President Donald Trump used a teenage girl’s story to call for a ban on states and schools allowing transgender and nonbinary students to socially transition without parental consent, in what civil rights groups have called “forced outing” that endangers vulnerable children.
Trump singled out the story of a Virginia teenager during his State of the Union address Tuesday to call on Congress to further restrict transgender and nonbinary youth after his administration imposed sweeping bans targeting trans Americans over the last year.
Sage Blair’s mother, Michele, sued the Appomattox County School Board in 2023 over allegations that the district did not disclose information that Sage was identifying as male.
Michele has claimed that the school’s alleged withholding of that information led to Sage running away from home and experiencing abuse. The case is ongoing.
“Surely we can all agree, no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will,” Trump said in his remarks. “We must ban it and we must ban it immediately.
Gesturing to Democratic lawmakers who didn’t stand up to applaud him, Trump said: “Look, nobody stands up. These people are crazy. I’m telling you. They’re crazy.”
Michele Blair, who is named in court documents as Sage’s paternal grandmother and adoptive mother, has repeatedly testified in support of “Sage’s Law,” legislation in Virginia that would mandate schools to notify parents if a student identifies as a different gender.
Sage Blair was diagnosed with “severe gender dysphoria” and related symptoms in 2021, according to court filings.
She reported experiencing severe abuse, sexual harassment and threats from schoolmates, which Michele Blair blamed on the school for supporting her gender expression. She accused the school of violating her right to direct Sage’s upbringing.
In August, a federal appeals court upheld a lower court’s dismissal, asserting that “under the facts alleged here, none support a finding that these rights are clearly established under the law.” The panel instead suggested Michele could try to bring a case that the school acted with “deliberate indifference” to threats against Sade under civil rights law.
“I’m just so grateful that a light has been shown on this dark topic because it’s happening to so many children like Sage,” Blair told Fox & Friends after the president’s address.
“[The school] glorified the fact that … she wanted to identify as a boy, and she was being horribly bullied,” she said. “Had things been different, and they called me and brought me in and told me about the bullying, I could have saved her a lifetime of nightmares.”
LGBT+ advocates warn that proposals like Trump’s would forcibly “out” trans and gender nonconfirming children to unsupportive families.
At least six states explicitly require school staff members to notify families when a student has requested to be called by a different name or to use different pronouns, according to LGBT+ advocacy group the Movement Advancement Project.
Roughly 2.8 million people, or 1 percent of the U.S. population, identify as trans, including 3.3 percent of U.S. youth ages 13 to 17, or roughly 724,000 teenagers, according to data collected by UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute.
Since taking office, the president has issued a series of directives targeting trans Americans, including an executive order that erases federal recognition of trans people and other measures that restrict gender-affirming healthcare and ban trans athletes from competing in women’s sports.
The Department of Defense has also banned trans people from serving in all branches of the military after the president issued an order stating that the “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
Hundreds of federal surveys have also scrubbed questions tied to sexual orientation and gender identity, the Williams Institute found.
“Unfortunately, this is just the latest attempt from Trump and his fellow MAGA politicians to wrestle away medical freedom from American families and distract from their complete failure to solve this country’s pressing issues,” Human Rights Campaign press secretary Brandon Wolf said in a statement after the president’s address.
“No amount of transphobic fear mongering will change the reality of the state of our union,” he said.
