A Virginia mother has filed a lawsuit against her local school district after her daughter went through a secret gender change and later ran away and was sex-trafficked.
Michele Blair, whose daughter Sage was dealing with mental health problems and being bullied in school as a result of her gender change, has filed a lawsuit against the Appomattox County School Board, school district staff, and Aneesa Khan, a lawyer from Baltimore, Maryland, who allegedly attempted to carry out a “series of acts” to strip Blair of custody of her daughter, she told the Washington Examiner.
Blair alleged that as Sage was being bullied in school over identifying as a male, the school had hidden it from Blair.
“They stole my right to protect my daughter,” Blair told the outlet. “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.”
Mom sues school for hiding daughter's gender change after she later ran away and was sex-trafficked: suit https://t.co/QBY2IYA4pf
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 29, 2023
“It was verbal, physical, sexually harassed with constant threats of rape by the male classmates,” Blair told the outlet. “Despite this, the school encouraged her to use the boys’ bathroom.”
Sage, who had been adopted at the age of 2 by the Blairs, had a history of mental health problems, depression, self-harm, hallucinations, and eating disorders. Despite knowing this, the school pursued a gender change for Blair. Sage had not told the Blairs she had been identifying as a male, and “no one from ACHS had informed them,” nor had they received the results of the “psychiatric evaluation,” according to the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Child & Parent Rights Campaign (CPRC).
“The school officials were encouraging her to use the boys’ bathroom, even though they knew she was being threatened with sexual assault, so she perceived herself that she wasn’t safe and she runs away from home,” Vernadette Broyles, the lawyer for Blair told the outlet. “She runs into the arms of waiting pedophile, who encounters her, rapes her, traffics her with two other men, and takes her across states lines into Washington, D.C., and then ultimately into Maryland.”
After being rescued by FBI agents, the juvenile court system in Baltimore took custody of Sage. Khan represented Sage in a court case, who claimed that the girl’s parents “did not support” her new identity as a male, according to the lawsuit.
After this, Sage was placed in a group home for males where she was “not provided with any trauma therapy” and was “subjected to sexual assaults by male residents.” Sage ran away from the group home on Nov. 12, 2021, according to the lawsuit.
Sage was once again “abducted by yet another adult male predator” and was “sexually abused, drugged, starved and tortured” until her rescue by law enforcement officials in Texas on Jan. 24, 2022. Blair arrived in Texas and “Texas officials released Sage” to her mom to be brought back to Virginia, according to the lawsuit.
Broyles described what happened to Sage as a result of a “systemic failure” that can be fixed “when 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.”
Sage has “undergone intensive in-patient and outpatient therapy” in order to deal with the events of the trauma she went through as a result of the “Defendants’ acts and omissions,” the lawsuit says.