A federal appeals court has ruled against two Florida parents who allege a school district aided their child’s “secret” gender transition in a case highlighted by President Donald Trump in his address to Congress last week.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, ruled 2-1 on March 12 that January and Jeffrey Littlejohn could not prevail on their parental-rights claim under the 14th Amendment’s due-process clause because school officials’ actions did not “shock the conscience.”
The story of the Littlejohns and their child, who was assigned female at birth and sought to transition at age 13 in 2020 at their Tallahassee, Fla., middle school, has been a conservative cause for years, and was even cited by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his successful effort to enact a law limiting what schools could teach and speak about sexual orientation and gender identity.
On March 6, January Littlejohn was in the VIP guest gallery of the House sitting near first lady Melania Trump when President Trump mentioned the family in his joint address.
“A few years ago, January Littlejohn and her husband discovered that their daughter’s school had secretly socially transitioned their 13-year-old little girl,” Trump said. “Teachers and administrators conspired to deceive January and her husband, while encouraging her daughter to use a new name and pronouns—‘they/them’ pronouns, actually—all without telling January, who is here tonight and is now a courageous advocate against this form of child abuse. January, thank you.”
Trump added that “stories like this are why, shortly after taking office, I signed an executive order banning public schools from indoctrinating our children with transgender ideology.”
Despite the president’s recent executive order, the 11th circuit decision is the second by a federal appeals court in a month to side with a school district over parents in a gender-transition case. On Feb. 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, in Boston, also rejected a parental rights challenge to a school district’s policy.
Majority said school officials were trying to help the gender-transitioning child
Fact checkers have noted that the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper published emails in 2021, after a public-records request, showing that January Littlejohn appeared supportive of her child’s gender transition.
But the Littlejohns’ court papers in their suit against the Leon County school district, which includes Tallahassee, have referred to the school’s actions as aiding a “secret” transition. The parents say they informed teachers and administrators at their child’s middle school they did not allow the child to use a preferred name and “they/them” pronouns.
The school relied on a district guide for dealing with student gender transitions, and they developed a student support plan for the student identified in court papers as J., without including the parents in meetings because their child had not requested their attendance.
The district’s equity officer emailed the Littlejohns to say, “We currently do not have any Florida specific law that obligates us to inform the parents or says we cannot listen to the student without their parent present.”
The school district amended its guidelines to generally require parental notification after Florida in 2021 passed the Parents’ Bill of Rights, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
A federal district court dismissed the Littlejohns’ lawsuit. In its March 12 decision in Littlejohn v. School Board of Leon County, the 11th Circuit court panel agreed with the district court that the school district’s actions did not meet a “shock-the-conscience” standard set by various U.S. Supreme Court precedents.
“Defendants did not act with intent to injure,” said the majority opinion by Judge Robin S. Rosenbaum, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “To the contrary, they sought to help the child.”
Dissent says parents deserve their day in court
The court did not address the emails that purportedly showed January Littlejohn to be at least initially supportive of her child’s transition. That is likely because of the procedural posture of the case, in which the court was required to accept the parents’ factual narrative.
Judge Kevin C. Newsom, a first-term Trump appointee, concurred but wrote that the defendants’ actions of “hiding from the Littlejohns the fact that their 13-year-old daughter had expressed a desire to identify as a boy at school … was shameful.”
But “judges aren’t just politicians in robes,” he said, “and they don’t (or certainly shouldn’t) just vote their personal preferences.”
Senior Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat, an appointee of President Gerald R. Ford, said in his dissent that Supreme Court precedent does not “deprive citizens of the right to be heard in cases brought against state or local governmental executives for the violation of fundamental rights” and that the Littlejohns “are entitled to a day in court on the merits of their claims.”
