Fact check: Trump brings back his 2024 lie that schools are secretly sending kids to hospitals for gender surgery

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — In the final months of the 2024 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump told an outlandish lie that schools in parts of the US were sending children for gender surgeries without the knowledge of their parents.

Trump has now revived the lie for the final weeks of the 2026 midterm campaign.

At a rally in Georgia on Friday, he said, “We got critical race theory and transgender mutilization (sic) insanity out of our schools. I mean, we have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy, three or four days later. It’s true. And teachers make – somebody makes a decision. Can you imagine? ‘Goodbye, Timmy. I love you so much. I’ll see you later.’ And you say, ‘Where’s my son? My son is in the hospital.’ Can you imagine? Can you imagine? They don’t even need approval. It’s sick. You’ll have five – I think Minnesota and some others – I think it’s five or six states. You know that, right?”

That’s all nonsense.

There is no state in which schools would not need parental approval to send a child to a hospital for elective surgery. And just like in 2024, experts in gender identity care told CNN that they do not know of a single case in which a US school had secretly sent a child away for gender surgery.

The White House itself couldn’t provide one example proving Trump’s claim. Five conservative organizations we contacted in search of any examples did not respond.

A spokesperson for Minnesota’s education department, Anna Arkin, called Trump’s claim “unequivocally false.” And the president of the National Association of School Nurses board of directors, Lynn Nelson, noted Monday that “even giving a student Tylenol typically requires written parent or guardian permission and, in many jurisdictions, an order from a licensed health care provider.” Nelson said Trump’s claims about schools sending children off for secret gender surgeries are “false” and “misrepresent the care school nurses provide.”

“There are no documented cases of schools taking children to hospitals for gender-affirming surgery,” said Landon Hughes, an instructor at Harvard Medical School who has published studies on the prevalence of gender care among US minors. “This claim is not only entirely unsupported by evidence but also reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the legal and medical consent requirements governing surgical care for minors.”

“I know of no such case, and it is extremely difficult to envision a scenario where that would happen,” said Lindsey Dawson, director of the LGBTQ Health Policy Program at KFF, a health policy research organization. “Schools are very limited in the type of care they can provide without parental consent.”

Dawson also said, “The claim that schools are medically transitioning students is patently false. Transgender people make up a small share of the population, not all transgender people pursue medical transition, and surgery among young people is extremely rare. It is certainly not happening in schools or because of school policy.”

The limited available data suggests a tiny percentage of transgender people receive surgery as minors and that the vast majority of the gender surgeries that minors do receive are chest procedures between the ages of 15 and 17.

Some states ban people under 18 from receiving gender surgery in particular or both gender surgery and broader gender identity care like hormones and puberty-blocking drugs. Even in states where these medical interventions are legal for minors, parental consent is required, Dr. Laura Taylor, medical director of the Gender-Affirming Care Program at the University of Southern California, said in 2024.

Taylor outlined a lengthy process before a minor might undergo such a surgery.

“In adolescents, the decision to start hormones and/or have surgery would happen after consultation with an interdisciplinary team for a psychosocial assessment,” she said, the bold type hers. “The assessment includes understanding the dysphoria related to gender incongruence (the distress caused by the physical characteristics that do not match the person’s identity), how long it has been present, excluding other reasons to account for the dysphoria, and making sure the adolescent and family can provide informed consent.”

The White House couldn’t find any examples proving Trump’s point

Trump has started peppering his speeches with his tale about schools and clandestine surgeries, delivering vague versions at a Kansas rally on Monday, a Kentucky rally on Saturday and an Ohio rally on October 12. But when we asked the White House this week for cases in which US schools had actually sent children to hospitals for gender surgeries without parental consent, Trump’s team wasn’t able to find any – let alone examples from the “five or six states” Trump invoked.

Instead, in an unsigned email on Monday, the White House sent along a list of cases in which schools facilitated minors’ social transitions without their parents’ knowledge – allowing them to be called a different name or pronouns at school – and sometimes allegedly connected these minors with counselors or therapists who also supported the social transitions.

That’s very different than Trump’s narrative about schools sending a child to a hospital for an operation their parents didn’t know about.

The White House claimed in the unsigned email: “President Trump is clearly explaining that a direct nexus exists between these processes being initiated at schools, and the same kids eventually ending up in hospitals and doctors’ offices taking dangerous drugs and undergoing permanent mutilation procedures.”

Nope, Trump wasn’t “clearly explaining” that argument. The president didn’t say children “eventually” end up getting surgery; his story wasn’t about the alleged future dangers of schools permitting minors to make social transitions.

Rather, for the second election cycle in a row, Trump simply asserted that schools in parts of the country have a permitted practice of sending children to be operated on when their parents thought they were attending class – and, for the second election cycle in a row, his aides couldn’t prove that this had ever happened.

Most of the news articles the White House highlighted Monday did not mention surgery at all, though the White House used the word “mutilation” to describe cases involving only social transitions. And a case that did involve a mention of surgery did not end up in actual surgery – undermining, rather than confirming, Trump’s stories.

In that case, Colorado parents said that after their daughter was experiencing feelings of depression, anxiety and “transgender identification” in her freshman year of high school, a school counselor encouraged her to make a social transition and discussed the possibility of hormone treatments and gender surgery. But a lawsuit filed by the parents said that after they “would not consent” to hormones or surgery, their daughter came to regret the social transition and resumed identifying as a girl.

In other words, even in a state known as being supportive of students who want to undergo social transitions at school, there was no surgery without parental consent.

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