Michele Blair is suing the Appomattox County, Virginia school district, alleging it performed a secret gender transition on her daughter, which led to bullying that drove the teen to run away from home and into the clutches of multiple sexual predators who repeatedly trafficked her.
The school staff secretly conducted social gender transitioning of Blair’s daughter, Sage, encouraging her to identify as a boy and use the boys’ restroom at her school, Blair told The Washington Examiner.
Despite Sage’s history of mental health problems, the school encouraged her transition while simultaneously “withholding the information on Sage's stated gender identity in school,” denying her mother the opportunity to “exercise her fundamental parental rights to direct the upbringing of her daughter, including making educational and mental health decisions,” the lawsuit says. Sage was subsequently bullied and threatened with sexual assault during this time, prompting her to run away from home.
After she ran away, Sage was kidnapped by a pedophile who “rap[ed] her, traffic[ed] her with two other men, and t[ook] her across state lines into Washington, D.C., and then ultimately into Maryland,” according to Michele Blair’s attorney, Vernadette Broyles.
FBI agents eventually rescued Sage, but the situation took a turn for the worse after Baltimore Public Defender Aneesa Khan pushed for the city’s juvenile court system to take custody of Sage. Broyles says that Khan created “a fabricated story of abuse and neglect by the parents and convince[d] a judge to keep this child in custody” because Sage’s mother was not “sufficiently affirming” of her daughter’s alleged transgender status.
Sage was put into a male juvenile facility, based on her claimed gender identity, where she was reportedly “sexually assaulted, exposed to drugs, and denied medical and mental health care.” She fled the facility, whereupon she was kidnapped by yet another sexual predator who took her to Texas, where he “raped, drugged, starved, and tortured” the teen until law enforcement rescued her and returned to her mother.
Blair’s daughter has reportedly been “diagnosed with complex PTSD” as a result of her repeated traumatic experiences and has “undergone intensive in-patient and outpatient therapy.”
Along with the Appomattox County school board and district staff, Blair is also suing public defender Khan for her participation in the “systematic failure” that she believes led to her daughter being bullied and trafficked.
"They stole my right to protect my daughter," Blair told the Washington Examiner. "I'm the parent, I am an expert on my child, there is nobody in the school or court system that knows my daughter better than me. They will never know my daughter better than I do."
In representing Blair, Broyles warned that more children will continue to experience these types of horrors until “ideologically driven school officials are forced to recognize it is not within their competency, their authority to be transitioning a child without the direct involvement of their parents, period.”