Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier led 21 states in a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court Monday supporting a Tallahassee mother who claimed her rights were violated when a local middle school created a secret plan supporting her child switching genders.
Uthmeier’s lengthy letter of support is the latest turn of legal events involving January Littlejohn, now a banner for parental rights in GOP Circles, and her then-13-year-old child who attended a gender-support meeting at Deerlake Middle School in 2020 that school staff allegedly intentionally kept secret from Littlejohn. They followed the policy laid out in the district’s LGBTQ+ guide dissuading teachers from “outing” students to their parents.
“Parental rights have taken on new focus as an ever-growing number of public-school officials are placing it upon themselves to make life-altering decisions for children in place of, or in direct conflict with, parents’ convictions,” Uthmeier wrote in the friend of the court brief, joined by 21 other states.
“That unfortunate phenomenon is front and center in this case,” he continued, criticizing school officials for hiding the “social transition” from the Littlejohns. “This sort of intervention is highly destructive and can lead to permanent damage to the child’s mental and physical health.”
Now a prominent speaker for the right-wing Moms for Liberty organization and the inspiration for Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, Littlejohn in 2021 took her case against Leon County Schools to state and federal courts, although she was rejected at every turn.
In March of this year, a three-judge federal appeals panel ruled against her because the district’s actions, though Littlejohn disagreed with them, did not “shock the conscience.” This legal precedent determines whether egregious misconduct violated a person’s rights. Littlejohn attempted in July to have the court rehear her case, but it quietly dismissed it.
“Defendants did not force the Littlejohns’ child to do anything at all. And perhaps most importantly, defendants did not act with intent to injure,” Judge Robin Rosenbaum of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit wrote in the March opinion. “To the contrary, they sought to help the child.”
Littlejohn’s outrage quickly sparked statewide attention. The GOP-dominated Legislature responded by ushering in the 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law, which banned teachers from discussing sexuality with students and allowed parents to sue school districts over curriculum they deemed inappropriate.
In March, Littlejohn was First Lady Melania Trump’s special guest at President Donald Trump’s joint session to Congress. Trump lauded her as a “courageous advocate” for parental rights, and claimed cases like hers are why he signed a January executive order blocking funds for schools promoting “gender ideology.”
Similar cases have cropped up nationwide. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a nearly-identical case out of Massachusetts, in which an 11-year-old’s parents were allegedly kept in the dark when the school helped the child socially transition. Tammy Fournier, a Wisconsin mother who successfully sued when her 12-year-old’s school “refused” to refer to the child as female, filed her own letter in support of Littlejohn on Monday.
Other supporters who have filed briefs supporting Littlejohn include 10 conservative organizations and a transgender psychologist who has warned against helping minors transition.
What happened?
Littlejohn’s 13-year-old child, born female, asked to be referred to by a male name with they/them pronouns ahead of the 2020-2021 school year. Littlejohn told the child’s teacher that the school could use the nickname “J,” but she didn’t want staff using different pronouns for her child.
According to emails obtained by The Tallahassee Democrat, Littlejohn told the teacher that, “If she wants to go by the name (redacted) with her teachers, I won’t stop her.” Littlejohn added that they did not use the male name at home.
The school later called a meeting with the school counselor, staff, and the child to create a Student Support Plan to help socially transition the child. Per district law, the school did not tell the Littlejohns about the plan, nor did they release the details in the following months.
This came from Leon County’s LGBTQ+ guide warning staff against telling parents if their child was not heterosexual, because “[o]uting a student, especially to parents, can be very dangerous to the student’s health and well-being.”
The Littlejohns sued in federal court, which case was promptly dismissed, and then in a federal appeals court, hoping to receive financial damages and ban the LGBTQ+ guide. The three-judge panel sided against the parents in March and refused to hear the case again in July.
On Sep. 3, the Littlejohns filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court questioning whether a court can deny relief for a violation of a “fundamental right” if the infringement did not “shock the conscience.” The case bounces off of the Massachusetts case, which asks the Supreme Court to decide whether a public school “violates parents’ fundamental constitutional right” when it secretly helps “transition” their child to a new gender.
The letter of support submitted by Uthmeier was co-signed by the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas. They were joined by Arizona’s Speaker of the House and Senate President.
–Liva Caputo, Florida Phoenix
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