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The former president has repeated a claim that schools are giving gender-affirmation operations to students and sending them home another gender.
On Saturday afternoon, Donald Trump held a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, where he repeated a claim he first made at an event hosted by the anti-trans school board group Moms for Liberty: that youth were being given sex-change operations at school and sent home as a different gender. This claim is entirely false — schools do not have the resources, doctors, or legal authority to provide medical gender-affirming care, much less surgeries. When asked about the claim, Moms For Liberty founder Tiffany Justice acknowledged that it was a lie, but said she was thankful to Trump for spreading it.
Trump, at the rally, spoke on transgender issues, claiming that “Kamala supports states being able to take minor children and perform sex change operations, take them away from their parents, perform sex change operations, and send them back home… 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? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”
You can see his latest false claims here:
This is not the first time Trump has made these claims. A week ago, while speaking with Tiffany Justice at a Moms for Liberty conference, Trump spoke for 20 minutes on transgender issues, attacking cisgender Olympic athlete Imane Khelif and falsely claiming that she had transitioned. During the same speech, he repeated the assertion that people are being given operations in schools and sent home as a different gender.
The claim appears to be a talking point that Trump is determined to stick with, despite its easy debunking. Transgender youth cannot receive operations in schools—these institutions lack the medical facilities, specialized doctors, and legal authority required for such procedures. Moreover, many U.S. schools are understaffed and lack sufficient numbers of school nurses and counselors to adequately support their student populations, with 21% not having a registered nurse on staff at all. Multiple fact-checks have confirmed that the claim is false, and even Tiffany Justice of Moms for Liberty has acknowledged that it is a lie.
Tiffany Justice, when asked by CNN, stated that she was happy that Trump was lying about gender affirming care in schools, however:
“Are kids getting surgery in school? No they’re not.” But she continued that she was still “thankful to President Trump” for making the claim – since, she said, his remark has drawn attention to the important issue of schools facilitating children’s social transitions without parental consent.
Justice said of Trump’s claim: “It grabbed your attention, and we’re talking about it now, and that makes me very happy.”
Currently, gender-affirming care for transgender youth is banned in roughly half of U.S. states, while most of the remaining states have moved to protect access. Even in those states, however, transgender individuals often wait years to access surgeries, which require multiple letters of recommendation and often come with expensive medical bills that are inconsistently covered by insurance. A very small number of these surgeries are performed on older transgender youth, typically those aged 16-18, and mostly consist of “top surgeries.” In such cases, youth must obtain parental permission and usually face stringent approval criteria, such as older teenage transgender boys stable in their gender identity who find binding uncomfortable over long time periods. In all cases, care is provided through accredited U.S. facilities and medical practitioners—not through schools, and certainly not without parental consent.
Nevertheless, lies about gender-affirming care continue to spread through far-right social media networks, often becoming rallying cries for future anti-trans legislation. The infamous litter boxes in classrooms hoax, for example, still gets cited as a justification for passing anti-trans laws. It's rare for leaders of anti-trans organizations to admit they know they're spreading falsehoods. By doing so, Justice inadvertently exposes a broader strategy shared by many anti-transgender groups: their policies targeting transgender people are not driven by facts but are instead propped up by deliberate fabrications.
This article originally appeared on Erin in the Morning.
