The mother of a teenage girl who was bullied at school and eventually treated sexually is suing her daughter’s school district for withholding information that identified the teenage student as male at school.
Michelle Blair, the mother of sage Blair, filed a lawsuit against the Appomattox County School Board and district staff as well as a Baltimore public defender for actions she alleges deprived her of properly raising her son.
Blair now claims her daughter was severely bullied in high school, which she knew about, but alleges the school district withheld information about why the bullying was happening. Sage had begun to identify as a boy at school.
The harassment, Blair says, included “verbal” and “physical” assaults, but also included a constant barrage of “rape threats from male peers.”
“Despite this, the school encouraged her to use the boys’ bathroom,” she said.
Blair previously informed the school that her daughter had a history of mental health problems, including depressioneating disorders, self-harm and hallucinations.
Even with this information, however, the school chose to carry out a social transition for Sage behind her parents’ backs.
Sage, then 14, was encouraged to transition socially by her school, unbeknownst to her parents
Michele Blair is now suing the Virginia school district for withholding information from her and her husband about their son, which they say led to her running away and ultimately being sexually abused.
At school, the 14-year-old girl was able to change her name to Draco. His parents finally discovered details of the situation only when they found a stepping stone in Draco’s name.
According to the Child & Parent Rights Campaign, which filed the lawsuit on Blair’s behalf, the school’s decision to withhold information about Sage’s gender identity “deprived” Blair of her ability to “exercise her fundamental parental rights to direct the upbringing of his daughter.” including making educational and mental health decisions.’
Vernadette Broyles, Blair’s CPRC attorney, told the Washington Examiner that Sage ran away from home because of bullying and harassment she suffered at school.
Previous reports indicate that Sage first ran away from home the night her parents found the hallway with Draco’s name on it.
“School officials were encouraging her to use the boys’ bathroom, even though they knew she was being sexually assaulted, so she was perceived as unsafe and ran away from home,” Broyles said.
“She finds herself in the arms of a pedophile who waits for her, who finds her, rapes her, traffics her with two other men and takes her across state lines to Washington, DC, and finally to Maryland.”
In Maryland, Sage was finally located and rescued by FBI agents, which is where her nightmarish journey should have ended.
However, Baltimore’s juvenile court system took custody of the teenager at the direction of Aneesa Khan, an area public defender.
Khan had called Sage’s parents not “assertive enough” of her new identity and, according to the suit, concocted a “story of parental abuse and neglect” that convinced a judge to keep her in custody.
Sage’s parents said that at the time she ran away, she was kidnapped and abused by numerous men in various locations before being located and rescued by law enforcement. She was then placed under judicial protection and spent almost a year away from her family. Pictured: A missing persons poster after Sage ran away from home
Blair is suing the Appomattox County School District over the way it handled information that her daughter had begun to publicly identify as male.
Sage Blair was briefly identified as the trans boy, Draco, with a vibrant streak of blue hair
While in state custody, Sage was placed in a juvenile facility for young men, “where she was repeatedly sexually assaulted, exposed to drugs, and denied medical and mental health care.” , the lawsuit states.
‘This is a 100 pound girl, what do you think is going on in this facility?’ Broyles said.
Maryland’s top public defender, Natasha Dartigue, said she and her office support Khan in the fight.
“We fully support our attorney, who adequately represented his client in accordance with his legal, ethical and professional obligations,” he said.
In the men’s facility and once again fearing for her safety, Sage ran away again and was again picked up by a sex trafficker who took her to Texas “where she was again raped, drugged, killed starved and tortured until law enforcement in Texas took her to Texas.” rescued her and notified her mother that he returned her to Virginia,” the lawsuit states.
Since returning to her parents’ home, Sage “has undergone intensive inpatient and outpatient therapy to address the multiple incidents of extreme trauma.” He was also diagnosed with complex PTSD.
Broyles argues that what happened to Sage is a direct result of the school’s failure. The problem at hand, however, will be solved when “ideologically driven school officials are forced to recognize that it is not within their purview, their authority to transition a child without the direct involvement of their parents , point”.
“Frankly, it’s cruel and irresponsible that school officials are encouraging confusion, gender confusion in especially traumatized young girls with mental health histories.”
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has spoken out about Sage’s case before, and a few months ago he implemented new state guidance that will crack down on some of the school policies that led to the teenager’s experience.
Baltimore Public Defender Aneesa Khan is also named in the lawsuit for sending Sage to a juvenile facility for young men, instead of returning her to her parents, who she says did not affirm her gender identity.
Activist attorney Vernadette Broyles, founder of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, has led cases against school districts and other parent-teacher conflicts.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin created guidance that would prevent schools from withholding information about a child’s gender identity from parents.
Under Youngkin’s guidance, parents must now be informed if their child is in social transition, which was not the case in 2021, when Sage had his traumatic experience.
Youngkin, a Republican, won his late 2021 race against former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in a state that Joe Biden had won by ten points just a year earlier.
Michele and Roger Blair and Sage’s biological grandparents: They legally adopted her as a child.
When Sage was 14, she began treatment for depression at the same time she was starting a new high school in central Virginia. It was at school, parents say, that Sage was exposed to a barrage of “emos,” goths and a panoply of sexuality and gender options.
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