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Parents in Leon County, Florida, are suing the school district for holding a meeting with their teenage daughter about her chosen gender identity without their knowledge or consent. The parents have warned that the district's LGBT policies create a "wedge" between students and their parents.

January and Jeffrey Littlejohn filed a lawsuit against the school board, Superintendent of Schools Rocky Hanna and Assistant Superintendent, Equity Officer and Taitle IX Compliance Coordinator Kathleen Rodgers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida on Oct. 18.

In the lawsuit, the Littlejohns accuse the defendants of violating their substantive due process right to direct the education and upbringing of their children under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and other rights guaranteed to them by state and federal law by excluding them from a meeting with school officials discussing their 13-year-old daughter's gender identity.

Vernadette Broyles of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, a legal organization created two-and-a-half years ago "specifically to stand with and help parents who are in some way or the other seeking to protect the well-being of their child from gender identity ideology," is one of the attorneys representing the Littlejohns in the litigation.

In an interview with The Christian Post, January Littlejohn and Broyles elaborated on the lawsuit and the events that led up to it.

Littlejohn explained that her daughter, who is now a high school student, began undergoing treatment for gender confusion in the summer before the start of the 2020-'21 school year. She attributed her daughter's gender confusion to peer pressure from her "friend group because three other children in that same friend group had come out as nonbinary or transgender within the previous six months."

While Littlejohn told one of her daughter's teachers at Deer Lake Middle School that she was "seeking mental health counseling and she was experiencing distress that we weren't affirming her at home because we didn't feel like it was in her best interest," she did not expect the school to begin referring to her daughter using they/them pronouns and give her the option to sleep in the same quarters as her male classmates on an overnight school field trip.

Littlejohn only found out that the school had taken such action because her daughter revealed to her that she'd had a meeting about her "nickname," with the concerned parent telling CP that "that's kind of what we refer to it as."

She said her daughter then asked, '"isn't it funny that they asked me what restroom I wanted to use?"'

"My daughter has ADHD ... and so to her, this seemed like the silliest thing in the world that they asked her which restroom she preferred to use. That was my first indication that the school had met with her without notifying my husband or myself," she said.

"I immediately called her guidance counselor. The guidance counselor said she needed to call me back. She called me back with the assistant principal on the line. So right then and there, I knew something felt different about the situation because I had spoken to the guidance counselor multiple times in the past because of my daughter's 504 plan for her ADHD."

Littlejohn accused the school of "colluding with my daughter to deceive us so that we would never have known she was going by an alternate name."

The concerned mother also insisted that she "absolutely should have been at that meeting" and expressed disbelief that the school that she volunteered at did not partner with them. "I was volunteer of the year at that school. It wasn't like I was an unknown parent."

Littlejohn recalled the detrimental impact of the school's decision to hold meetings with her daughter about her gender identity confusion without her knowledge or consent, saying: "It created a huge wedge between our daughter and us, as her parents. We have worked very hard over the past year-and-a-half to stabilize the situation through counseling, and I do feel like she's on a better path at this time."

Broyles told CP that the purpose of the lawsuit was to get the school district to "rescind the guidance that was in place that basically instructed school officials not to inform parents when a child begins to indicate a transgender or LGBTQ+ identity." The attorney expressed particular concern that the guidance implied that "outing a student to their parents could be dangerous to a student's well-being."

"Every time I think about this lawsuit, it really hits me: The district guidance had the message to parents that you don't have the best interests of your child in mind. It sends the message that children need to be protected from parents rather than by parents, and that is an earth-shattering message that cannot stand," Broyles asserted.

Specifically, the guidance, part of the "LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide," warned that "Outing a student, especially to parents, can be very dangerous to the [student's] health and well-being" because "some students are not able to be out at home because their parents are unaccepting of LGBTQ+ people out."

The guidance maintains that "as many as 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ+, many of whom have been rejected by their families for being LGBTQ+," suggesting that "outing students to their parents can literally make them homeless."

"We are seeking that guidance to be permanently removed and replaced with new guidance that complies with the Parents' Bill of Rights there in Florida as well as the Florida and United States Constitution that honors the parents' right to make decisions for their children," Broyles added. "It's really important to recognize that affirming a child's discordant gender identity involves a significant mental health decision that affects the well-being of children and with potentially lifelong consequences."

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