Nearly five years before President Donald Trump introduced her to the world as a cautionary tale of gender identity politics, Sage Blair ran away from home.
At school, she had been using a boy’s name and masculine pronouns, but she didn’t tell her parents that. Then her mom found a hall pass in her belongings with the male name on it. That night Sage, then 14 years old, took off.
She ran from the boys at her high school, who, according to court filings, had bullied her on the bus and assaulted her in the boys’ restroom. She ran from school officials who did not disclose her gender transition to her parents. And she ran from her parents, who did not believe that a person can change genders.
After her parents went to sleep that August night in 2021, Sage left them a note.
“You’ve done your job, Jesus loves you,” she wrote. “I’m afraid of what is to come if I stayed. Be on your guard. There are bad people around here.”
She signed it, “All my love,” and slipped out through her bedroom window.
It would be a harrowing journey from that window to the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol last month, where Trump presented her and her mother as victims of activist school and court officials determined to change Sage’s gender.
“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,” Trump said after asking the Blairs to stand in the gallery overlooking the chamber full of lawmakers. “Who would believe that we’re even talking about it? We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately.”
Their appearance was a high-profile effort to advance the idea that a person’s gender identity cannot differ from their sex assigned at birth, an issue sparking battles in legislatures, courts and school boards over medical care, schooling and sports. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring there are only two sexes — male and female — that are “not changeable.” His administration has pressured schools across the country to bar transgender girls and women from playing on women’s sports teams or using women’s restrooms.
Fifteen statesrequire educators to tell parents if their children use a different gender identity at school, although details vary. California, on the other hand, discouraged educators from sharing gender identity information with parents without student consent — a policy temporarily blockedthis month by the Supreme Court.
The national debate — and Sage’s story in particular — pits parents against schools and other institutions, with all sides claiming that they are protecting children, sometimes from one another.
At the State of the Union address, Trump made clear whom he sees as the villains in Sage Blair’s tale.
But her fuller story is far more complicated. Over the course of one year, beginning with her identification as a boy at school, Sage was the victim of bullying, assault, abduction, rape and sex trafficking, according to a lawsuit filed by her mother. School and court officials failed to protect her, the suit alleges. And as a freshman in high school, she found herself in the middle of a raging national debate about gender identity that would eventually take her to the halls of Congress.
Sage’s story is laid out in court filings associated with the 2023 lawsuit, which accuses her school district and several employees of hiding Sage’s new gender identity from her mother and infringing on her parental rights. It also blames school officials for a series of events that followed. This account is based on court filings from both sides and interviews with Michele Blair, Sage’s grandmother and adoptive mother, and their lawyer, as well as contemporaneous news coverage.
In 2024, Sage turned 18 and after that became a named plaintiff in the lawsuit. Now 19, she declined to comment for this article, her lawyer said. (The Washington Post is referring to Sage with feminine pronouns because that is her preference now, according to her attorney.)
The school district’s filings confirmed many, though not all, of the factual allegations detailed in the Blair lawsuit about Sage’s experience at school. Attorneys for the school board and school officials argued that they properly handled the situation and that, while the Blairs experienced a nightmare, those events were “in no way” attributable to their actions.
A federal district court dismissed the case in 2024, but the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals partly revived it last year and it remains pending. The district court is also considering whether the Blairs can add a new claim — that the school district violated Michele Blair’s right to direct the religious upbringing of her child.
Sage was 2 years old when she was adopted by her grandparents Michele and Roger Blair, who refer to Sage as their daughter. (The Post also is referring to Michele Blair as Sage’s mother.) Her biological father had died, her biological mother was unable to care for her, and Sage had spent months in the foster care system. With the onset of puberty, the lawsuit says, Sage began experiencing psychological problems including “distress about her body” along with depression, eating disorders, self-harm and hallucinations.
In the summer of 2021, when Sage was between eighth and ninth grades, Michele Blair took her to a health care provider for evaluation and treatment, including a week of inpatient psychiatric care. Later that summer, Sage received a diagnosis of “severe gender dysphoria,” which results from incongruence between sex assigned at birth and gender identity, although Sage’s mother didn’t learn of the diagnosis until after Sage ran away, according to the lawsuit.
That summer, she knew only that Sage liked to dress unconventionally — in “tomboy” or “emo” style, an androgynous, gender-neutral fashion, Michele Blair said. But she thought it was just that — clothing, not a sign of changing gender identity.
“She came home and informed me that all the kids were bi and trans and emo and gay and goth, and at some point the social influence overcame her,” Michele Blair said later. “She started dressing in boys’ clothes, but she was telling me she was emo.”
As a freshman at Appomattox County High School in rural Virginia, Sage immediately faced pressure about her gender.
On her second day, she was harassed and threatened by boys on the bus who mocked her appearance, according to the lawsuit. Sage reported the incident to a school counselor, the district confirmed in a court filing.
A teacher overheard Sage telling a friend that she wanted to be referred to by a male name — Draco — and male pronouns, the lawsuit said. A school counselor then asked Sage whether she identified as a boy or a girl. A boy, Sage replied, and the counselor said she could use the boys’ restroom and, a few days later, told her to do so, because some girls said they were uncomfortable with Sage using the girls’ restroom.
The district confirmed that a teacher reported that Sage used the name Draco and that a counselor met with Sage to discuss her preferred name and pronouns. The district did not confirm the directive on using the boys’ restroom.
Over the next two weeks, boys followed Sage into the restroom, touched her, threatened her with a knife and with rape, and shoved her against a hallway wall, the lawsuit alleges. The school counselor spoke with Sage about her gender identity several times, but the lawsuit alleges that she did not check on Sage’s welfare until other parents reported the restroom incidents, an allegation that the district denied in its filing.
She met with her counselor and was told she could use the restroom in the nurse’s office, both sides say. During that discussion, Sage said that “all boys are rapists” (which she defined as inappropriate touching). The next day she was called into a meeting with the school resource officer and admonished against making false accusations, according to notes from the counselor cited by the lawsuit and confirmed by the district.
The superintendent of the Appomattox schools declined to comment. Attorneys for the district did not respond to requests for comment. The counselors involved in the case and the superintendent at the time of these events could not be reached for comment.
The school counselor repeatedly discussed gender identity with Sage but did not share the full story with Sage’s mother, the lawsuit says. The counselor told Michele Blair that an incident occurred on the bus but not what prompted it or that Sage was identifying as male at school and using the boys’ restroom.
Both sides, in their filings, said that Sage had asked that the school counselor refer to her by her given name and use female pronouns when speaking with her mother. In one of her filings, Michele Blair alleged that a school counselor told Sage it would be better not to tell her parents about her identity because they were religious.
The district said Sage told school staff that her mother was not supportive of her gender identity, and it disputes Michele Blair’s assertion that she was unaware of Sage’s male identity.
The district quoted notes from the school counselor’s separate conversations with Sage and her mother. At one point, Sage told the counselor: “I don’t want my mom to know I used the men’s restroom. I don’t want her to get mad at me about being transgender again … and I don’t want to talk to her about that. Every time she brings it up it’s yelling and stuff.”
And in another conversation, Michele Blair replied to the counselor by saying, “Let me guess, it’s about [Sage] wanting to be a boy isn’t it?”
Meanwhile, Virginia had started to require school districts to adopt policiesthat protect transgender students, including the right to use restrooms that match their gender identity and their chosen names and pronouns. The state directed schools to keep this information from parents if students did not want them to know. Those policies were reversedin 2022 when Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin took office, part of a national backlash that continues today.
Michele Blair strongly questions the assertion that the school knew how she would have responded to Sage’s transition. However, in a court filing, Blair’s attorneys make it clear that Blair was not supportive of gender transitioning and had raised Sage to understand this.
“Michele Blair is a Christian for whom the Christian worldview grounded in Scripture and sincerely held religious beliefs, permeate all aspects of her life and inform how she has raised Sage,” the filing says. “Children should be encouraged to accept their biological sex as created by God and to live their lives in the reality of their sex.”
The night Michele Blair found Sage’s hall pass with a different name — Draco — she told her daughter not to worry.
“You do not have to go to school tomorrow,” Blair recalls saying. “You know what, we’ll just stay home.”
The next morning, Sage was gone.
“Please, please, somebody help her,” an anguished Michele Blair told a local TV news station. “Please come home, Sage, wherever you are.”
Sage had met up with a man she encountered on an LGBTQ-friendly website recommended by a school counselor, the Blairs said in a court filing. He abducted her, raped her and took her to Washington, D.C., the Blairs said. There was more sexual abuse there and in Maryland, including sex trafficking, the suit said. Eight days after leaving home, Sage was rescued by law enforcement and landed in the custody of Maryland’s Department of Social Services.
A public defender who represented Sage persuaded a juvenile court judge to keep her in state custody, arguing that she did not want to go home and that her parents would not accept her gender identity, the lawsuit says. (The public defender did not respond to a request for comment, and her office declined to comment.)
In making her case, the public defender communicated with school officials in Virginia and told the court about Sage’s gender dysphoria diagnosis, which was part of her record because her mother had authorized medical authorities to share it with the school, Blair’s lawyer said. The court hearing is how Michele Blair says she learned of the diagnosis.
The court placed Sage in a group home for boys in Maryland. There, the lawsuit alleges, she was again sexually assaulted, used drugs, and was not provided medical and mental health care.
Sage ran away from the group home after about two months, traveling to Texas to meet up with someone else she met online — a 16-year-old boy who liked skateboarding, or so she thought.
In Texas, she was abducted by a man who sexually abused, drugged and tortured her, the lawsuit alleges.
Michele Blair found information in Sage’s social media that helped track her down. More than two months after leaving Maryland, she was rescued by Texas law enforcement and returned to Virginia.
Blair wanted to place Sage in a Christian treatment facility that would use her given name, but the Maryland court, which retained jurisdiction, assigned her to an inpatient program in Virginia that affirmed her male gender identity, Blair said.
Asked in an interview whether it was true that she would not support Sage living as a boy, Michele Blair did not answer directly.
“Nobody ever gave me the chance. Nobody ever — the school didn’t give me the chance, the judge, nobody gave me a chance,” she said. “And personally, I don’t think it’s anybody’s business.”
Blair eventually found a lawyer who helped get Sage discharged againstmedical advice.
In July 2022 — nearly a year after she first ran away — Sage returned home. She continued to attend therapy several times a week, Blair said, this time with a Christian counselor who specialized in working with sexually exploited girls.
Blair’s attorney, Vernadette Broyles, said that at some point between running away and returning to her parents, Sage “reacquired comfort with her sex.”
Once home, Sage reenrolled in high school, earning her diploma online, her mother said.
And Blair began publicizing their family’s story.
She first worked with Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates to introduce “Sage’s Law,” a bill that went beyond Youngkin’s rules and required public schools to inform parents if their children expressed “gender incongruence.”
“We love our children more than any counselor, judge or teacher,” Blair said at a January 2023 news conference promoting the bill, where she recounted Sage’s story in detail. “They have no business teaching our children what gender they are and certainly no business teaching them to keep secrets from their parents.”
The bill passedin the GOP-controlled Virginia House in February 2023 but diedin the mostly Democratic state Senate.
In August 2023, Blair — represented by a law firm that battles the “harms of transgender ideology” — sued the Appomattox County Public Schools, the superintendent, two counselors and the Maryland public defender. (The public defender was dismissed from the suit in 2024.)
One of Blair’s original claims is still pending in court: whether the school district failed to properly respond to sexual harassment that Sage faced, in violation of the federal Title IX law, which bars discrimination based on sex.
In fall 2024, Sage enrolled in online courses as a freshman at Liberty University, one of the country’s most influential Christian universities, in nearby Lynchburg, Virginia.
Her lawsuit had been covered repeatedly by conservative media outlets by the start of 2026. Trump aides had been tracking the case, a White House official said. In January, about a week before the State of the Union address, a White House staffer called Broyles’s law firm to ask whether Sage and her mother would be interested in participating.
And so it was that the eyes of Congress and about 33 million at-home viewers turned to the balcony.
Trump described Sage as a symbol of the dangers of gender transitioning, and Sage and her mother rose to receive the applause.
Razzan Nakhlawi and Katie Mettler contributed to this report.
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