Trump SOTU Recounts When the State Replaced a Mother

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump honored two individuals whose names I’ve known for three years. While speaking about protecting children against social and physical “gender transition,” the President called attention to a pair of women in the audience, Michele and Sage Blair.

I first heard Sage’s story three years ago as a reporter. At the time, her story wasn’t getting the traction I thought it deserved, but many outlets, activists, and reporters were trying to highlight her experience. It was so refreshing to hear her name spoken by the President himself, meaning her story still hasn’t died out years later.

Nor should it. Sage’s story is gruesome and traumatic, but worth telling and retelling.

Teenage Sage began expressing a desire to transition to a boy at school at first, a fact which was deliberately kept from her mother, Michele. The school’s secretiveness didn’t just violate Michele’s parental rights, it also put Sage herself in danger. While using the men’s bathrooms and locker rooms, Sage was touched and assaulted by the boys in the school. Michele only found out about her daughter’s suffering when she came home from school one day sobbing.

“The transparency ended in August 2021 when Sage started high school,” Michele said during moving testimony before the Virginia legislature in January 2023. “She started a public high school and she told me that all the girls there were bi, trans, lesbian, emo, and she wanted to wear boys clothes and be emo. Because I saw it as just a phase it was fine with me. But at school she told them something different, she was now a boy named Draco with male pronouns. Sage asked the school not to tell me and they did not tell me.”

“No one told me but boys followed her, touched her, threatened violence and rape. Something happened in the boy’s bathroom but for two days the school told me nothing. They kept meeting with Sage alone, and she became so distraught they called me to pick her up.”

The troubled Sage ran away from home and was victimized by child sex traffickers. Yet when the state found her they kept her from her parents. In her battle to regain custody of her child, Michele discovered just how far the state would go to “affirm” Sage’s trans identity. During the grueling custody battle, Sage was raped in the boy’s children’s home. While running away from the loving family which the state assured her was the problem, Sage was further traumatized.

The story has as happy an ending as there can be. Sage and her mother are reunited, and according to the President, Sage is headed to Liberty University for a college education in the fall.

Michele was labeled a child abuser. The state’s insistence that her “misgendering” her daughter was child abuse put Sage into terrible situations of physical, mental, and sexual abuse. She and her mother learned the hard way how far things can deteriorate when a parent’s love is supplanted by the state’s pursuit of radical social programs.

The reason Sage’s story is so important is because it showcases exactly how the public school to child gender transition pipeline occurs. While some parents of transgender children are themselves “affirming” of their child’s stated identity, many parents understand that no child can make such drastic and irreversible decisions regarding their body so young. Yet in a strange twist of linguistics, these parents are labeled the child abusers.

Indeed, debates over the definition of “child abuse” are at the heart of the fight over parental rights and childhood innocence. The failed Virginia Bill named after Sage — Sage’s Law — had purposed to clarify that the definition of child abuse does not include so-called “misgendering.” This ridiculously broad definition of child abuse gave the judge in Sage’s custody case license to keep Sage in a terrible situation away from her mother.

The publicity around Sage’s case even years later will, hopefully, deter future cases of abuse. Three years ago, judges and taxpayer-funded schools felt they had the right to make major decisions about children’s identity for the parents. Today, the President himself is calling them out on it.

READ MORE:

Let’s Just Say It: Transgenderism Is a Mental Illness

How Identity Politics Fails to Address the George Floyd Fallout

Is This the End of Transgender Hysteria?

Sarah Wilder is a visiting fellow at Independent Women and contributor for IW Features.