During a conversation onstage at a Moms for Liberty event last week, Donald Trump said something that made even me—a seasoned visitor to Trump’s theme park of hyperbole—look around in confusion at the people around me in the audience.
“The transgender thing is incredible,” he told the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. “Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”
Headlines after the event declared that Trump was questioning the acceptance of transgender children. Fact-check: True. But his full comments are worth spending a little more time with. As is typical with the former president’s rhetoric, Trump took the tiniest smidgen of information, inflated it with 10,000 cubic feet of hot air, and sent it flying off into the country to rile up his supporters. Justice, of course, did not attempt to correct him or offer any context.
First, schools are not providing sex-change operations to students. Even from a purely financial perspective, that seems obvious: Teachers still have to buy their own crayons; schools aren’t shelling out for surgeons. Second, educators are not deciding “what’s going to happen” with students, beyond subjecting them to a pop quiz or an in-school suspension.
What some schools are doing is following the Biden administration’s recent revision of Title IX regulations, the law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools. These new rules require schools to refer to transgender students using their chosen pronouns, ensure that students and faculty can use the restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity, and allow students to dress in accordance with that identity. Republican attorneys general and advocacy groups such as Moms for Liberty have sued to block the new federal rules from taking effect, and they’ve succeeded in securing judicial review in more than two dozen states, including Tennessee, Ohio, and Virginia.
Because it’s an election year, the conversation is only generating more heat. As governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz—now Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate—signed a law making his state a “trans refuge,” and another requiring that public schools provide free menstrual products to all students. Now Trump and others on the right are referring to Walz as “Tampon Tim.”
The context for this debate is that Americans disagree about how to handle the presence of transgender people in public schools. On the left, people have broadly advocated for changes, such as the ones from the Biden administration, that would recognize trangender students’ chosen identity and adapt to them. Although the new Title IX rule does not advise teachers on student privacy and parental disclosure, some Democratic-controlled states also have laws stipulating that teachers should not reveal information about a student’s gender identity to their parents without the student’s permission. Other people and groups, however, have argued against such adaptations. In several Republican-controlled states, school boards have implemented rules that restrict the labeling and use of bathrooms to biological sex, and bar schools from honoring a student’s change in name or pronoun without their parents’ permission.
In any case, Trump’s suggestion that schools are performing gender surgery is not only untrue; it’s also a dangerous, unsubtle dog whistle to the QAnon followers in his party, who have long argued that Democrats are sexualizing children. We already know that this kind of rhetoric can have violent outcomes: The propagation of a similar child-abuse theory famously resulted in a 2016 attack at a D.C. restaurant.
People can disagree in good faith about the policies governing schools supported by their taxpayer dollars. But disagreeing with those policies does not justify promoting conspiratorial lies.