Trump and Linda McMahon make claims about trans kids at White House event
Donald Trump and Linda McMahon (Getty Images)
A White House back-to-school celebration took a sharp turn into anti-trans rhetoric on Monday (24 August), as Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon used an event attended by schoolchildren to repeat unfounded claims about transgender students and schools.
Trump falsely claimed that Biden-era policies forced “transgender insanity” on children and said schools could be committing child abuse by telling a child they are “trapped in the wrong body”.
McMahon, meanwhile, repeated the debunked claim that schools have been “secretly” transitioning students and threatened to pull federal funding from schools over what she described as “radical experiments”..
The Education Department has not identified schools conducting medical experiments or medically transitioning students. Its investigations have instead involved issues such as educators respecting students’ names and pronouns, or schools disclosing the gender identities of children without their consent.
LGBTQ+ students continue to report discrimination and harassment at school. An 18 August GLISTEN-Trevor Project report found that 56 per cent of trans, nonbinary and gender-diverse students surveyed attended schools with at least one discriminatory policy, while 61 per cent had experienced a negative event at school.
Trump also used the event to repeat a false claim about childhood vaccines and autism, suggesting that spreading out vaccinations would reduce autism despite extensive research finding no causal link between vaccines and autism.
All of this was delivered at a back-to-school event where children made up roughly half of the audience.
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