A concerned parent has filed a lawsuit against a Florida school after it held gender discussions with her daughter without her knowledge, leading the student to transition without her consent.
January Littlejohn, a mother from Florida has filed a lawsuit against her daughter's school for allowing her daughter to transition at school without her consent. Littlejohn and her attorney Vernadette Broyles appeared on national TV to shed light on the lawsuit and explain why she felt "outraged" over the incident.
"This is happening all over the nation," Littlejohn said on Monday during "Fox & Friends First," Fox News reported. "This same protocol is in place in many, many schools across districts everywhere, and even the guides being used to dictate these transgender support plans that cut parents out even have the same language."
Littlejohn argued that public schools in America today have "a very systematic way of ensuring that parents are "excluded from important decisions occurring with their children." The parent, who is also a mental health professional, underscored that "social transition is a medical intervention that schools are grossly unqualified to be taking these steps without parental involvement."
Littlejohn lamented how her daughter, who was at the time just 13 years old, felt confused over gender during the pandemic because a group of friends had transitioned to the opposite sex. The Florida mother then found out that the school was working on a "transgender support plan" with her daughter, but they initially prevent her from participting because she was "protected by a nondiscrimination law."
The Florida mother than saw the "transgender support plan," which she described as a "six-page document" that the school completed with her daughter "behind closed doors." During this discussion, her daughtwe was asked questions that would "absolutely impacted her safety," such as "which restroom she preferred to use and which sex she preferred to room with on overnight field trips."
The Daily Mail reported that according to Littlejohn's speech during the Florida Family Policy Council in 2021, her daughter never expressed "signs of gender confusion or distress in early childhood or leading up into this announcement," which meant that she was merely influenced by the group of friends who began identifying as trans and was possibly peer pressured into transitioning. But school administrators at the Deerlake Middle School in Tallahassee, Florida allowed her child to transition without her consent or knowledge.
When Littlejohn raised concerns to the school, its guidance councilor and vice-principal said that they could not disclose what happened in the closed-door meeting with her 13 year old daughter as the student had to give consent by law for her parents to be informed about the discussion. The parent lamented that the "transgender support plan" also featured a clause "to use her birth name when speaking to us in effect to deceive us of the social transition that had occurred."
The Littlejohns sued the school for violating their parental rights at the end of 2021. Deerlake Middle School then filed a motion for dismissal, which the family opposed. They are now waiting on the decision on their opposition to the filing.
Broyles said that these types of lawsuits are not uncommon. In fact, similar lawsuits have been filed in Wisconsin, Maryland, Oregon, California, and Massachusetts. The attorney warned, "This is a national agenda, and parents need to recognize they have the right to direct the upbringing, education, care, medical decisions, mental health decisions of their child, and they need to assert that right with their school."
