How a School Socially Transitioned a 13-Year-Old Girl Against Her Parents' Wishes

Exclusive Interview with January Littlejohn + My Opinion

I believe the greatest privilege an adult has is becoming a parent. It’s an honorable role & one that teaches you how deep your love can go because you’d be willing to sacrifice anything for your child.

But what if one day your child’s school tells you that you’re not to be trusted?

What if in the most vulnerable times in your child’s life, this school weaponized your child against you and attempted to aid them on a path of destruction?

With every move you make to have a transparent relationship with your child’s school, they are stabbing you in the back and facilitating an environment of confusion for your child in despair without your knowledge.

This is exactly what happened to January Littlejohn, a Florida parent turned child advocate, who seemingly overnight saw her daughter’s school actively work against her parental demands in favor of a “transition” policy.

Littlejohn currently has a case that is up for consideration at the Supreme Court after several court battles in the lower courts.

In an exclusive interview, I spoke with January Littlejohn about the origins of her fight to save her child’s sanity.

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“It was at the height of Covid, and our daughter came to us and told us that she no longer felt like a girl. And this was shortly after three of her friends at her middle school had also suddenly adopted a trans identity… I knew, in terms of my clinical training, that gender dysphoria is very rare.”

“And then when it does happen, it’s mostly males and happens in early childhood. So what I was seeing in my daughter’s friend group was not correlating at all with my clinical experience or training.”

Littlejohn was a highly involved parent who would volunteer at her children’s school multiple times a week and felt that she had built a solid relationship with the teachers and administrators. That all changed when her daughter began identifying as “non-binary.”

“My daughter got into the car a couple of weeks into the school year and said that she had a meeting at school, where they asked her which restroom she wanted to use... I had actually emailed her homeroom teacher and let her know that our daughter was experiencing distress out of nowhere, that I thought it was directly related to her friend group, that we were not using the name and pronouns at home, but that I felt like if it was going to be treated like a nickname, there was nothing I could do about it. It turns out this teacher that I confided in was the LGBTQ advocate on campus.”

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Link to view the entire Gender Support Plan

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Once this advocate was notified, the plan of secrecy and transition began…

“We were finally then given an in-person meeting with the principal of the middle school. And that’s where we were shown what they actually did at this meeting, which was socially transition our daughter, with a six-page document. This document is used all over the country. It’s from an organization called Gender Spectrum. And they asked questions that would absolutely impact my daughter’s safety, such as which restroom and locker rooms she preferred to use, and even which sex she preferred to room with on overnight field trips. To think about that power dynamic of having three adults in a room with a 13-year-old girl, putting the burden of whether or not her parent would even be notified about this social transition meeting on the child.”

Private meetings, secret identities and confusion for the child only magnified the distress for the child and created a culture where parents like Littlejohn are automatically guilty of being harmful to rationalize hiding information from them and anointing themselves as pseudo caretakers.

“We continue to ask for legal justification as to how, you know, what gives them the right to meet with our 13-year-old daughter without notifying us... They finally showed us a Leon County LGBTQ guide... In this guide, it was about 38 pages. They painted all parents to be a danger to their children with no due process. It even says in there it could cause abuse or make a child homeless if you quote unquote out the child... There was an NGO called Equality Florida that had started partnering with the public schools back in 2016... Providing training on these gender support plans, even giving schools checklists about how are you best supporting these children, but really, it was all a way to alienate the child from their parents.”

The school’s social transition policy only enhanced the rate of confusion her child was experiencing at the time.

“By the time that we found out about the social transition plan, our daughter was talking about cutting her breast off. So this was escalating very quickly... What the school did by interfering and socially transitioning her behind our back, it sent a very clear message to her that the school was in charge. Her parents’ authority no longer mattered. And it really pitted us against her... These kids, including my daughter, get a great deal of affirmation and attention and praise for these trans identities.”

“I naively thought that if I bring this information to the superintendent... that they’ll stop. That did not happen... We tried first to send a demand letter to them... We wanted a revised policy showing that you would contact the parents as a sign of any distress... Then I went public with this story anonymously... It took over a year for us to make the difficult decision to file the first federal lawsuit for parental rights violation and harm in this manner.”

Littlejohn’s case, January Littlejohn, et vir v. School Board of Leon County, Florida, et al. (Docket No. 25-259), is currently pending at the Supreme Court and they are hoping for its consideration which could help in other legal battles for parent rights to succeed.

“My case is pending before the Supreme Court... My case is on a very narrow legal technicality and a split decision because they applied... ‘shock the conscience’ when they dismissed my case... The Foote case is about the whole case does violate parental rights when they socially transition a child behind the back of the parents... We want the Supreme Court to set a precedent that parents are protected from these secret social transitions... Schools are continuing to do this.”

According to Defending Education, there are over 1200 school districts, 21,000 schools with secret social transition policies in place that could impact any one of their 12 million students.

Unfortunately, when you bring up this as a reality for many families across the country, we are still faced with either denial or reflexive minimization.

People deny this as a reality because I think many cannot comprehend how it is at all possible that a school could steal your authority from your hands or be labeled as dangerous without cause by some random administrator.

But this issue is far too real and it’s not just a few kids that are getting caught up in this. Medical transition surgeries and drugs are massive money makers and the children who get caught up in early often become patients for life.

By the grace of God, January was able to pry her daughter from the grip of this evil ideology that tells a child that there is something inherently wrong with them.

Many of us had our worlds shaken during the pandemic but we overcame the earthquake to stand tall in the face of a potential aftershock that comes from speaking the truth and standing up against evil.

January Littlejohn is an example of a woman, a mother, who risked everything to not only save her child’s life but also to selflessly help arm parents just like her to do the same.

God bless people like her.