Trump makes wild claim that school education is now ‘mostly transgender’
Donald Trump has once again made wild claims about trans issues and schools (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
Donald Trump has once again made a totally unfounded claim about the US school system as a means of pushing right-wing, anti-transgender narratives.
The former US president and Republican nominee for November’s presidential election made the comments in a conversation with Kellyanne Conway, his former political advisor, on her Fox News show Here’s The Deal with Kellyanne Conway.
The comments were reported by the Huffington Post but PinkNews has been unable to independently confirm them.
“We want reading, writing and arithmetic,” the former president was reported to have said. “Right now, you have mostly transgender. Everything’s transgender.”
He went on to add: “Some of these school programs, I looked at it the other night ― they’re destroying our country”.
It is unclear what Trump believes these alleged transgender curriculums contain, but if you ask his running-mate JD Vance the reason for falling maths levels is in the US is because they can name “87 genders”.
“Well, now we’ve got American children who can’t add five plus five, but they can tell you that there are 87 different genders and I think both of those things are related,” the Ohio senator told Lance Wallnau, a right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical preacher.
This is not the first time Trump has made outrageous claims about trans folks and schools.
In September, the GOP nominee said multiple times that school pupils are undergoing gender-affirming surgeries during the school day – a completely false claim.
“The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it: your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child,” he said at a Moms for Liberty event.
Following this, at a rally in Wisconsin, he said: “[Vice-president] Kamala [Harris] supports states being able to take minor children… away from their parents, perform sex-change operations, and send them back home.
“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say: ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school’, and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”
When asked about the comments by CNN, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice admitted the claims were false but said she was “thankful to President Trump” for saying it because it drew attention to the topic of social transition in schools – the process when students change their presentation or pronouns.
“It grabbed your attention and we’re talking about it now, and that makes me very happy,” she said.
The comments were very quickly debunked by medical professionals and members of teachers unions, who pointed out many schools can hardly afford new textbooks let alone the medical equipment to perform a highly complex and invasive medical procedure.
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