Fact check: Trump falsely claims schools are secretly sending children for gender-affirming surgeries

Former President Donald Trump has been making false claims about transgender people – including an inflammatory and baseless claim on Friday that schools are secretly providing or obtaining gender-affirming surgeries for children.

Former President Donald Trump has been making false claims about transgender people – including an inflammatory and baseless claim on Friday that schools are secretly providing or obtaining gender-affirming surgeries for children. “The transgender thing is incredible. Think of 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,” Trump said in remarks to the conservative group Moms for Liberty. Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. There is no evidence that US schools have sent children into gender-affirming surgeries without their parents knowing or performed gender-affirming surgeries on site; Trump’s own presidential campaign could not provide a single example of this ever happening. Even in states where gender-affirming surgery is legal for people under age 18, parental consent is required before a minor can undergo such a procedure.   “Of course everything in this statement is false,” Dr. Meredithe McNamara, an adolescent medicine physician at the Yale School of Medicine, said in a Monday email. “Of course surgery of any kind happens in a qualified medical center and not in a school. Of course parents are the medical decision-makers for their kids, especially when it comes to gender-affirming care.” Landon Hughes, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a co-author of a recent study on the prevalence of gender-affirming surgery in the US, said in a Tuesday email: “There are no instances of children receiving surgeries or access to surgeries from their schools.” Hughes added: “No provider in the US would perform surgery on a minor under the direction of a school, let alone without parental consent.” For minors, parental consent is also required in the US for non-surgical gender-affirming medical treatments, like puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Various guidelines and standards for medical care of transgender adolescents, from entities including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, explain that parental consent is needed.