Overview:
At an Oct. 16 rally in Dalton, Georgia, President Trump revived his debunked 2024 claim that schools in “five or six states” secretly send children to hospitals for gender surgery without parental approval, a claim that education officials, school nurses and gender-care experts call false and that the White House could not support with a single example.
President Donald Trump told a rally crowd in northwest Georgia on Oct. 16 that schools in at least five states are sending children to hospitals for gender surgery without their parents’ approval. The claim is false. It is the same story fact-checkers debunked when he first told it during the 2024 campaign, and it has resurfaced in the closing weeks of the 2026 midterms.
No state lets a school send a child for elective surgery without parental consent. Experts in gender care say they know of no case in which a U.S. school has secretly arranged gender surgery for a student. Asked by numerous news outlets, The White House could not provide one.
What Trump said
About an hour into a roughly 96-minute speech supporting Senate candidate Mike Collins and gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson, Trump turned to schools, according to a transcript published by Rollcall.
“We got critical race theory and transgender mutilization insanity out of our schools,” Trump said. “I mean, we have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later. It’s true.”
He went on to describe a parent asking where their son is and being told the boy is in the hospital. “They don’t even need approval. It’s sick,” Trump said. He did not name the states, saying only, “I think Minnesota and some others. I think it’s five or six states.”
Later in the speech, Trump promised that a Republican Congress would “enshrine into permanent law” a ban on what he called “transgender mutilation of your children.” Discussing a Supreme Court case on transgender athletes, he also said he did not want the issue finalized because he wants to run on it for years, adding that he only talks about such topics right before an election.
Why the claim is false
Schools cannot authorize surgery for a child. Even in states where gender surgery for minors is legal, parental consent is required, and some states ban such surgery for anyone under 18.
The president of the National Association of School Nurses board, Lynn Nelson, told CNN that schools typically need written parental permission just to give a student Tylenol. She called Trump’s claims false and said they misrepresent what school nurses do.
Minnesota, the only state Trump named, rejected the claim outright. Anna Arkin, a spokesperson for the state’s education department, called it “unequivocally false.”
Researchers who study gender care said the scenario does not exist. Landon Hughes, a Harvard Medical School instructor who has published research on gender care among minors, told CNN there are no documented cases of schools taking children for such surgery. Lindsey Dawson, who directs the LGBTQ Health Policy Program at the health research group KFF, said she knew of no such case and that schools are tightly limited in the care they can give without parental consent.
Surgery among transgender minors is rare. The limited data available suggest most procedures that do occur are chest surgeries for 15- to 17-year-olds, and they follow a lengthy assessment by a medical team that includes confirming the family can give informed consent.
No evidence from the White House
When asking the White House for cases in which a U.S. school sent a child to a hospital for gender surgery without parental consent, Trump’s team could not identify any, from Minnesota or anywhere else. Five conservative organizations CNN contacted for examples did not respond.
Most of the articles the White House pointed to did not mention surgery at all. The one case that did undercut Trump’s account: according to the lawsuit described, the parents refused consent and no surgery took place.
The pattern repeats from 2024. When Trump first told the story that year, his campaign also produced no example, sending reporters articles about the broader debate over how schools handle students’ gender identity instead.
A recurring line on the campaign trail
Trump first told the story in late August 2024. CNN, PolitiFact and Snopes all rated it false at the time.
He has now worked it back into his midterm stump speech, telling vague versions at rallies in Ohio on Oct. 12, Kentucky on Oct. 17 and Kansas on Oct. 19, according to CNN.
The Dalton rally came 18 days before the Nov. 3 election, with early voting already underway in Georgia. Collins is challenging Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, and Jackson faces former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in the governor’s race.