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

Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters

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.”

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.

路透社/Elijah Nouvelage

在 2024 年总统竞选的最后几个月里，唐纳德·特朗普总统编造了一个荒谬的谎言，称美国部分地区的学校在家长不知情的情况下将孩子送去做变性手术。

在2026年中期选举的最后几周，特朗普又重拾了这个谎言。

周五在佐治亚州的一次集会上，他说：“我们把批判种族理论和变性残害（原文如此）的疯狂想法从学校里清除出去了。我的意思是，现在有五个州，你的孩子上学时叫蒂姆，三四天后回来就变成了塔米。这是真的。老师——或者说，有人——会做出决定。你能想象吗？‘再见，蒂米。我非常爱你。回头见。’然后你会说，‘我的儿子在哪儿？我的儿子在医院。’你能想象吗？你能想象吗？他们甚至不需要批准。这太恶心了。有五个州——我想是明尼苏达州和其他一些州——我想是五六个州。你知道的，对吧？”

纯属胡说八道。

没有哪个州规定学校在送孩子去医院进行择期手术时无需获得家长同意。而且，就像2024年一样，性别认同护理领域的专家告诉CNN，他们从未听说过美国学校秘密送孩子去做变性手术的案例。

白宫自身也无法提供任何例证来证明特朗普的说法。我们联系的五个保守派组织也未作出回应。

明尼苏达州教育部门发言人安娜·阿金称特朗普的说法“完全错误”。全国学校护士协会理事会主席林恩·尼尔森周一指出，“即使给学生服用泰诺，通常也需要家长或监护人的书面许可，而且在许多地区，还需要持证医疗保健提供者的医嘱。”尼尔森表示，特朗普关于学校秘密安排儿童进行变性手术的说法是“错误的”，并且“歪曲了学校护士提供的护理服务”。

“没有任何记录显示学校会带孩子去医院做性别确认手术，”哈佛医学院讲师兰登·休斯说道，他曾发表过关于美国未成年人性别矫正普及率的研究。“这种说法不仅完全没有证据支持，而且反映出人们对未成年人手术治疗的法律和医疗同意要求存在根本性的误解。”

“我从未听说过这样的案例，而且也很难想象这种情况会发生，”健康政策研究机构KFF的LGBTQ健康政策项目主任林赛·道森说。“学校在没有家长同意的情况下能够提供的医疗服务类型非常有限。”

道森还表示：“所谓学校为学生进行医疗性别转换的说法显然是错误的。跨性别者只占人口的一小部分，并非所有跨性别者都会进行医疗性别转换，年轻人接受手术的情况更是极其罕见。这种情况绝不会发生在学校，也不是学校政策所致。”

有限的现有数据表明，只有极少数跨性别者在未成年时接受手术，而且未成年人接受的性别手术绝大多数是 15 至 17 岁之间的胸部手术。

一些州禁止18岁以下的人接受变性手术，包括变性手术以及更广泛的性别认同治疗，例如激素治疗和青春期阻断药物。南加州大学性别肯定治疗项目医疗主任劳拉·泰勒博士在2024年表示，即使在这些医疗干预措施对未成年人合法的州，也需要父母同意。

泰勒概述了未成年人接受此类手术前需要经过的漫长过程。

“对于青少年来说，是否开始激素治疗和/或手术的决定，需要在与跨学科团队进行心理社会评估后做出，”她说道（粗体字为原文所有）。“评估内容包括了解与性别认同不符（即身体特征与个人性别认同不符而引起的痛苦）相关的性别焦虑，这种焦虑持续了多久，排除其他可能导致性别焦虑的原因，并确保青少年及其家人能够提供知情同意。”

特朗普开始在演讲中反复提及学校和秘密手术的故事，周一在堪萨斯州的集会上、周六在肯塔基州的集会上以及10月12日在俄亥俄州的集会上都含糊其辞地重复了这些说法。但本周我们向白宫询问美国学校是否真的在未经家长同意的情况下将儿童送往医院进行变性手术，特朗普的团队却找不到任何案例——更不用说特朗普提到的“五六个州”的例子了。

相反，白宫在周一的一封未署名电子邮件中附上了一份案例清单，其中列举了一些学校在父母不知情的情况下协助未成年人进行社会转变的案例——允许他们在学校被称呼不同的名字或代词——有时据称还会将这些未成年人与辅导员或治疗师联系起来，这些辅导员或治疗师也会支持他们的社会转变。

这与特朗普的说法截然不同，特朗普声称学校将孩子送到医院进行父母不知情的手术。

白宫在一封未署名的电子邮件中声称：“特朗普总统清楚地表明，学校里启动的这些程序与这些孩子最终在医院和医生办公室服用危险药物并接受永久性残害手术之间存在直接联系。”

不，特朗普并没有“清楚地解释”这个论点。总统并没有说孩子们“最终”都会接受手术；他的言论也并非关于学校允许未成年人进行社会性别转换可能带来的所谓未来风险。

相反，在连续第二个选举周期中，特朗普只是断言，美国部分地区的学校允许在家长以为孩子在上课的时候送他们去做手术——而且，在连续第二个选举周期中，他的助手们都无法证明这种情况曾经发生过。

白宫周一重点报道的大部分新闻文章根本没有提及手术，尽管白宫用“残害”一词来形容仅涉及社会性别转换的案例。而唯一提及手术的案例最终并未进行实际手术——这非但没有证实特朗普的说法，反而削弱了他的可信度。

科罗拉多州的一对父母表示，他们的女儿在高一时出现了抑郁、焦虑和“跨性别认同”的症状，学校辅导员鼓励她进行性别转换，并讨论了激素治疗和变性手术的可能性。但这对父母提起的诉讼称，在他们“拒绝”女儿接受激素治疗或手术后，女儿开始后悔进行性别转换，并重新认同自己是女孩。

换句话说，即使在以支持学生在学校进行社会转变而闻名的州，未经父母同意，任何手术都不能进行。