The Things That Can Actually Happen at School

Donald Trump’s campaign appearances have been a bit loopier than usual this week. He’s started to talk about gender-reassignment surgeries that are supposedly happening at school.

I know I said I would try to cram my politics update into one post per week, but I also said I’d have to talk politics more often as we got closer and closer to election day, and here I am. In the past several days, Trump has been repeating a series of bizarre lies at his campaign appearances and in his social media posts. He’s claiming yet again that the upcoming election, and even this week’s debate, are rigged against him, though I don’t even know how you rig a debate. He’s repeating fictitious claims I’ve already debunked that it’s legal to kill babies after birth in blue states. He claims that tens of thousands of immigrants are being sent to our Southern border from “mental asylums,” even though border crossings have gone far down recently. And he’s also claiming that children are getting gender reassignment surgeries at school without their parents’ permission.

That last one has me scratching my head, and everyone else who heard it seems to be scratching too. How could anyone even believe that? Yes, public and private schools both often have a counselor and a nurse’s office, but those are not allowed to do anything without parents’ permission. You have to fill out forms to have your child see the counselor. You have to give permission for the nurse to give your child Tylenol. When my child ran a fever at school, they had to call me and get permission before they could swab her with a flu or COVID test– not a medicine, mind you, just a test. But Trump really has said, more than once, that children are getting entire gender reassignment surgeries against their parents’ will at school. At a Moms for Liberty event several days ago, he told an interviewer “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.” And just yesterday, in a campaign speech in Wisconsin, he claimed ““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?”

And everyone is laughing at this, because it’s such a laughably ridiculous thing to say.

It would  be neat if schools were equipped to perform emergency surgeries like an appendectomy in case anything terrible should happen, but they are not. You cannot get any kind of surgery at a school. Gender transition involves a series of surgeries and medications that take years; it’s not something anyone could do over the course of a school day even in a world where schools had an operating room and a surgeon standing by. America’s schools tend to be woefully underfunded; teachers have to bring their own pencils and art supplies for the classroom. Nobody’s going to foot the bill for a gender transition. It couldn’t happen even in the wildest fantasy. All you can do is laugh at such nonsense.

Still, it’s not really laughable to watch Donald Trump rant. Because as he rants, I think about all the terrible things that could happen to a child at school, and how the cult of Donald Trump has made things harder for children.

Can you imagine: you send your child to school with an “I love you so much,” and your child almost tells you something that’s on their mind, but stops because they are afraid of what you’d say. They keep that secret inside of themself. They feel horrible anguish about their gender but they don’t have anyone they can talk to to help them understand what’s happening inside them. They feel like a liar every time they use the locker room or the toilet, but they have no one to explain the feeling to. They’d love to go to Mom and Dad for empathy and advice. That’s what children are supposed to do. But they’re afraid of what Mom and Dad will say. They’ve almost made up their minds to be honest. They get home and put their backpack away and go to make an after school snack.

When they carry it back to the living room, there are Mom and Dad, watching the latest Trump rally, approvingly. They hear what Trump says about transgender children and see the look of revulsion on their parents’ faces at the very mention of gender transition.  And they keep their secret to themselves.  And they would never trust you with their secrets again. And they’d get into all the different kinds of trouble a child gets into, when that child feels their parents can’t be trusted. And you wouldn’t be able to help.

That’s something that could actually happen. A child getting a non-consensual gender reassignment surgery in the school nurse’s office is not.

Here’s something else that could happen. Can you imagine: You send your daughter to school with an “I love you so much.” Your daughter could get there and see the classmate, or the older boy, or the young handsome substitute teacher, or the youth minister— the one she’s been crushing on for the longest time. She’d smile at him. And that boy or man could reciprocate her smile, and she’d feel like it was the happiest day of her life. And maybe things would proceed from there, and your daughter would naively go and meet that man or boy someplace alone, because young girls with crushes make mistakes no matter how carefully we teach them not to. Or maybe your daughter would behave in an exemplary way, but the boy or man would lie in wait and entrap her anyway somehow.  And that boy or man would do something unspeakable. And when he was finished, he would tell her that it was all her fault, that she’d made him do it, and everyone would blame her if she told anyone what happened. She’d go home in agony, wanting to fall into your arms and tell you everything so you could make this stop and protect her from it ever happening again.

And when she got home, there would be Mom and Dad, watching Trump on TV as he slanders and defames that woman he raped in a dressing room, denying something that two different juries of his peers held him liable for. He’s also slandering the OTHER woman who reported that he sexually assaulted her– not by protesting that rape is unthinkable, but that she’s not his type. “She wouldn’t have been the chosen one. She wouldn’t have been the chosen one.” As if being raped were an honor. And your daughter watch you nod your head in approval at what he was saying. And she would realize that she can’t possibly trust you.

That’s something that could happen.

Getting surgery at school isn’t.

Or, of course, your child could go to school and never come back at all.

You could send your son off to school with an “I love you so much,” and two hours later you’d get an automated phone call, and your heart would jump up into your throat. You’d get in your car and step on the gas, and when you got to school you’d see the ambulances and the SWAT team and behind them, the television news trucks. Maybe one of those reporters would snap your picture as you sprinted over to the sawhorses the police put down so no one would enter the school parking lot. You’d run around trying to find someone who could tell you what was happening, and it might take an hour or more of waiting in terror before you found out you’d never see that boy again.

This has happened between 300 and 400 times in the past twenty-five years or so. That many children have gone off to school in the morning, and ended up in the coroner’s office in a body bag before school’s out, because somebody picked up a gun and used a school as a killing ground. This doesn’t happen in other countries, but it happens all the time in America, because we let it happen. We have the National Rifle Association, which says that guns of every kind, no matter how dangerous, have to be available to anyone who can buy one, and that every single law regulating those guns is a sin against the second amendment. And there is a political party who will do whatever the NRA tells them, as long as the NRA keeps the cash flowing. That party has nominated Donald Trump for president. Trump has promised to keep our gun laws nice and lax, so school shootings can keep happening unabated, because there’s money to be made.

That could happen to any of our children at any time, because enough of us have voted to protect the Second Amendment instead of our children.

A lot of people have even referred to that vote as a “pro-life” one.

But I promise your child is not going to get a gender reassignment surgery at school.

Your daughter could watch her classmate and very best friend, the DREAMer who was snuck into the country as a baby and didn’t even know she wasn’t a citizen, arrested and thrown into a detention camp before being deported to a country she’s never known, with a language she doesn’t speak. Of course, both political parties deport immigrants, but Trump is the one who’s gleefully promising mass deportation of tens of millions without mercy. But no, that child won’t get a gender reassignment surgery.

We could lose our democracy entirely and your child will never grow up to cast their first vote.

We could end up with a world war because the United States threw NATO under the bus, and your child could die in a bombing.

Your child could die from the botched handling of a pandemic or a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, or anything else that is made worse when you hand the reins of a country over to a petty tyrant.

But you don’t have to worry about your child getting a gender reassignment surgery behind your back.

We can go on laughing at that, as well we should.

Just make sure you’re aware of other things, real things, that could actually happen.