Donald Trump Claims Schools Perform Sex-Change Surgery
The Republican presidential candidate stoked the culture-war fires, accusing schools of assisting transgender youth in surgical transitions.
Donald Trump ridiculously claimed that children were coming home from public schools having undergone gender transition surgeries.
Speaking as part of a “fireside chat” with Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice at a Washington, D.C. summit hosted by the right-wing activist organization, the former president (and convicted felon) sought to pander to conservative voters by scaremongering about the Right’s favorite wedge issue: transgender rights.
Trump implied that schools, by affirming transgender identities, were, in effect, pushing children with gender dysphoria toward medical transition — even though surgeries are rarely performed on individuals under age 18.
“The transgender thing is an incredible thing,” Trump said. “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And you know many of these childs (sic) 15 years later say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?'”
Trump’s comments got much play on social media but were not widely reported in mainstream media.
Some Trump detractors on social media attempted to fact-check the former president by stating the obvious — that surgeries are not literally being performed in classrooms by teachers in between classes.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters argued he was illustrating a larger point about what happens when schools hide information about students’ gender identities from their parents. They also claimed that school districts that do not have “forced outing” or “parental notification” policies are complicit when they fail to inform parents that their children are identifying by different names or pronouns socially in schools.
“Trump says, ‘Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days late with an operation.’ I’ll give CashApp $1000 to anyone that shows proof of a middle school or high school that operated on a child and changed their gender,” wrote Alex Cole on X.
Trump says, "Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days late with an operation."
I'll give CashApp $1000 to anyone that shows proof of a middle school or high school that operated on a child and changed their gender.pic.twitter.com/McG4wakYTz
— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) September 1, 2024
A Trump defender replied to Cole’s post, arguing that it’s more important to take Trump’s words in the spirit they were said — rather than his exact words.
“You’re not really pretending the operation was done at the school are you? Most of us know he’s speaking about the school keeping a child’s sexual identity and even their name from the parents and helping assist the child find doctors who will help them with transitioning if they desire to do that,” the user wrote. “In some cases they are talking about taking the child away from the parents if the parents do not agree to the transition.”
You’re not really pretending the operation was done at the school are you? Most of us know he’s speaking about the school keeping a child’s sexual identity and even their name from the parents and helping assist the child find doctors who will help them with transitioning if they…
— Michele (@michellmybell1) September 1, 2024
Trump also used the MOL “fireside chat” to scaremonger about transgender athletes participating in sports, pointing to the controversy over Algerian boxer Imani Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Both athletes — who won the gold medal in their respective weight divisions — were assigned female at birth, and neither identifies as transgender, but some people have alleged that they may have disorders of sex development or be intersex and should be considered “biologically male.”
Trump referred to Khelif and Lin using male pronouns and called them “transgendered.”
At one point, he referred to Lin using the pronoun “she” — and was immediately corrected by Justice, who asserted that Lin was a “he,” then adding, “I’m a mom. I have to protect my kids.”
Justice did not elaborate on how misgendering Lin protects her children.
Trump’s comments serve as an attempt to encourage anti-LGBTQ or anti-transgender individuals to rally around his candidacy, stirring up animus toward the idea of transgender identity and the belief by some right-wingers that public schools are “indoctrinating” children into accepting transgender identity as valid.
Such claims play into the larger mission of organizations like Moms for Liberty, which encourage parents to either reject public education altogether or push for policies like vouchers, casting public school teachers as arms of the state, pushing a nefarious agenda by teaching their students concepts or values that don’t align with those of conservative parents.
Moms for Liberty — which emerged in the wake of the pandemic, largely centering around opposition to school shutdowns and COVID-related masking policies — has since shifted its energies, focusing on LGBTQ-related content that they claim is being taught in schools.
The organization has sought to ban books with LGBTQ-related content from school libraries — with some individual members even seeking to have teachers or school administrators charged with crimes — has railed against mutual displays of affection by LGBTQ students, has backed laws seeking to “out” LGBTQ students to their parents, has advocated for Florida-style “Don’t Say Gay” laws, and pushed for bans on transgender athletes’ participation in female sports.
Moms for Liberty has also sued the Biden administration to challenge the Department of Education’s guidance on Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in educational settings, claiming that pro-transgender policies regarding pronoun use violate the free speech rights of students who don’t believe in transgender identity.
Nearly two dozen states have successfully sued to prevent schools from abiding by the guidance, with several federal judges blocking it from being enforced.
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