Content warning: This article contains references to suicide. If you or someone you know are in need of mental health support, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
Palo Alto is still in mourning. Last month, we lost Summer Mehta Devi, the fourth high school student in the city to dieby suicide in two years, and only 10 months after her classmate Ash He had also died. Summer and Ash were transgender teenagers growing up in our backyard. Their deaths force us to ask ourselves: what does a coming of age story, especially as a queer person, look like in this place that prides itself on progress and excellence?
When I moved across the country to Silicon Valley for medical school, I found comfort in its history. Decades of queer activism and hard-won political gains make this region a symbol of LGBTQ+ progress. Less than an hour drive from Stanford, San Francisco has the highest percentage of queer adults of any major U.S. city. But in this alleged sanctuary, proximity to a legacy of progress is not the same as protection. It is in that distance that some of our most vulnerable young community members are falling through the cracks.
California’s youth are under mounting pressure, and the Bay Area in particular has long cultivated a competitive ethos that reaches children early. A 2025 study by Blue Shield of California and Children Now found that about 94% of young people in the state reported regular mental health challenges. Among the top stressors: soaring housing costs, the job market and discrimination. Even two decades ago, a Lucile Packard Foundation survey found that California parents were already reporting high or very high stress levels in children of all ages.
Having graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York, where 60.1% of the class of 2025 indicated on a survey they agree or strongly agree they will one day attend an Ivy League or other elite university, I understand pressure intimately. At both Yale and Stanford, I’ve sat with enough friends who attended Gunn, “Paly,” Harker and Lowell to know how they speak about adolescence: work hard, achieve, absorb the turbulence in private. That culture is real. And it is formidable.
For queer youth, those pressures are compounded by something else: the daily work of finding acceptance in a heteronormative society. As of 2017, LGBTQ+ youth in California reported less connection with school, more frequent victimization and a more negative school environment than their non-LGBTQ+ peers. The Bay Area’s competitive intensity does not inherently create homophobia or transphobia, but it does create an environment where there is little room to be anything but in motion. For a teenager still figuring out who they are, that atmosphere can be suffocating.
The political moment is deepening the crisis. At the beginning of March, the Supreme Court blocked a California education policy limiting when teachers could disclose a student’s gender identity to parents. For students who are not yet safe being out in their households, trusted adults at school may represent a lifeline.
My empathy for educators is rooted in the fact that my own field of pursuit, medicine, is also under attack. At the federal level, the current administration has moved aggressively to restrict gender-affirming care, threatening to withhold federal funding from medical institutions that provide it. Some providers have been issued subpoenas. Institutions providing such care have received bomb threats.
Stanford Medicine has given me hope by meeting this moment with remarkable resolve. Providers here have long championed LGBTQ+ care, and on the institutional level, significant strides in cultivating curricular diversity are being made. The Q+ clinic, which provides fertility and reproductive care to LGBTQ+ individuals looking to start their own families, is among the first of its kind in the nation. Within the first month, Stanford trains all its medical and physician assistant students in Question, Persuade, and Refer (QPR), a suicide prevention framework.
Carrying such lessons into the communities I serve has been humbling. I have sat across the coffee table from a trans student whose parents threatened to stop paying her college tuition if they came out or transitioned socially. One of my patients at a recent service event was a trans person from Florida struck by the state’s emergency cuts to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program. Serving on the community board of a senior care facility, I once spoke with an elderly queer resident who had lived through the violence and stigma amid the AIDS epidemic, only to find himself, decades later, edging back into the closet in response to the current political climate.
What I have come to understand is that affirming care, for many people, does not always mean surgery or hormones, despite the far right’s accusations that providers are agents of mutilation and queer indoctrination. More often, it means being seen. It means a conversation with a doctor who does not pathologize your identity and a teacher you confide in. That is care.
What also devastated me about Summer’s passing was how little I heard about it. I ask the Stanford community to pause and remember that many of us are living the dreams of countless American high schoolers. The ability to pursue higher education is a privilege. When we wrote applications to this institution, many of us spoke about our hopes of giving back. I believe this intention. The talent and heart of this student body are unparalleled. But the time to make change is not when we graduate or start our careers, it is now. Our communities need us now. Bay Area trans youth need us now.
Action takes many forms. It can be volunteering with local organizations that support queer youth, working with high schools to design inclusive curricula or advocating for LGBTQ-competent care in healthcare systems and technology. It can mean becoming QPR-certified or showing up to city and school board meetings—including a recent opportunity for the public to weigh in on whether to temporarily close the train crossing at Churchill Ave/Alma, a site of several recent fatalities. It can look like mentoring someone who looks up to you.
My own field historically teaches me to become familiar with death, to metabolize loss quickly. Today, I refuse. I cannot look away. I want to feel the full weight of what Summer, Ash and every young person who struggled lived through, and let it remain with me. The least we can do now is to refuse the silence around what they faced and build a world where we bet on love. Regardless of what stands in our way.