Trump SOTU Recounts When the State Replaced a Mother | The American Spectator

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 publicity around Sage’s case even years later will, hopefully, deter future cases of abuse.
“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…