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........

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