Our Schools USA and Rainbow Youth Project Hotline Receives Threat

From San Francisco Chronicle

LGBTQ supporters set up a hotline for kids in California. Then came the death threat and the search for its source.

Erin Allday

Chelsey wasn’t supposed to be working the overnight shift at the hotline for LGBTQ kids, but someone had called in sick that Friday and she knew weekends were always busy.

It was just before 5 a.m. in Indianapolis, where Chelsey has answered phones for the nonprofit Rainbow Youth Project for a year, when a call came into the mental health hotline set up for LGBTQ youth in California. As sometimes happens, Chelsey wasn’t able to pick up the call so it went to voicemail. When she listened to the message a minute later, she heard a man’s mocking voice: “My pronouns, my pronouns, you misgendered me,” he said.

Chelsey was reminded of the buffoonish cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead. She thought maybe it was a prank. Then the man called again and left another message.

The second call, placed a few minutes after 5 a.m., at first sounded again like just a rude joke. Then it turned furious, the voice no longer mocking but menacing. The message was littered with transphobic language and threats.

“I’ll kill you,” the man said.

“Even though you know that 99.9% of people are just venting, it’s shocking to hear,” said Chelsey, whose last name the Chronicle agreed to withhold due to threats she faces for volunteering with the hotline. “And then you have to ask the question: What if this is the 0.1% who’s an actual threat?”

The hotline had been set up in August for students of Chino Hills Unified in San Bernardino County, the first district in California to put in place a policy requiring teachers and other staff to inform parents if their children identify as transgender at school.

Within days of going live, the hotline had taken dozens of calls — mostly from students who were scared, sad, confused and angry. Some said they no longer felt safe using their preferred pronouns or chosen name at school.

But some callers were hostile. They taunted and hurled slurs. They raged.

The death threat that Chelsey heard that early morning was not the first of her career, or the first recorded by Rainbow Youth Project this year. But the message, and the one that preceded it, was hair-raising in a way that set it apart.

Chelsey and her managers decided to investigate. The caller, when they found him, was living and working in one of the most progressive, LGBTQ-friendly places in the country, if not the world.

The calls were coming from San Francisco.

California an unlikely ‘fighting ground’

The Chino Valley policy was approved by the school board in July, and went into effect at the start of the school year in August. It was in place for about two weeks before the state attorney general filed a lawsuit alleging the policy infringed on students’ right to privacy. A judge last month banned the district from enforcing the policy until the case goes to trial.

Similar policies have since been put in place in at least six other California school districts, mostly in conservative counties, and proposed in many more. The policies generally require teachers and other school staff to notify parents within three days of students’ requesting to use different pronouns or facilities from their sex assigned at birth.

Proponents of such policies argue that parents have a right to know when their children identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming at school. Those who oppose the policies say they’re dangerous, and could put students in the untenable position of choosing between staying closeted at school or being outed to unsupportive parents.

“If you would have told me five years ago that California would be a fighting ground for having to protect LGBTQ+ kids, I would have laughed at you,” said Lance Preston, executive director of Rainbow Youth Project, which advocates for LGBTQ young people. “And yet, here we are.”

The hotline was created after parents associated with Our Schools USA — a nonprofit established last year by a Chino Valley mother distressed by the school board’s politics — expressed concern that students, especially those identifying as transgender, would struggle under the new policy when school started.

“I literally had kids reaching out to me, telling me they were scared, telling me they didn’t want to go back to school — that they’re scared of being outed when they walk back in,” said Kristi Hirst, Our Schools co-founder. “And Lance said, ‘We’re going to get you a hotline.’ And they created a phone number just for Chino, so people calling in wouldn’t have to explain what was happening to get help.”

Rainbow Youth Project, which already had a national mental health program for LGBTQ young people, set up a hotline specifically for students affected by the parental notification policies. The phone number at first was shared only with students in Chino, but eventually was made available to any young people affected by parental notification policies in California.

The calls came from teens who said they were now scared to be out at school, a place that previously felt safe. Some callers said they were feeling depressed or angry about the vitriol they’d witnessed when the policies were passed. Some students wanted to know how they could transfer schools. Others worried about where they would go if they were outed to their parents and no longer could stay at home.

A few students who called were in grave distress; at least one reported feeling suicidal.

“There’s just a lot of fear and confusion about what to do, where to go for support. Which is why I was happy that the hotline was started,” said Max Ibarra, 17, a transgender student in Chino Valley Unified who has spoken out against the parental notification measures.

“This policy is dangerous,” Max said. “If a student isn’t out to their parents, this shoves them in the closet at school. That’s a miserable place to be.”

When the state attorney general sued Chino Valley Unified over the policy, Rainbow Youth Project provided a formal declaration of support for the lawsuit, and provided examples of the types of issues students who called the hotline were facing.

In the first two weeks the hotline was in place, the organization reported, 61 calls from Chino Valley students came in. Nearly all of them said they wanted to leave the school district.

“A lot of them are experiencing isolation, depression, anxiety. They’re fearful,” Preston said. Some students said they were worried about participating in campus LGBTQ clubs — often a critical source of emotional support — for fear of being outed, Preston said.

In all, the hotline’s taken more than 330 calls since it went live Aug. 5. Preston said Rainbow recently added seven more volunteers — there are 17 now — to keep up with demand.

A growing need, a bigger target

At first, there weren’t many hate calls, likely because the phone number was not widely disseminated, Preston said. But when the hotline was opened to students outside Chino Valley, groups that support LGBTQ youth began promoting it on social media.

The volunteers who answer hotlines for Rainbow Youth Project are used to hearing from people spouting anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Rainbow’s national hotlines get several calls a year that are threatening enough to involve police or other authorities, Preston said; they’ve had three such calls so far this year, including a bomb threat in January.

But almost daily they get calls from people using transphobic or other hateful language, using refrains that have become uncomfortably familiar.

The California hotline is monitored around the clock, though not always answered by a live person. The night of the death threat — Sept. 9 — Chelsey was keeping tabs on the hotline while she monitored social media; part of her job is to delete problematic posts and block those users.

The first call, at 4:48 a.m., was a 19-second message — that was the one Chelsey thought sounded like a prank. But just a few minutes later she saw a reply to a post on X (formerly Twitter) sharing the hotline number that used very similar language. She looked up that person’s profile to see where he lived, then returned to the voicemail to see where the call had been placed from.

The area code was 415. The Twitter poster was a San Francisco man.

When the second call came at 5:07 a.m. — 3:07 a.m., in San Francisco — Chelsey recognized the phone number. The man left another voicemail. Chelsey didn’t want to listen to it alone, so she asked a colleague to join her. This message was longer than the first, lasting almost a minute.

It started in the same mocking, derisive tone. “I want to turn to trans,” the man said, his voice high and whiny. “Then I’ll be LGBTQ+. Then I’ll be so special and everyone will love me.”

It was “run of the mill,” Chelsey said. “And then we heard ‘I will kill you,’ and we both froze.”

The death threat triggered a “crisis alert.” Chelsey called and woke up Preston and other leaders, who began reaching out to law enforcement. She also shared her suspicion that the individual on Twitter may have been the same person who left the messages.

Further social media sleuthing turned up the same man on Facebook and LinkedIn. Chelsey found a video he’d posted on Facebook. At one point, the man spoke. She recognized his voice.

The man is a San Francisco tech worker who’s developed at least two well-known and widely used apps. The Chronicle is not naming him because no police report has been filed.

Rainbow Youth Project officials called San Francisco police to ask about filing a restraining order against the individual, but were told not much could be done because the hotline was based in another state. Indianapolis police also said they couldn’t act. Eventually, after consulting with lawyers, Rainbow Youth Project officials decided not to file a report.

San Francisco police said they could not comment on the specific incident since no report had been filed. Still, in the past year, said Sgt. Kathryn Winters, “We have seen an uptick in threatening and harassing phone calls targeting LGBTQ organizations. Here in San Francisco, around the state, and around the country.”

Rainbow has increased security precautions since the threat, including removing names and photos of staff and volunteers from its website. Rainbow’s security adviser, Thomas Steinberg, said he expects the situation to worsen with the Chino Valley lawsuit still pending and the overall national unrest over LGBTQ rights.

‘That is the voice’

After learning that options for dealing with the threatening caller were limited, Preston, still haunted by the messages, decided to call the man himself. He didn’t know what he expected from the call, he said, or what he wanted to hear. The man picked up, and verified his name when Preston asked.

“When he answered, my stomach sank. Because I was like, that is the voice,” Preston said.

In the past, Preston said, he’s rarely been interested in finding or confronting a caller. Most of the time it’s not possible anyway — the calls are untraceable, the phone numbers belonging to public or shared lines or burner phones.

Here, though, was someone who had a name and an active social media presence, whose LinkedIn resume was expansive, whose listed address is a multimillion-dollar home near Golden Gate Park. On Facebook he carped about San Francisco politics and pride-posted about his daughter.

This was a man who appeared to have the world in his hands, Preston thought. And now he was answering on the same phone line from which the hate messages and death threat had come.

“And I really wanted to ask: Why?” Preston said. “Why do you think this is something to do to people who are literally talking kids off the ledge?”

But when the man answered, Preston found that he didn’t have anything to say at all. He feigned a poor connection and hung up.

Contacted Oct. 3 by the Chronicle, the individual denied making the calls. He said the number on which he’d been reached was for an internet line.

“Maybe someone hacked my WiFi,” the man said. “Maybe my neighbor did it.” Then he said he had somewhere else to be and hung up.

Chelsey said at first she was relieved that the man leaving the voicemails lived so far away. Then she was mad. She’s always mad when such calls come in, she said, not because they’re hurtful or even scary, but because they waste her time.

Last year, Chelsey took a call from a boy who was suicidal. He’d called on FaceTime, so there was a video connection, and when she asked if he had a plan to kill himself he held up a gun and showed her it was loaded. “That was the scariest 20 minutes of my life,” she said.

The boy did not kill himself. He got into therapy through Rainbow and is doing well now, Chelsey said. But she thinks of him, and all the others like him, when the hate calls come in.

Every time the phone rings, she said, “you’re mentally preparing for the worst that could be on the other end. And to know that your time was wasted by somebody just wanting to be hateful …

“I could have gotten a call from a kid who just wanted to chat for a few minutes. Instead I had to get this asshole who just wanted to ruin my night.”

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