A federal appeals court ruled this week against a Florida couple who had sued officials in their child’s school district for disregarding their wishes and excluding them from discussions about the child’s gender identity.
The ruling adds to a complicated legal landscape concerning minors and gender identity. While Republican lawmakers across the country have sought to restrict gender-transition care and the expression of gender identity, federal courts have remained divided over whether such laws violate equal protection.
Some parents, like the ones in the Florida case, have argued that their rights should take precedence over a child’s professed wish to transition. Others, facing bans on transition care for teenagers, have argued that their children have a right to health care that they feel is necessary for their well-being.
At the center of the Florida case is January Littlejohn, who with her husband sued the Leon County School District in Tallahassee and has become a prominent promoter of parental rights. Now affiliated with an organization opposed to gender-transition care, she was a guest of the first lady, Melania Trump, at President Trump’s speech to Congress last week.
Ms. Littlejohn “is now a courageous advocate against this form of child abuse,” Mr. Trump said in his speech, nodding to her as he detailed the steps his administration had taken to “protect our children from toxic ideologies in our schools.”
But two of the three judges who heard the case for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit rejected the argument made by Ms. Littlejohn and her husband, and upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the case.
“Even if the Littlejohns felt that defendants’ efforts to help their child were misguided or wrong, the mere fact that the school officials acted contrary to the Littlejohns’ wishes does not mean that their conduct ‘shocks the conscience’ in a constitutional sense,” Judge Robin S. Rosenbaum wrote in the majority opinion.
A lawyer for the couple did not say whether the Littlejohns would appeal, but said “we cannot allow this assault on parental rights to remain unchallenged.”
“This decision wrongly emboldens school districts to act in secret, eroding the fundamental parental rights that have been upheld by the Supreme Court for more than 100 years,” said Vernadette Broyles, the president and general counsel for the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, a nonprofit law firm.
The child, who is not identified by name in the lawsuit, first asked to use they/them pronouns and a more masculine name ahead of the 2020-21 school year at Deerlake Middle School in Tallahassee. While the Littlejohns agreed to use a different name as a nickname, they did not explicitly agree to the use of different pronouns — something they told the school staff.
At the time, the school district was using a 2018 guide that warned that “outing a student, especially to parents can be very dangerous” for a student’s well-being. And it allowed for a support plan that documented, in part, whether parents were “supportive” of a student’s identity or whether they were to be identified as L.G.B.T.Q. to their parents. (The guide was updated in 2022 after Florida passed a law prohibiting any classroom instruction about sexual or gender identity.)
When the Littlejohns learned of their child’s identity change, they asked the school why they had not been included in meetings setting up a support plan. Administrators said that because the child had not asked for their involvement, and because there was no law requiring parents to be informed, the school did not have to involve them in the decision.
“It’s our fundamental right to direct the upbringing of our children,” Ms. Littlejohn said in a video posted by the White House this month. “And that includes mental and physical health care.”
The Littlejohns sued the school district, the superintendent, the assistant superintendent equity officer and a school counselor, arguing that their parental due process and privacy rights had been violated. But Mark E. Walker, the chief judge for U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, dismissed the case in December 2022. That decision upheld by the appeals court on Wednesday.
The school officials named in the case “did not force the Littlejohns’ child to do anything at all,” Judge Rosenbaum of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote. “And perhaps most importantly, defendants did not act with intent to injure. To the contrary, they sought to help the child.”
A lawyer representing the school district and staff did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After Mr. Trump singled out Ms. Littlejohn in his speech last week, Rocky Hanna, the Leon County Schools superintendent, told The Tallahassee Democrat: “To blatantly lie and disparage our teachers and our public schools to simply gain notoriety or political power is reprehensible. I only hope that truth and honesty matter more to our federal courts than it does to Ms. Littlejohn, our current governor and our current president.”
Wednesday’s ruling — 169 pages in total — reflected divisions on the court, including between the two judges who agreed to dismiss the case.
In his concurring opinion, Judge Kevin C. Newsom said he considered the actions taken by the school district officials “shameful.” But the question at hand, he wrote, was “whether it was unconstitutional.”
“If I were a legislator, I’d vote to change the policy that enabled the defendants’ efforts to keep the Littlejohns in the dark,” he wrote. “But — and it’s a big but — judges aren’t just politicians in robes, and they don’t (or certainly shouldn’t) just vote their personal preferences.”
Senior Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat, who dissented, warned that the decision “ignores bedrock separation of powers principles, waters down fundamental rights and flies in the face of our prior panel precedent rule.”
