Teachers might be crowdfunding for students’ basic school supplies, but according to Trump’s (false and completely baseless) claims, free sex change procedures are being offered on this year’s curriculums.
Ahead of Tuesday night’s debate, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been spreading lies about transgender people on his campaign trail once again. Most recently, at a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin this past Saturday, Trump repeated the unfounded lie that children are, for some reason, receiving gender-affirming surgery at school behind their parents’ backs.
“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” Trump said in a video posted to X. “Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”
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There are many things wrong with this country, but children seeking gender affirming care is not one of them. Not only are surgeries for trans minors vanishingly rare, but research has shown that when minors do have access to gender-affirming hormone therapy, it has an overwhelmingly positive effects on trans youth’s mental health. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an international body of experts that writes the standards of gender-affirming care, states that patients must be of the age of majority in order to undergo bottom surgery.
The Trump campaign, in fact, could not come up with any evidence of a school granting a child access to gender-affirming surgery without parental consent after CNN pressed them on the issue Monday.
Campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt instead focused on the broader debate about “parents’ rights” and trans children at schools, telling CNN, “I have personally spoken to several individuals whose children were undergoing transition, being called entirely different names at school and the parents were never notified. These cases don’t always make the news because parents fear backlash, but their stories are nevertheless truthful and very concerning.” However, as CNN mentioned, any evidence of Trump’s claim that gender-affirming surgeries have been made available at schools remains to be seen.
Not even Trump’s staunchest allies could point to evidence of children receiving gender-affirming surgery at school. CNN asked Moms for Liberty cofounder Tiffany Justice for any information on that phenomenon, to which she said, “Are kids getting surgery in school? No they’re not.” However, she also said that she was “thankful” that he made the false claim, since it brought attention to the “issue” of social transition, or children being allowed to use different names and pronouns at school. Additionally, Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation told CNN that “Trump’s point is completely valid” even though he was also “not aware of a specific incident yet where it has gone that far, where it has gone from social to medical transition.”
Chase Strangio, the Deputy Director for Transgender Justice at the ACLU's LGBT & HIV Project, said in a post on X that the sentiment was hardly worth gracing with a response, writing, “No one needs to verify this to know it is absurd.”
“Schools don’t perform surgery period (and obviously - they can barely afford books),” he wrote. “Gender-affirming medical care doesn’t happen without parental consent. Don’t ‘investigate’ the claim. Show what animates it.”
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