Maryland, My Maryland

From Da Wire, Maryland Refused To Give Back A Virginia Runaway Because Her Parents ‘Misgendered’ Her. Then She Was Sex Trafficked, Mother Says, a horrific story.

A 14-year-old transgender runaway from Virginia endured a six-month nightmare that saw her twice fall into the hands of sex traffickers, the second time after Baltimore bureaucrats refused to return her to her home state because they accused her adoptive parents of “misgendering” her, according to records reviewed by The Daily Wire.

The child, identified in legal documents as Sage, was adopted by her biological grandmother, Michele Blair, after the death of her father. Long troubled, Sage began identifying as a male named “Draco” and ran away from their rural home in late August of 2021, only to end up on the mean streets of Baltimore, where authorities rescued her from a convicted sex offender, according to records. But instead of returning the child to her grandmother, Maryland officials put her in an inner-city group home. The reason: They thought her adoptive, blood-relative parents didn’t seem to sufficiently recognize her transgender identity.

“It is not possible to return the child to that home,” Judge Robert B. Kershaw wrote on Sept. 3, 2021, after an impassioned plea from Baltimore Assistant Public Defender Aneesa Khan.

Instead, the judge turned Sage over to the Baltimore City Department of Juvenile Services “for placement in a hardware secure therapeutic facility which makes reasonable accommodation for Respondent’s expressed male gender and desire to live as a trans male.” That meant housing the girl just rescued from a sex offender with some of Baltimore’s most troubled biological males.

“[Sage] has committed no juvenile offense in Maryland, is not a Maryland resident, and has no connections to Maryland… If he is located in another State there is no legal authority to return him to Maryland, much less for Maryland to assert legal custody over him.”

After months in Maryland institutions, Sage bolted, only to resurface in Texas, where she once again had been allegedly trafficked to pedophiles, according to records. Unlike their counterparts in Maryland, Lone Star officials returned her to her parents, according to an ethics complaint Blair filed against Khan. Khan allegedly told the girl to lie about being abused by her parents, seemingly in order to create a legal precedent allowing states—other than where a teen lives—to refuse to return a runaway teen if transgender issues are in play.

Then, in the end. . . 

Hanford said, based on her discussions with Blair, that after Sage was rescued from Texas, she entered the Virginia treatment facility that was required by the Maryland court agreement, and the facility urged her to have a mastectomy. But, she said, when Blair visited her daughter there, Sage asked her mother to secretly buy her girls’ clothes.

She managed to raise a few dollars for legal expenses thanks to the Gavel Project, a nonprofit that is battling “wokeness” in the courts. And she secured representation from Josh Hetzler, an attorney with the Founding Freedoms Law Center. 

She was released from treatment to her mother’s care in June 2021 and no longer believes she is a boy, according to discharge paperwork that shows no diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

After 20 months, Sage was finally home.

Firing is too good for them. More on the story here. Virginia Teen Sex-Trafficked Twice After School Hides Gender Identity From Her Parents.