Daniel Wolfram
“It’s true,” Trump insisted to rally crowds, claiming public schools secretly send children for gender surgery and return them “three or four days later” without parental consent.
Donald Trump has brought back an old fabricated story for the final stretch before the 2026 midterm elections. At a rally in Georgia last week, he told supporters that schools in five or six states secretly send children off for gender surgery without telling their parents.
“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,” Trump said during his speech in Georgia.
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Since then, Trump has repeated the false story at rallies across Kentucky, Kansas, and Ohio. CNN fact-checked the story and found nothing to support it. CNN also gave White House officials a chance to provide evidence for Trump’s transgender claim.
No state allows classrooms to schedule hospital operations behind a family’s back. Across the country, pediatric doctors and school leaders confirmed that such secret hospital trips simply never happen.
Strict medical rules
In reality, school nurses face strict legal guardrails every single day. Lynn Nelson, head of the National Association of School Nurses board of directors, told CNN 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.” According to Nelson, the allegations are simply “false.”
Up in Minnesota, one of the states Trump blamed for having a lot of these surgeries, education officials pushed back immediately. Agency spokesperson Anna Arkin called the claim “unequivocally false.”
Landon Hughes, a health services researcher at Harvard Medical School, noted: “There are no documented cases of schools taking children to hospitals for gender-affirming surgery.” Lindsey Dawson, a director at KFF, agreed: “Schools are very limited in the type of care they can provide without parental consent.”
Zero evidence found
White House press officials offered no evidence when CNN asked for proof. Instead, an unsigned email cited disputes over students using preferred pronouns or social names in class. None involved surgery.
In one highlighted Colorado case that the White House likes to reference as evidence, parents refused consent, meaning no medical procedure ever took place.
Meanwhile, Trump seems to believe that these false claims and culture-war battles over demeaning and vilifying transgender children are a winning topic among his voter base. That claim will be put to the test on Tuesday, November 3.
