THE US ATTORNEY GENERAL IS FRETTING ABOUT A ‘PANDEMIC‘ OF GENDER TRANSITIONS IN SCHOOLS.
By Guardian - Arwa Mahdawi - Sat 5 Sep 2026 13.00 BST
Todd Blanche’s remarks are part of a totally-not-invented moral panic that stretches the limits of the imagination. Being a public school teacher in the US these days is tough. You’ve got to pay for a lot of your own supplies, deal with smartphone-addicted children, and perform gender reassignment surgeries in your lunch break.
Luckily our intrepid attorney general, Todd Blanche, is on the case. Blanche appeared on Fox News this week to decry a “pandemic” of gender transitions in schools across the US. “There’s not a parent in America, no matter where you live, that would want their school to change and call their child by a different name and not expect to be told about that. We partnered with the Department of Education recently to combat this very trend and, really, pandemic that’s happening in some school districts around the country,” Blanche said.
He seemed more concerned with name changes than with surgery, but the president himself has suggested on several occasions that schools are furtively doing surgery on children. During a campaign speech in 2024, for example, Donald Trump said: “Can you imagine … your son leaves the house and you say: ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this?”
No, I can’t even imagine this. The public schools near me can’t afford air conditioning, so I’m not sure where they are getting all these operating theaters and surgeons from.
Still, don’t let my lack of imagination stop you from getting outraged over this totally-not-invented moral panic, which is consuming valuable government resources. Blanche’s Fox News interview came shortly after the justice department filed what it described as a “first-of-its-kind lawsuit” against a Kansas school district, aimed at stopping it from “facilitating secret ‘gender transitions’ for children at school without their parents’ knowledge or consent”. The district, which denies wrongdoing, risks losing almost $70m in federal funds if it is found to have violated federal law.
While this all sounds terribly dramatic, the substance of the Kansas public school lawsuit is actually rather mundane. It seems what is riling the Trump administration up are some extremely reasonable internal school guidelines, never adopted as formal policy, which state, according to the justice department complaint, that if a transgender student doesn’t want their parents notified about their preferred names and pronouns “that request will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis”.
There’s certainly a sensible conversation to be had about whether teachers should inform parents if their child wishes to be known by a different name. And Blanche might actually want to ask the vice-president to weigh in on that matter, considering JD Vance has changed his own name multiple times. But let’s not pretend that Blanche and Fox News are interested in sensible conversations. One suspects they just want to whip viewers up into a frenzy about trans people, a favourite boogeyman, in order to distract from the fact that the Trump administration is pillaging the country for personal gain.
Let’s also not pretend that the attorney general, who was confirmed last month, is in his job because he is deeply invested in the wellbeing of America’s young people. Blanche was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer before he was brought into the White House; he eventually became attorney general following the ousting of Pam Bondi. He is a Trump loyalist who once said he’d tell the president “Thank you very much. I love you, sir” if Trump nominated someone else for the job.
He’s got his job, I’d wager, because he’s made it clear he’ll protect the president and advance Trump’s agenda. Indeed, one of the very first things that Blanche’s justice department did after he was confirmed as attorney general was to issue an opinion stating that the president’s “executive privilege” can extend to advisers who don’t work for his administration. Which makes it harder for Democrats to investigate Trump in the future.
But maybe I’m being uncharitable here. Maybe the attorney general isn’t just interested in advancing his own career by finding ways to give Trump carte blanche to do whatever he likes. Maybe he really does care about vulnerable young people. In which case, may I suggest he focus some of his attention on revisiting the Jeffrey Epstein files? I’m sure that I don’t need to remind you that the only person in jail right now because of their connection to the late sex offender is Ghislaine Maxwell. An awful lot of powerful people seem to have successfully dodged any accountability.
One would think an unpunished international pedophilia ring might worry Blanche more than schoolkids experimenting with their names in Kansas. However, Blanche seems a little resistant to taking the investigation much further; possibly because Trump is named in the Epstein files thousands of times. The attorney general also made sure to stress on Fox News earlier this year that “it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein”.
Still, it doesn’t matter how much Blanche tries to distract us with culture wars, he can’t escape the ghost of Epstein. This week, the outgoing congressman Thomas Massie, a staunch Trump critic, noted that millions of Epstein files have yet to be publicly disclosed and urged the Department of Justice to launch an immediate investigation into 14 named Epstein associates, including the billionaire Leon Black. “Perhaps hearing these names will shame the Department of Justice into delivering justice,” he said. One would hope so. But it’s hard to shame the shameless.
Guardian - Arwa Mahdawi
