The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal in a case involving the Leon County School District that inspired Florida’s new laws regarding the teaching of gender and sexuality in the classroom.
In 2021, January Littlejohn sued the school district, alleging teachers and administrators violated her parental rights after speaking with her child about a “gender support plan” without her consent.
The case was a catalyst for Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education,” law, also known by critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” and quickly became state and national news. Littlejohn appeared alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis when the measure was passed in 2022, and President Donald Trump called Littlejohn a “courageous advocate” at a joint address to Congress last year.
The high court’s decision was issued without explanation. It leaves in place a decision by a three-judge panel with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with the school district in a 2-1 decision that denied Littlejohn’s request for an en banc hearing in front of all 12 judges.
Why did January and Jeffrey Littlejohn sue Leon County Schools?
In 2020, before the start of the new school year at Deerlake Middle School in Tallahassee, the Littlejohns’ 13-year-old child asked to socially transition at school with a male name and they and them pronouns, court records show.
January Littlejohn told the child’s teacher that they did not allow the child to use a different name or pronouns at home.
According to emails obtained by The Tallahassee Democrat, Littlejohn told the teacher that although they hadn’t changed what they call the child at home, “If she wants to go by the name (redacted) with her teachers, I won’t stop her.” When the teacher asked if they could share the info with other teachers, Littlejohn replied, “Whatever you think is best or (redacted) can handle it herself.”
In a later email the same day, she said “This gender situation has thrown us for a loop. I sincerely appreciate your support. I’m going to let her take the lead on this.”
The child confirmed to a school counselor a desire for the changes. The school counselor and other school staff met with the child to create a Student Support Plan. The Littlejohns were not notified because the child did not expressly request their presence, which was required at the time.
The school district’s LGBTQ+ guide in use in 2020 instructed staff not to notify parents if a child’s behavior led them to believe the child was LGBTQ+, saying “Outing a student, especially to parents, can be very dangerous to the student’s health and well-being. Some students are not able to be out at home because their parents are unaccepting of LGBTQ+ people out.”
Two months later, after the school repeatedly refused to disclose the details of the Student Support Plan per law, the Littlejohns sued the Leon County School Board, Superintendent Rocky Hanna, and Robin Oliveri, the assistant principal at Deerlake.
They did not dispute the legality of the LGBTQ+ guide, but alleged that the school officials violated the Littlejohns’ rights by excluding them from conversations about their child’s gender identity, especially since the parents brought the topic up with the child’s teacher in the first place.
The lawsuit asked for damages and for the district to change its LGBTQ+ guide.
January Littlejohn told The Christian Post in a 2021 interview that she believed officials were “colluding with my daughter to deceive us so that we would never have known she was going by an alternate name.”
Almost two dozen states sided with Florida in trying to get the Supreme Court to hear the case
Florida’s attorney general joined with 21 other states in siding with the Tallahassee couple in the case.
The states that signed onto a friend-of-the-court brief in support of January and Jeffrey Littlejohn were Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia.
“Put simply, parents have a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children, including controversial decisions like whether to allow their children to socially transition,” the state leaders’ brief said. “Purposefully withholding from a parent critical information about supposed medical treatment that a school is providing a student not only violates that right, but does so to a disturbing and constitutionally intolerable degree.”
Legal battle involving Littlejohns began in 2021 and got attention of President Trump
The Littlejohns have been fighting in court against the Leon County School Board since 2021, when they asked for damages, including for emotional distress, saying their relationship with their child was damaged because of the district.
Even though they lost their case in two federal courts, the couple continued to argue the Leon County School District violated their parental rights.
January Littlejohn has since become a spokesperson for the parents’ rights movement, appearing alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis and Uthmeier during press conferences and also speaking at numerous events for conservative groups, including Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation. Last year, she was invited by First Lady Melania Trump to attend President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress in March.
Trump called the school’s policies a “form of child abuse.”
“Stories like this are why I signed an executive order banning public schools from indoctrinating our children with transgender ideology,” Trump said as he introduced Littlejohn to the national stage more than an hour into his national address.
That same month, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a decision by U.S. District Judge Mark Walker to dismiss the 2021 lawsuit. The appeals court said the case involved a challenge to government executive actions and, as a result, the legal test under court precedents was whether school officials’ actions “shocked the conscience.” Judge Robin Rosenbaum, who penned the main opinion, concluded that the actions did not rise to that level.
“The child was not physically harmed, much less permanently so,” Rosenbaum wrote. “Defendants did not remove the Littlejohns’ child from their custody. And defendants did not force the child to attend a Student Support Plan meeting, to not invite the Littlejohns to that meeting, or to socially transition at school. In fact, defendants did not force the Littlejohns’ child to do anything at all. And perhaps most importantly, defendants did not act with intent to injure. To the contrary, they sought to help the child.”
After the 2025 ruling, Leon County Schools Superintendent Rocky Hanna said he was still dealing with frustrations of the publicity generated by the legal action five years later.
“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,” Hanna told the Tallahassee Democrat at the time. “Their deceitful comments represent the very worst among us.”
This is a developing story. Check back for details.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: US Supreme Court rejects parents’ appeal in Leon Schools pronoun case
Reporting by Staff reports, USA TODAY NETWORK and News Service of Florida / Tallahassee Democrat
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