At the State of the Union on Tuesday, President Donald Trump demanded the end of schools implementing gender secrecy policies to “transition” confused young people without parental knowledge or consent.
The 45th and 47th president called for the end of gender secrecy policies after telling the story of one of his address guests, Sage Blair. Blair was taken from her parents at the age of 14 after school officials in Virginia allegedly tried to secretly transition her into identifying as male. Blair’s mother, Michele, who was also a guest at the address, sued her daughter’s school district in 2023, alleging the school secretly transitioned her daughter. The lawsuit further alleges that the school’s actions led to Sage running away from home, where she ended up being kidnapped, drugged, and raped by sex traffickers.
At one point during the legal fight, a judge ordered Sage to be separated from her parents because they supposedly did not affirm her “gender identity.”
“But today, all of that is behind them because Sage is a proud and wonderful young woman with a full ride scholarship to Liberty University,” Trump said during his address.
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“Thank you for your great bravery,” he continued. “And who can believe that we’re even speaking about things like this. Fifteen years ago, if somebody was up here and said that, they’d say ‘what’s wrong with him?’ And now we have to say it because it’s going on all over numerous states without even telling the parents.”
“But 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. Who would believe that we are even talking about this? We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately,” he said.
President Trump’s Department of Education (ED) has been investigating states like California and Maine over their gender secrecy policies. ED says such policies are a violation of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which is a federal law that gives parents the right to access their children’s education data. The department says a violation of FERPA can result in the termination of federal funding.
An advocacy group called Parents Defending Education found that in 2025 more than 1,000 school districts across the United States have policies openly stating that “district personnel can or should keep students’ transgender status hidden from their parents.” Those districts encompass 21,314 schools and 12,360,787 students.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
