Did school officials try to 'secretly transition' Sage Blair, Trump's 2026 State of the Union guest? What we know

During U.S. President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on Feb. 24, 2026, a rumor spread that one of his guests, a Virginia woman named Sage Blair, had been "separated from her parents" at 14 after her school tried to "secretly transition" her to male. 

Posts on X and Facebook made the claim, including one X post by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who mentioned Blair before Trump's speech (archived):

Leavitt's post quoted the first paragraph of a report by The Daily Caller, a conservative publication founded by commentator Tucker Carlson, who has spread a wide range of baseless claims. The story, titled "EXCLUSIVE: Trump Invites Girl Taken From Parents After Secret Gender Transition," described Blair as "a young woman who was separated from her parents at age 14 after school officials attempted to secretly transition her to a male" and claimed that "one point during the legal battle, a judge ruled that Sage Blair should be separated from her parents because they did not affirm her 'gender identity.'"

At the State of the Union address, Trump similarly described Blair when discussing his plan for a federal ban of gender-affirming care for minors. Trump said:

In the gallery tonight are Sage Blair and her mother, Michele. In 2021, Sage was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents.

After she was found in a horrific situation in Maryland, a left-wing judge refused to return Sage to her parents because they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son. Sage was thrown into an all-boys state home and suffered terribly for a long time. But today, all of that is behind them because Sage is a proud and wonderful young woman with a full-ride scholarship to Liberty University.

[…]

But surely, we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents' arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents' will. Who would believe that we've been talking about that. We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately.

The allegations described in The Daily Caller's story and Trump's address were the basis of a lawsuit Blair's mother, Michele Blair, filed in 2023. (The lawsuit listed Sage Blair, who was a minor at the time, as a co-plaintiff under the initials "S.B.")

The defendants in the lawsuit were the Appomattox County School Board, the school district's superintendent, two counselors at Appomattox County High School and Aneesa Khan, a public defender appointed to represent Blair in Maryland after the teen ran away from home and ended up in a Virginia juvenile detention facility in 2021. The lawsuit alleged the school had concealed Blair's decision to use male pronouns and a male name at school, thereby preventing Michele Blair from seeking mental health care for her daughter, and that Khan had made false allegations of abuse in an attempt to take custody of Sage Blair away from her mother, resulting in Blair being sent to a state-run all-boys facility, where she allegedly experienced further sexual trauma. 

Those allegations, however, have not been proven. A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia dismissed the Blairs' lawsuit in June 2024, writing that the "Plaintiff does not adequately allege any of her claims." The Blairs then submitted several appeals.

In August 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld the lower court's dismissal of the claim that the school had a duty to reveal Blair's gender identity to her parents. 

Then, in September 2025, the federal discrict court in Virginia vacated part of the its previous dismissal of the lawsuit, allowing Michele and Sage Blair to file an amended complaint naming the Appomattox School Board, the superintendent and the two counselors as defendants. The amended complaint focused specifically on alleged Title IX violations involving the school's alleged failure to properly respond to sexual harassment Sage Blair experienced at school. The lawsuit based on that amended complaint remains open as of this writing.

Many of the allegations in the Blairs' lawsuits are impossible to verify or disprove. We've reached out to the Appomattox County School Board, Khan, and Mary Elizabeth McAlister, the lawyer who represents the Blairs. (McAlister is part of a conservative nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping trans children from transitioning socially and medically against their parents' will.) We will update this report should they respond.

The allegations in the original lawsuit

In their 2023 lawsuit, Blair and her mother claimed the Appomattox County High School, district Superintendent Annette Bennett, Appomattox County High School counselors Dena Olsen and Avery Via and Khan, the public defender, had interfered with Michele Blair's right as a parent to bring up her child as she saw fit; that they had violated the family's fundamental right to privacy by concealing information about Blair from her mother; that they had been indifferent to her complaint she was sexually harassed at school; and that Khan had committed legal malpractice by fabricating allegations of parental abuse and conspired with Olsen and Via to prevent Blair from returning to her family home. Lastly, they alleged that Khan, Olsen and Via had intentionally inflicted emotional distress on Blair, a vulnerable teenager with a history of psychiatric illness.

According to court documents including the original lawsuit, Khan's motion to dismiss and a the district court's decision to dismiss the original lawsuit, Blair became distressed about her body "at the onset of puberty in 2019" and was eventually diagnosed with "severe gender dysphoria" on Aug. 5, 2021, just before she started high school. 

According to the complaint, Michele Blair "did not receive a copy of the report and was not aware of the diagnosis until several months later." 

After she started high school, Sage Blair chose to wear male-coded clothing and received permission to use the boys' bathrooms. 

Blair then reportedly adopted the name "Draco" at school. After an incident of sexual harassment, Olsen talked to Blair's mother, but did not inform her of Blair's chosen name and gender identity. We could not determine whether the Appomattox County High School or the district had a policy not to disclose students' chosen gender identities without the students' consent. 

The complaint also said Olsen and Gunter violated Title IX protections by failing to report incidents of other students sexually harassing Blair, as required by law. 

On Aug. 25, 2021, Michele Blair reportedly found a hall pass with the name Draco. According to the court documents, the teen told her mother she identified as a boy at school, then "suffered a psychotic breakdown and decided to run away." 

The complaint goes on to say that Sage Blair was abducted, raped and trafficked for sex.

According to the Blairs' complaint, law enforcement "rescued" Blair in Baltimore, but before her mother could pick her up, the state assigned Blair a public defender — Khan. It is unclear whether Blair was facing charges or what those charges might be, but the lawsuit says she was "placed in solitary confinement in a juvenile detention center and remained there for five days, believing that she had done something wrong." 

According to the lawsuit, Khan then took steps to affirm Blair's chosen gender identity, which included initiating a Child Protective Services investigation against the teen's parents. The complaint adds that "said investigations concluded with findings that the charges were unsubstantiated."

Per Khan's motion to dismiss, the juvenile court judge in Maryland ordered that Blair "remain in Maryland under the temporary custody of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services." Weeks later, the judge gave a new order to move Blair to "a residential facility in Northern Virginia." The next day, Blair "removed her GPS tracking device" and ran away from Maryland, eventually ending up in Texas, where local authorities found her in January 2022 and returned her to her parents in Virginia.

We have not been able to establish based on the available evidence when or why Blair stopped using male pronouns or the name Draco.

In 2023, as a result of Blair's story, Republicans in the Virginia legislature attempted and failed to pass a bill known as "Sage's Law," which, had it passed, would have compelled schools to notify the parents of "minor students experiencing gender incongruence" of the way the students request to be identified at school, and seek "parental permission" to socially transition. A more-recent version of that bill failed in 2025.

(A social transition means adopting the external markers of a gender identity incongruent with one's sex, such as adopting other names, choosing other pronouns, and being able to present oneself as part of one's chosen gender. It neither requires nor implies a medical transition, such as using hormones to change one's appearance, or undergoing sex-reassignment surgery.)