender, representing about 1.4% of the 51,890 students in grades six, eight, 10 and 12 surveyed — although none of the sixth graders were asked if they are transgender.
Reports on gay or lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual, as well as “Not Sure or Other Orientation,” students remain online. The website also has links to health district-specific reports, separate information for males and females, and profiles of various racial and ethnic groups.
“The knowledge we’ve gained from the SHARP survey is invaluable,” the website where reports are posted says, “because it tells us where to look for problems and solutions.”
It continues, “Local health departments, local prevention coalitions, local schools and school districts, superintendents, health systems, public health professionals, and most importantly, parents use SHARP data to develop programs and services to help Utah youth and families.”
Survey results are also provided to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its development of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System.
While DHHS says reports coming off its website were not tied to a Trump directive, their disappearance coincided with the administration’s deletion of CDC data over its discussion of transgender students. A federal judge ordered the information restored in February.
Now, a note at the top of the CDC page says, “Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.”
The axing of transgender youth’s mental health data comes as resources for the group, which has historically seen heightened risk of mental health challenges and suicide, are in jeopardy. The Trump administration is proposing cutting specialized help for young LGBTQ+ people from the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Approximately 19 states, according to LGBTQ+ rights-focused think tank Movement Advancement Project, asked students about their gender identity in Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System surveys in 2021.
“[Government officials] try to defend this by saying they don’t want to advance certain ideologies, but the fact is that this is really not about ideology. It’s just about understanding population health,” said Ilan Meyer, a distinguished senior scholar at the Williams Institute at UCLA, which researches public policy around sexual orientation and gender identity.
Meyer advocated for national public health agencies to expand their data collection on LGBTQ+ populations in the late 1990s as the Public Health Service questioned, amid the AIDS epidemic, whether it had enough data to include that group in its 10-year health priorities blueprint. Any loss of data on LGBTQ+ communities, he said, is “devastating.”
“It sounds to me like the state ... government,” Meyer continued, “is saying, ‘We just don’t want to look, we don’t want to know about it.’”
‘We’re really in the dark’
Transgender students’ responses were scrubbed from the DHHS website less than a year after a law requiring parental permission for students to take the SHARP survey took effect, likely already inhibiting the amount of youth mental health data Utah is able to collect. Experts say limiting which demographic information is available is an additional blow to the usefulness of behavioral surveys like SHARP.
Sharon Talboys, a professor at the University of Utah who specializes in public health and behavior change research, said taking down the reports is a “disservice” to teens — and their caregivers — who agreed to share information about themselves.
Survey data on gender identity and other population characteristics help researchers pinpoint where students are suffering and how the institutions responsible for looking after them should improve. Without that information, Talboys said, “We’re really in the dark.”
An appendix at the end of the 2023 report detailed all of the questions asked in the survey, and possible answers students could give.
“Some people describe themselves as transgender when their sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about their gender,” one question says. “Are you transgender?”
Students had the option to respond, “no,” “I am not sure,” “I don’t know what this question is asking” and “yes.”
“Why can’t kids be asked that?” Talboys asked. “It’s certainly something that the people who are affected think about. And we know that they have poor health outcomes, especially with mental health and substance use.”
This year was the fourth in a row that Utah passed laws imposing restrictions on its transgender residents, and the most acute effects of those measures are experienced by the youngest transgender Utahns.
Transgender girls were prohibited from participating in high school sports that align with their gender identity in 2022, and in 2023, Utah banned gender-affirming health care for transgender minors.
Last year, transgender Utahns were barred from using public restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity in government-owned buildings, including schools. And during the recent legislative session, the state banned transgender students from living in dorms that align with their gender identity at public universities.
An article by researchers at The Trevor Project — an LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention nonprofit — published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour last year concluded that state-level restrictions on transgender people lead to an increase in suicide attempts among transgender youth.
About a quarter of Utah’s surveyed transgender students reported in 2023 attempting suicide at some point during the previous year.
“Whatever it is that LGBT youth are going through is continuing, and just not knowing something doesn’t really address the underlying problem,” Meyer, of the Williams Institute, said. “By not knowing, you’re not going to be able to address it at all. And maybe that’s the point.”
