Last weekend, Donald Trump made an appearance at the Moms For Liberty Joyful Warrior summit, during which he lamented that children were, and I quote, “Think about it, 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 many of these childs [sic], 15 years later, say ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’”
This is a patently false statement. It’s not a thing, it does not happen. But the Moms For Liberty are very, very upset that people are saying that it is false instead of just going along with him/them. So upset, in fact, that I got a PR email from someone representing the group titled “Embarrassing abdication of ‘JOURNALISM’ in CNN’s ‘Fact Check’ of Trump” that promised a litany of lawsuits related to just this very thing.
Are you so excited to hear what they have to say about that?
I certainly was! Because hey! — if I’m wrong, if I’ve got spinach in my teeth or toilet paper attached to my shoe or I’ve tucked my dress into my tights by accident (which could happen to anyone), I hope people will tell me.
Except the thing is … every single lawsuit they sent along had to do with social transitioning, which is pretty different from actual surgery:
LAWSUITS SENT TO CNN, WHICH THEY IGNORED IN THEIR REPORTING:
January Littlejohn / Parental rights lawsuit in FL: (Excerpt, “...School officials’ secret social-transitioning of minor children in alternate gender identities and deliberately withholding that information from parents.)
Abigail Martinez /Parental rights lawsuit in CA: (Excerpt: “She shares her family’s tragic story in hopes that other families will not experience similar heartache from harmful state policies that exclude parents and pressure vulnerable minors to pursue gender transitions, often at the expense of their mental and physical health.”)
Foote v Ludlow /Parental rights lawsuit in MA: (Excerpt: “PRF submits this amicus brief because this case represents what we believe is rapidly becoming all too-common: schools and school personnel forgetting that parental rights are fundamental, and believing that they can encourage minor children to hide key components of who they are from their parents, while actively encouraging children to disobey and ignore their parents’ wishes, and while actively deceiving parents and hiding information about their own children from them.”
Kettle Moraine / Parental rights lawsuit in WI: Excerpt - “This particular case is simply whether a school district can supplant a parent’s right to control the healthcare and medical decisions for their children. The well established case law in that regard is clear – Kettle Moraine can not. The School District abrogated the parental rights of B.F. and T.F. on how to medically treat A.F. when the district decided to socially affirm A.F. at school despite B.F. and T.F. requesting it does not.”
Wendell Perez /Parental rights lawsuit in FL- Headline: “Florida father sues school after daughter's suicide attempts, says gender counseling hidden from parents.“
Again, none of this is surgery. Therefore, if one is fact checking “Can kids go to school and come back a few days later without a penis?” they are not of much help.
But the email also offered some quotes from Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. Perhaps those will be more illuminating?
The President is right to bring up this issue because public schools in America are the ON-RAMP for gender transitioning of minor children. As soon as a school is legally allowed to assign a new pronoun without parental knowledge (which the Biden-Harris Administration wants to codify in federal law with their Title IX re-write for gender ideology), then students quickly go down the road from SOCIAL TRANSITION of their gender to MEDICAL TRANSITION with hormone therapy, and then SURGICAL TRANSITION with gender reassignment surgery. If schools were not the on-ramp and it was just children self-identifying, then why have the cases of gender dysphoria exponentially multiplied since the start of schools using ‘affirming care!?’
Curiously, while she has no problem bending the truth here — claiming that schools “assign” a child a different pronoun rather than simply using the pronoun they choose to go by — even Tiffany Justice does not actually claim that schools are doing any operations, as Trump did.
What about this other quote though. Does that refute it?
What President Trump said to our audience of Moms for Liberty in DC was met with a round of applause because parents of school kids hear about this all the time. There is absolutely no school untouched by ‘gender ideology’ now. And, when a child is hurting and confused, the schools isolate them from their parents to the point of numerous lawsuits being filed against schools and school districts. CNN also made a HUGE error in fact when they say no US state allows gender surgery without parental consent. Guess which one does? Minnesota, which is run by Tim Walz, who is now running to lead our whole country. What an important fact for them to ignore.
No, it does not, despite all of the other ridiculous lies contained therein.
What Minnesota law holds is if parents are not together and live in different states, a parent in Minnesota can get their kid gender-affirming care without worrying about legal repercussions from whatever state the other parent lives in. That is very different!
The idea that these surgeries are even remotely common among teenagers is also patently ridiculous.
A recent study published by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that not only is it incredibly rare for teenagers to get gender-affirming surgery at all, but that the vast majority of those getting “gender-affirming surgeries” aren’t even trans — they are cisgender boys getting “breast reduction surgery” for gynecomastia.
The study found no gender-affirming surgeries performed on TGD youth ages 12 and younger in 2019. This was expected, the researchers said, as current international guidelines do not suggest any medical or surgical intervention for TGD individuals prior to puberty. For teens ages 15 to 17 and adults ages 18 and older, the rate of undergoing gender-affirming surgery with a TGD-related diagnosis was 2.1 per 100,000 and 5.3 per 100,000, respectively. A majority of these surgeries were chest surgeries. When considering use of gender-affirming breast reductions among cisgender males and TGD people, the study found that cisgender males accounted for the vast majority of breast reductions, with 80% of surgeries among adults performed on cisgender men and 97% of surgeries among minors performed on cisgender male teens.
Schools, also, are not taking boys to get gynecomastia surgery, for whatever that is worth.
It is, actually, the job of schools to protect kids from their parents at times. It is their job to call Child Protective Services when they suspect child abuse or neglect. It is their job to listen to kids without those kids having to worry that their parents will find out, and it is their job to put the welfare of the children above that of their parents. It’s also not the job of teachers to shame or bully children and refuse to call them by their preferred pronouns or the name they choose to go by — at least decent people who actually care about children hope it is not.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
I have been busy working on the most important movie calendar of the year. It's the 3rd annual Wonktober Frightfest! Four scary movies plus a special event on Thursday the 31st,
Halloween (1979) on Halloween!
The calendar will premiere tonight at 8:30 pm ET on my Substack. Plus we are starting spooky season early just like Hooper, watching 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐢𝐫𝐝𝐬 tonight.
I was never given the option to send my kids to public schools and get them back "a few days later". Non-fair!