Expert Discusses Highlighting Controversial ‘Gender Affirming’ Laws During State of the Union Addres

And now what we just heard is a clip from Tuesday's State of the Union address where President Trump highlighted the story of a Virginia teen whose parents say school officials secretly attempted to socially gender transition her without their consent. Now the story sparked a national debate over parental rights and federal protections and so for analysis we welcome Laura Hanford, Senior Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Laura, good afternoon, welcome. You're a personal friend of the Blair family. What did it mean to see Sage's story highlighted by the president? It was incredible to see her story finally told. A lot of these parents suffer in silence and it was just amazing to see the president recognize that this had happened, that it happens to a lot of families, that it was evil and that we need to stop it. It was amazing. It's incredible. From your perspective, what does the case reveal about how some schools are handling, you could say, sex education without parental involvement? Right, well this is a problem in tens of thousands of districts across the U.S. Sage's school was actually in a conservative district, so it goes from liberal to conservative. I've known them for three and a half years now. I documented her story for The Federalist and then was behind with Family Foundation in Virginia and Representative Dave called Sage's law that would have banned secret gender transitions in Virginia, required social parental notification, and then said it's not abuse to raise a child according to their sex, which you would think would be a no-brainer. But as President Trump highlighted yesterday, it's crazy. Democratic leaders are against that bill. It's failed. Each year they've killed it. I think it's every parent's worst nightmare, to be honest with you, for something like that to be kept secret from a parent is just a beggar's belief. How widespread is transgender ideology across the nation? Well, I would say we know that child welfare services are especially captured, and schools, unfortunately, with school counselors as well. And so you have this combination where a child might express confusion at school or want to go by different pronouns or a name, like Sage did. She was very vulnerable. Often it's the kids that are looking for friends or just uncomfortable in this stage of puberty, and they get pulled into this ideology as a solution. In Sage's case, she actually was given trans websites by the school counselor, and that's part of how she met the predator that she ended up running off to. And it's what led to the assault in the bathroom because the school kept all this from her mom. She had a history of fragile mental health. The school ignored that, kept her mom out of the loop. She was assaulted in a boy's bathroom, ended up having sort of a breakdown and running away. So her mother was never given a chance to step in and stop the first domino that fell in this horrific experience. So keeping parents in the dark is a terrible, terrible idea. It opens the door to predators. And then, of course, everyone is operating from this idea that it's abuse somehow not to affirm a child as the opposite sex, which sounds crazy, and it is, but it is happening all across the U.S. It's just incredible. That is incredible. Now, the president called for nationwide action. What specific protections do you think are necessary to prevent this, something like this happening? Well, there's different solutions. For one, there's the state-level solutions, like Sage's Law. And ironically, the day that Sage's Law was killed for the fourth time in Virginia, an Ohio congressman introduced the Affirming Families Act in Ohio that would go much further than Sage's Law and really deal with some of the root causes of this upside-down definition of abuse. So just in the last three years, Texas, Indiana, North Carolina have introduced bills like this, which would mean you can't take away a child from parents simply for not affirming this claim to be a different identity or not medicalizing them, and you also can't deny a foster placement on that grounds. So that would solve a huge part of the problem if we could just define and clarify that abuse does not include raising a boy as a boy or a girl as a girl, which, again, as the president said last night, it's crazy that that's where we are. So there's a state-level solution. Ohio, Georgia, and New Hampshire have all introduced bills this session. More may come. But federally, we also need legislation to tackle this problem of kids that are lured away from their families like Sage was and run away to blue states, because states assert custody now in some of these blue states if the child ran there or was trafficked there to get sex-rejecting procedures. So in that case, those states have decided they simply are going to assert custody over those children, ignore all parental rights, ignore any custody orders, and keep that child. So this is really an emerging just battle over parental rights. How can you assert as a state who is not even the state of the home state of the child, they suddenly assert rights over this child? So that needs a federal solution, and we're working on that. There's quite a bit of interest on that. And the White House also can help by defining abuse properly and enforcing a proper definition of abuse across states. Incredible. I think one of the most alarming allegations was that a judge kept Sage from her parents because they wouldn't affirm that gender transition. A judge. That's right. Well, judges are being trained also to view not affirming a child as the opposite sex, as abuse. And so the judge's parents suddenly find themselves in this twilight zone where the judges, the social workers, the teachers, everyone is lined up against them. And they're, like Michelle was, just in the position of having to hear themselves after caring for a child for a lifetime. Suddenly they're being called abusers by people that have known their child for five minutes, but heard that they were identifying as the opposite sex. And so that gender ideology then blinds these authorities into making terrible decisions, like withholding a tiny victim of sex trafficking from her parents after that first terrible experience when she was trafficked, caught in Virginia and then trafficked across state lines to Maryland. That judge withheld custody from her parents, and he even ended up throwing her father out of the courtroom because the father was weeping and couldn't remember these new pronouns. And mind you, they hadn't even known she was identifying as a boy because the school had kept this from her. It's hard to believe that this story is true, but I spent months documenting it. There's a lawsuit that lays out the causes, and every aspect of it is just really incredible. But it's such an abuse of child, to use the term properly, it really is an upside down abuse of child welfare systems. They're meant to protect kids, and in this case they just precipitated her into further harm. Just so many shocking details there. This issue, Laura, seems like it just came out of nowhere, and now it's just everywhere. It's crazy. That's Laura Hanford at the Heritage Foundation. Laura, thank you. Thank you for having me.