WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Florida parents challenging school officials who withheld their child’s “social transition” from them under a since-rescinded policy.
In 2018, the Leon County School Board adopted a policy empowering schools to develop a “support plan” for students who wished to be treated as the opposite sex, including withholding the news from parents if a student did not want them to know. The policy was changed in 2022 after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, but not before one pair of parents sued the school district for keeping them in the dark about “socially transitioning” their middle-school-age daughter.
CBS News reported that January and Jeffrey Littlejohn’s daughter, identified in court documents only as AG, had asked her parents to change her name and address her with male pronouns. They refused, allowing her only to adopt “J” as a nickname, so AG discussed her gender confusion with a school counselor. A “support plan,” complete with preferred name and pronouns, was established, but the Littlejohns were not notified until their daughter told them herself.
The parents sued in 2021 but lost through multiple appeals, based largely on the conclusion that the 2022 policy change rendered the issue moot. They had sought damages on the grounds that it was the school’s “course of conduct, not the contents” of the 2018 plan that were at issue.
So the Littlejohns appealed to the nation’s highest court, but Monday’s order list confirmed their petition has been denied without elaboration. How individual justices voted was not listed, but CBS noted that Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas previously urged the Court to resolve similar questions, indicating they most likely would have taken the case. If true, that would mean that all six remaining justices voted to deny the petition, as only four votes are necessary to hear a case.
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality, race, and other agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools and libraries, from book shelves to drag events to classroom materials to even “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas. Across the nation, controversy has also erupted in recent years over schools and libraries adopting books that expose sexual themes and activity to children, often in graphic detail and with pornographic imagery depicting specific sexual acts.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them. Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” interventions fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
As for the current Supreme Court, it is often unpredictable on conservative and pro-family goals despite six of its nine current members having been appointed by the GOP, including three by President Donald Trump alone.
The Court has delivered major conservative victories on gun rights, environmental regulation, affirmative action, and, most significantly, abortion with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but it has also issued dismissive rulings on COVID-19 shot mandates, religious freedom, and LGBT ideology to the point that Alito and Gorsuch have taken the rare step of criticizing Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh for lacking the “fortitude” to resolve such issues.
