(The Lion) — Two Florida parents have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a lawsuit against their local school system, where they say their teenage daughter was gender-transitioned without their knowledge.
“Whether a public school ‘violates parents’ fundamental constitutional right’ when it secretly helps ‘transition’ their child to a new ‘gender’ is ‘a question of great and growing national importance,’” asserts their petition filed with the high court Sept. 3.
The lawsuit claims January and Jeffrey Littlejohn’s then 13-year-old daughter, identified as A.G., began a gender transition in 2020-21 at the advice and aid of a counselor at Leon County’s Deerlake Middle School. The Littlejohns, who knew A.G. struggled with some developmental delays and mental health and gender-identity questions, had hired a private therapist.
Despite the parents’ opposition to A.G.’s transition, school officials met with A.G. and presented a six-page guide for her “formal gender transition at school.”
Without asking A.G. if she wanted her parents’ involvement, the officials labeled her “nonbinary,” required staff and teachers to reference her using they/them pronouns, and asked if she was “comfortable” sharing male bathrooms and lodging.
The school also allegedly forbade anyone from informing A.G.’s parents.
When the Littlejohns discovered the transition, they asked the school to stop, requested records of any transition meetings, and even asked to participate – but the lawsuit says the school refused each request, saying the parents had no right.
The Littlejohns argue such actions violate their “fundamental rights to ‘make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children’ and ‘to direct the medical and mental health decision-making for their children.’”
A federal district judge in Tallahassee dismissed the case, a decision that was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which found that school officials acting against the Littlejohns’ wishes doesn’t constitutionally qualify as “shocking the conscience” – a key phrase in the lawsuit and previous legal proceedings.
The petition argues the “shocks the conscience test” is “utterly and totally in the eye of the beholder” and “fundamental rights” should not “hinge on this arbitrary distinction.”
Alliance Defending Freedom agrees, saying in an amicus brief filed April 30 that the shock-the-conscience test shouldn’t apply to “fundamental-rights claims.”
“The panel was wrong to hold that all fundamental-rights claims based on executive action must ‘shock the conscience,’” ADF’s brief maintains. “And it was wrong to hold that secretly transitioning a 13-year-old to a different gender identity doesn’t.”
ADF further contends school officials derive authority from the parents themselves, meaning teachers and staff cannot override direct parental requests regarding the care of their child.
In another amicus brief, Liberty Justice presented professional and medical guidelines for gender transition, demonstrating how the school’s actions contradict medical recommendations.
“No professional association recommends that teachers and school officials, who have no expertise whatsoever in these issues, should facilitate a social transition while at school, treating minors as if they are really the opposite sex, in secret from their parents,” the brief reads.
“Usurping the parents in this way is conscience-shocking.”
The parents’ Supreme Court petition says “parental-exclusion policies … are deeply harmful to children and parents.”
The Supreme Court will now decide whether to review or deny the parents’ petition, which it argues presents a question that applies to numerous cases and “affects all unenumerated rights.”
