Donald Trump rolled out an bonkers, evidence-free claim about gender-affirming care for children during a campaign rally on Saturday.
“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 at school’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” Trump told the crowd in Mosinee, Wisconsin.
“Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”
The false claim arrives just over a week after the former president spewed similar talk at an event that featured anti-transgender hate hosted by the far-right group Moms for Liberty, which has been labeled an “anti-government extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“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,” Trump told Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice.
Trump’s prior claim is false, too, as there’s no evidence showing schools in the U.S. are sending children into gender-affirming surgeries or administering them on school grounds — or that these surgeries occur without parental consent, CNN noted.
Gender-affirming care can also be lifesaving, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, while operations such as genital surgery and mastectomies are rarely performed on minors.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale took to social media to knock Trump over his “lie,” adding that the GOP nominee’s own campaign “could not find a single example of this ‘school secretly sends child for gender-affirming surgery without parental consent’ thing having ever happened anywhere” in America.
Justice told CNN last week that while children weren’t “getting surgery in school,” she was “thankful” to Trump for pushing the false claim at the Moms for Liberty event.
Critics on social media didn’t hold back on Trump, with some referring to the amount of people injured and killed due to gun violence in schools.
The former president’s remarks arrived just days after two students and two teachers were killed during a shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia.