Donald Trump has been telling a lie at recent campaign stops and rallies lately. You might, rightly, ask “which lie,” since as he proves repeatedly, there are many. Trump claims inflation is at 60 to 70%—the highest in U.S. history—utterly false. He claims he had the best economy and jobs record—also false. He says—after having eviscerated the Equal Pay Act and ending Roe v. Wade after 49 years—that he was the best president for women. He says Americans were better off four years ago when thousands were dying each week due to his mishandling of the pandemic and unemployment was at 6% and millions were threatened with losing their housing.
As egregious as these lies are, they aren’t the ones to which I am referring. It’s the lie that kids go off to school one gender and come home another because schools are getting them gender reassignment surgery.
Set aside for the moment that few schools even have nurses on staff. That’s been a crisis in Philadelphia and other cities for over a decade. Set aside that even if there’s a school nurse, they can’t dispense an aspirin or use an epi-pen without massive paperwork being logged.
Set aside how long gender reassignment surgery takes and how extensive the recovery time is, as anyone who has undergone that surgery can detail.
Set aside all those factors. Why is this lie a new focal point for Trump?
It’s the guns
If one takes a rational approach, it could be to deflect from what’s actually happening to kids at school: they’re being shot. Like the shooting in Winder, Georgia last week which killed four and wounded nine.
There were a series of claims on social media—all false—that the alleged shooter, Colt Gray, 14, is trans. He’s not. He’s just very pretty with slightly longish hair.
The right is always desperate to create new narratives to replace the reality that all but two of the 600+ mass shootings in the U.S. this year have been committed by men or teenage boys. School shootings are committed by boys and “men” like the Uvalde shooter who had just turned 18. There has been one alleged trans shooter, Audrey Hale, in 2023 and their trans identity was always a question.
So is deflection from gun violence by the party of the NRA the rationale for Trump’s constant references to these “brutal surgeries” or is it something else?
When Kamala Harris chose progressive Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate rather than Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, the more centrist choice, Team Trump began digging for issues they could use against him. (Once claiming Harris, whose husband is Jewish, rejected Shapiro because she’s antisemitic didn’t work.)
Targeting Tim Walz
Team Trump found Walz issued an executive order and signed a 2023 bill to shield people from punishment by other states for seeking and delivering gender affirming care. So Trump began asserting Walz supported schools giving students gender affirming care, which is untrue and that expanded and morphed, much like Trump’s stories of windmills, Hannibal Lecter and sharks, into a convoluted but also quite alarming series of claims that kids are being kidnaped at school and given gender-reassignment surgery. Trump even tried to insert a version of this lie into the debate, saying of Kamala Harris, “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical left liberal that would do this.”
At the Moms for Liberty event on Sept. 2, Trump declared that schools are imposing gender-reassignment surgeries on minors. Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” 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.”
At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Sept. 7, Trump told the crowd, “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?” Wisconsin is a vital swing state.
The Republican party has been obsessed with sexuality and gender identity for years. It’s a complex obsession that has resulted in book bans and hundreds of laws that have done serious harm to LGBTQ_ kids and families and also created a rise in hate crimes.
The dangers
Make no mistake—Trump’s comments are dangerous as they are inflammatory. They push the false narrative from MAGAs and other conservatives that teachers and school counselors are “grooming” and “indoctrinating” kids to become gay or trans. That kind of rhetoric led directly to the death earlier this year of nonbinary Native teen Nex Benedict.
This new lie about kids going to school as boys and being sent home as girls is more of the same GOP obsession. It has become such a consistent talking point by Trump on the campaign trail, that it’s in the Zeitgeist and is also being repeated all over social media by Trump supporters, including his most ardent new fan and noted transphobe, Elon Musk, who has already signed on to be part of a new Trump administration.
The sheer volume of MAGAs who believe this is shocking. The danger inherent in the constant reiteration of this unhinged Trump claim is clear: false narratives about trans people breed more bigotry against a tiny minority already under threat. And Trump supporters have a bad track record with violence, as we learned from Jan. 6.
Influencing the election
The reality is school nurses have no facilities for surgeries and there is no evidence of any students having gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S. But that won’t stop Trump from making the claims and inflaming the outrage.
Trump has asserted before that he would ban gender-affirming care for minors, which he has called “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” Trump said recently that he intends to roll back Title IX protections for trans students “on day one” if he is re-elected.
While the days dwindle down to the election, every single talking point stands to influence how voters choose. And with the polling showing a nearly tied race and a handful of states destined to determine who wins the election, these inflammatory statements made as if they are truth, not fiction, could have an impact on the outcome. That’s a grim scenario to contemplate, but all we can do is fight back with the truth. When you see this lie, refute it. That’s the best recourse we have to stop Donald Trump and the myriad dangers he poses.
