Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made baseless claims that American schools are secretly performing gender-reassignment surgeries on children.
These claims are divorced from reality: Schools are not involved in the medical decisions that families of transgender youth make about receiving gender-affirming care. Surgeons or anyone who could potentially perform such surgeries do not work in elementary schools, which parental consent required provide students with as much medical care as possible. Trump campaign he did not provide any evidence to support these clearly false statements.
Although Trump did not apply this rhetoric in the debate, experts believe his absurd anti-trans comments are an attempt to bolster support for alienating parts of his base with confusing and unclear positions about restricting access to abortion. Experts say the point of such bizarre anti-trans rhetoric is that it doesn’t have to be based in reality — it just has to get people going.
“He had to do some fixing. And it’s a really easy strategy to just go back to anti-trans rhetoric,” said Alison Gash, a professor and chair of political science at the University of Oregon. Gash said it didn’t require evidence. Republicans didn’t need evidence to make accusations that transgender athletes were taking away opportunities from cisgender women, and proof that transgender people posed a threat to cisgender people wasn’t needed to pass anti-trans legislation across the country.
Gash expects Trump to spew more anti-trans rhetoric in the coming weeks. He expects he will apply that rhetoric in an attempt to retain segments of his base that may be livid about his rejection of Project 2025, plan for a second Trump administration offered by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Trump first baselessly accused schools of secretly conducting surgeries on students during annual Mothers for Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C., Aug. 30, in conversation with Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the group. Leaders of Moms for Liberty, a conservative nonprofit, accused teachers and librarians of “grooming” children — without explaining what that means – one sec encouraging parents “oppose” gender ideology.
“Transgender is amazing. Think about it: Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with surgery,” Trump said at the event. “The school decides what happens to your kid. And you know, a lot of these kids [sic] After 15 years they say, “What the hell happened, who did this to me?” They say, “Who did this to me.”
The former president did not make such an outrageous statement without reason. For years, Republican state lawmakers have sought to block teachers from accepting students who question their gender identity and to exclude LGBTQ+ people from schools, while far-right commentators have accused public schools of conditioning children to become transgender.
Trump’s turn to anti-transgender rhetoric as a political tool also follows the same path Republicans took in the 1980s, when they supported and opposed same-sex marriage as part of their national platform — because voters weren’t as enthusiastic about abortion back then, Gash said.
“He’s not just creating a narrative out of thin air, is he? He’s taking us back to the narratives that catalyzed his campaign in the first place,” said Gash, who studies advocacy strategies used to advance civil rights and how transgender youth are targeted in politics.
In Mosinee, Wisconsin, days before he and Harris took the debate stage for the first time, Trump repeated the same blatant claim at a campaign rally.
“Can you imagine being a parent and your son walking out the door and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have fun at school.’ And your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you imagine that? What the hell is wrong with our country,” he said.
Kelly Dittmar, an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers-Camden University and director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), believes Trump is repeating the claim as a desperate attempt to appeal to his base by exploiting concerns among some Republican voters about gender-affirming care. But making such an absurd claim could actually alienate the Republicans he’s trying to appeal to, she said.
“It has no basis in reality, so it’s unclear whether it will motivate people who have less extreme concerns,” Dittmar said.
As found in Third Annual Survey With 19. and SurveyMonkey, Just because many Americans oppose gender-affirming care for transgender youth doesn’t mean they support government restrictions. Sixty percent of Americans oppose the right of transgender minors to access gender-affirming care, but 54 percent of Americans do not support lawmakers banning or restricting such care, including half of Republicans. Additionally, 70 percent of Republicans believe lawmakers lack the knowledge to create equitable policy regarding gender-affirming care for minors.
Hopefully, those who are nuanced enough not to support widespread health care restrictions won’t be fooled by such outlandish claims, Dittmar said. Still, there’s an inherent danger when someone in a position of power repeats easily debunked claims, she said — because enough repetitionssome people will start to believe it. And either way, the safety and lives of transgender people are still at risk, she said.
“This is a place where he can be more open and clear, because he has struggled with abortion,” Dittmar said. The fight is based on trying not to scare away either religious conservatives who want a blanket abortion ban or the majority of Americans who support access to abortion.
Trump has made misleading statements about Florida bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. This is unclear whether he would veto a nationwide abortion ban. On debate scene with harrisTrump doubled down on the oft-repeated lie that Democratic-run states want to pass laws allowing the execution of children after birth, which is illegal. On the broader issue of reproductive health, Trump’s call for order free access for in vitro fertilization caused a stir and scandal among some Republican congressmen and their allies.
Trump only brought up transgender issues once during Tuesday’s debate, the only time LGBTQ+ issues were brought up on stage by either candidate. He did noticeable reference to a recent CNN report that Harris expressed support for taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries for detained immigrants in a 2019 ACLU poll. That poll, given to candidates in the 2020 presidential race, focused on immigration at a time when the Democratic Party was more concerned with being seen as a powerful supporter of migrants and undocumented immigrants.
“Now he wants to perform transgender surgeries on illegal immigrants who are in prison,” Trump said during Tuesday’s debate. “He’s a radical left-wing liberal who would do that.”
GLAAD, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy media group, noted that the “unmistakable slur against transgender people” was the only mention of LGBTQ Americans that night. In a statement, GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis urged campaign reporters and debate moderators to ask questions that reveal candidates’ agendas toward LGBTQ+ Americans so that the community is included “not just as political talking points.”
But for Jami Taylor, a professor of political science and public administration at the University of Toledo, the fact that LGBTQ+ issues were not brought up by moderators was a gift to transgender people.
If Harris were asked about trans women in sports or gender-affirming care for trans kids, Taylor would see it as a no-win situation for the vice president — she would have to weigh public sentiment and anger some of her coalition of voters, namely LGBTQ+ rights groups. For transgender people, it is crucial that Harris wins, Taylor said. To do that, maintaining she said discussions about transgender rights beyond the campaign trail are crucial.
“Democrats will lose the election if the election is about bathrooms, health care for transgender minors and transgender people in sports,” said Taylor, who has co-edited and co-authored two books on transgender policy. “The public attitudes are not very favorable. They are mixed at best.”
A solid majority of Americans — including most religious people — support nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people, but overall support has declined, according to a up-to-date poll Institute for Public Religion Research (PRRI), which tracks such responses annually. In 2022 AND 2023PRRI finds increased public support for policies requiring transgender people to apply bathrooms consistent with their assigned sex at birth in Republican-led states they passed extreme laws do just that.
To Taylor, it’s clear that Republicans want to apply the public’s divergent views on specific transgender policies to their advantage against Democrats, and to Harris, the decision not to address transgender rights on the campaign trail is a clever move.
“If you’re trans, it sucks to be excluded. And I, I mean, I’m trans,” Taylor said.
“But I think I’m politically savvy enough to know that winning an election is more important than my current feelings,” she said. “The movement has to meet people where they are.”🔥
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