The Trevor Project's Learn with Love is a 2023 documentary short film featuring three transgender young people and the adults who love them, produced with
The Trevor Project Puts Transgender Youth at the Center of Learn with Love
Learn with Love is a 2023 documentary short film produced by The Trevor Project and boutique production company IMPOSTER, released on January 31, 2023, for United States audiences, following three transgender young people and the adults in their lives who chose to understand and support them.
The Trevor Project is the leading suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ young people in the United States. Learn with Love marks a deliberate pivot in the organization's content strategy — away from awareness-driven brand activations and toward what the organization itself describes, as reported by MediaPost, as a commitment to "authentic, educational, impactful, youth-driven storytelling." The documentary introduces three subjects: Kaiden, a transgender young man, and his mother; Skyler, a transgender young woman, and her grandfather; and Lyndon, a transgender young man who found familial support in a pastor after his biological family turned away from him. Each story surfaces a different dimension of the transgender experience in America, prioritizing breakthrough over barrier, and connection over conflict.
The campaign carries a clear advocacy mandate. According to The Trevor Project's own statement, seven in ten Americans have never met a transgender person, leaving the national discourse vulnerable to stereotype rather than lived reality. In the United States, more than 150 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in the first two weeks of 2023 alone, according to Kasey Suffredini, Vice President of Advocacy and Government Affairs at The Trevor Project. That legislative pressure directly informed the film's urgency. Learn with Love was presented by The Trevor Project, as documented by MediaPost, as the first installment in a planned broader content series and a new national content strategy — making it both a standalone public service documentary and a foundational statement of editorial direction. The Clapboard Score for Learn with Love is 77 out of 100.
The Trevor Project grounds Learn with Love in a specific and documented insight. Seven in ten Americans have never met a transgender person, according to The Trevor Project — a gap that leaves public understanding of transgender identity shaped more by political rhetoric than personal relationship. In 2023, that gap carried measurable consequence: as Kasey Suffredini noted at the film's launch, more than 150 anti-LGBTQ bills were under consideration in the United States within the first two weeks of January 2023 alone. The strategic response was not to catalogue injustice but to model acceptance — to show, in real time, what happens when people who love a transgender young person choose to learn.
This approach marks a significant shift in the organization's creative lineage. As documented by the Los Angeles Blade and Ads of the World, The Trevor Project's 2019 campaign, the Pride-era partnership with Abercrombie and Fitch under the banner of a celebrity-driven activation, operated within a celebratory register suited to a different cultural moment. Learn with Love, by contrast, treats the act of learning itself as the dramatic engine. The film does not ask audiences to celebrate; it asks them to witness. That distinction reflects a broader shift in LGBTQ public service communication in the United States toward documentary and personal testimony as persuasive formats.
The Trevor Project operates in a space where organizations such as GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign also produce public-facing LGBTQ advocacy content. What differentiates the Learn with Love approach is its explicit focus on the non-LGBTQ adult — the parent, the grandparent, the pastor — as the audience surrogate. By centering relationships rather than identities in isolation, the film makes acceptance feel achievable rather than abstract, a strategic choice with direct relevance to the legislative environment documented at the time of launch in the United States.
Learn with Love is directed by Megan Stowe, Vice President of Brand and Content at The Trevor Project, according to documentation cited by the Los Angeles Blade and MediaPost. The film is a co-production between The Trevor Project's in-house content team and IMPOSTER, a boutique production company with offices in New York City and Los Angeles. Director of photography is Spencer Mann, according to the same production documentation. Executive producer Avtar Khalsa represents IMPOSTER's contribution to the project, while Nolan Scott of The Trevor Project served as producer overseeing production and post-production, as reported by the Los Angeles Blade and thetrevorproject.org.
The choice to produce the film in-house, in collaboration with a boutique rather than a major production house, is itself a creative signal. IMPOSTER's scale and specialisation allow for the kind of intimate, subject-led filmmaking that Learn with Love requires. The documentary does not use narration or expert commentary to mediate the stories of Kaiden, Skyler, and Lyndon. Instead, it places the camera inside relationships — between a son and his mother, a granddaughter and her grandfather, a young man and the pastor who became his family — and allows the emotional logic of those relationships to carry the argument for acceptance.
The production aesthetic prioritises presence over polish. The social experiment dimension of the film lies in its structural approach: each of the three pairings represents a different starting point on the journey toward understanding, and each resolves not with a tidy conclusion but with a documented moment of genuine connection. According to The Trevor Project, the film is intended to underscore that "openness, education, and love" are not aspirational values but observable behaviours — ones the camera can capture and audiences in the United States can recognise as real. That documentary discipline, grounded in craft rather than sentiment, is what separates Learn with Love from public service content that tells rather than shows.
No verified performance data for Learn with Love is publicly available in terms of view counts, engagement metrics, or measurable shifts in public attitude attributable to the film. No awards have been identified for Learn with Love across major industry competitions including Cannes Lions, the Effies, or The One Show, based on available documentation.
What is documented is the organisational context in which the film operates. The Trevor Project reported approximately 71.2 million dollars in revenue for 2023, according to Citizenconnect Us, and approximately 4.72 million dollars in advertising and public-awareness expenditure for the year ended July 31, 2023, according to Storage Googleapis. These figures place Learn with Love within a broader resource context: the film represents a strategic deployment of content investment rather than a high-spend production, consistent with its in-house and boutique production model.
Structurally, the film's effectiveness rests on three durable choices. First, it selects subjects whose relationships are already in motion — adults who are actively learning — rather than presenting static portraits of acceptance. Second, it launches at a moment of acute legislative pressure in the United States, giving the content immediate relevance to news cycles without requiring paid amplification to be timely. Third, by positioning Learn with Love as the opening installment of a content series, as reported by MediaPost and thetrevorproject.org, The Trevor Project builds in a logic of return: the film is designed to establish a format, not exhaust one. These structural decisions suggest a campaign built for sustained influence rather than peak-moment impact — a reasonable architecture for a public service documentary operating in a contested political environment.
Learn with Love is a 2023 documentary short film produced by The Trevor Project and IMPOSTER. It follows three transgender young people — Kaiden, Skyler, and Lyndon — and the adults in their lives who chose to understand them. The film was released on January 31, 2023, for audiences in the United States as part of a new national content strategy.
Megan Stowe, Vice President of Brand and Content at The Trevor Project, directed Learn with Love. The film was co-produced by The Trevor Project's in-house content team and IMPOSTER, with director of photography Spencer Mann and executive producer Avtar Khalsa of IMPOSTER, as reported by the Los Angeles Blade and MediaPost.
The Trevor Project released Learn with Love on January 31, 2023, amid a surge of anti-LGBTQ legislation in the United States. According to The Trevor Project, more than 150 anti-LGBTQ bills were under consideration in the first two weeks of 2023 alone, making the case for public empathy and education around transgender youth experiences urgently relevant.
Learn with Love marks a shift from celebrity-led Pride activations toward documentary storytelling rooted in real relationships. Rather than centering LGBTQ identity in isolation, the film focuses on non-LGBTQ adults learning to support transgender young people, a strategy documented by MediaPost as the foundation of a planned broader content series in the United States.
IMPOSTER is a boutique production company with offices in New York City and Los Angeles that co-produced Learn with Love alongside The Trevor Project's in-house content team. Avtar Khalsa served as executive producer representing IMPOSTER on the project, according to production records cited by the Los Angeles Blade and thetrevorproject.org.
No verified awards for Learn with Love have been identified across major industry competitions including Cannes Lions, the Effies, or The One Show, based on available documentation. The film holds a Clapboard Score of 77 out of 100, reflecting its strong strategic architecture and documentary craft within the LGBTQ public service category.
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