When President Trump introduced Sage Blair during his State of the Union address, he put a human face on a debate that for many Americans is abstract. Should parents have the right to know if their child is experiencing an identity crisis, or not?
Sage is a teenager from Virginia. She was adopted by her grandparents at age two. By the time she reached ninth grade, she decided she wanted to identify as a boy; a desire she now attributes to a combination of trauma and YouTube. When she was 14, school officials started behaving as if she was a boy at school, including calling her by a boy’s name, using male pronouns, and giving her instructions to use the boy’s restrooms. Her parents had no idea.
When the transition at school led to harassment, she decided to run away with a man she believed to be a teenager but who was really an adult predator. The man sex-trafficked her to Washington, D.C., and eventually Maryland. Fortunately, she was rescued, but a local public defender convinced a judge not to send her to her parents but to an all-boys wing of a Baltimore children’s home. The public defender involved in the case told Sage her parents didn’t want her anymore because she was transgender. Meanwhile, her parents were denied the opportunity to visit her.
Sadly, the story gets even worse. Sage was unhappy in the boy’s home, so she ran away again and was again sex trafficked, this time to Texas. Months later she was rescued and returned to Virginia, but instead of being reunited with her parents, she was put in another treatment facility. In the end, she was away from her parents for 344 days. Even when the authorities knew where she was, they refused to tell her parents, who desperately wanted to help.
Fortunately, Sage is now comfortable owning her God-given female identity and now tells her story to highlight a serious cultural and political problem. When President Trump used Sage’s story to call for a national policy prohibiting states from acting behind the backs of parents to change a child’s gender, Democrats refused to show support by standing. That prompted President Trump to quip, “These people are crazy.” Questions of decorum aside, the sentiment is hard to argue with and is shared by most Americans.
It is profoundly unfortunate that the fundamental right to raise our children has become partisan. In America, we hold these truths to be self-evident: that we are created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. One of the inalienable rights our legal system has long recognized is the natural right of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and medical care of their children. We have long acknowledged that children belong to their parents, not the government.
This isn’t merely a policy preference for it reflects the design of the creation order. Children are born uniquely dependent upon their parents, and in turn, parents are both uniquely invested in and uniquely positioned to know what their children need. No bureaucrat, teacher, or judge—no matter how well-intentioned—can replicate the lifelong bond and instinctive protection of a mother or father.
Historically, our legal system has respected this. In rare and tragic circumstances, the government must intervene on behalf of a child, but only after a rigorous process in which parents are proven to be unfit due to abuse or neglect. However, we are now witnessing a radical shift. The modern left increasingly fights for a world where simply holding the belief that boys cannot become girls—or wanting to be involved in a child’s mental health struggles—is treated as a form of “harm” that renders a parent unfit.
When the state assumes the role of the parent, the results are rarely “liberating” for the child. As Sage Blair’s story proves, it is often catastrophic. By excluding parents, schools remove the first line of defense God gave to children. They trade the permanent, unconditional love of a family for virtue signals of activists and bureaucrats.
It should not be controversial to say parents have a right to know what is happening to their 14-year-old daughters at school or within the legal system. A world where the state can secretly re-engineer a child’s identity is not an improvement. Sage Blair’s story illustrates it, President Trump recognized it, and if anyone calls for an end of the government’s conspiring against parents, we should all stand and applaud.
