California Justice Center Urges Supreme Court to End School Policies that Hide Student Gender Transitions from Parents
Amicus Brief Filed in Littlejohn v. School Board of Leon County, Florida
Washington, DC — The California Justice Center joined the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Policy and Liberty Justice Center in filing an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday in support of the parents in Littlejohn v. School Board of Leon County, Florida. The Leon County School District — like over a thousand other school districts around the country — had a policy to secretly facilitate gender identity transitions of students at school and hide it from their parents. The Littlejohns sued after a district school secretly created a gender transition plan for their child without informing or involving them.
“We urge the Supreme Court to take this case to affirm parents’ rights and protect vulnerable children from this devastating policy of secretly transitioning students at school,” said Emily Rae, president of the California Justice Center. “Schools should never be in the business of keeping secrets from parents.”
The brief was filed on behalf of Dr. Erica E. Anderson, a transgender, clinical psychologist practicing in California and Minnesota with over 45 years of experience. Since 2016, Dr. Anderson’s work has focused on children and adolescents dealing with gender-identity-related issues at a clinic at Benioff Children’s Hospital at the University of California, San Francisco (2016 to 2021), and now in private practice. Between 2019 and 2021, Dr. Anderson served as a board member for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and as the President of USPATH (the United States arm of WPATH).
“Dr. Anderson has a strong interest in ensuring that such children receive the best possible care (whether or not they ultimately transition), which, in her view, requires involving their parents,” the amicus brief states.
The Littlejohns are asking the Supreme Court to hear their case after the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of their lawsuit because, in the majority’s view, the school district’s conduct was not sufficiently “conscience shocking.”
“If usurping parents and actively deceiving them about a highly controversial and life-altering decision is not conscience-shocking, it’s hard to see what would be,” the amicus brief argues.
The “shocks the conscience” test applied by the Eleventh Circuit is a lower review standard used by courts when considering whether government conduct violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The Littlejohns argue that their case is about the fundamental, constitutional rights of parents to raise their own children and should therefore be considered under the court’s highest level of scrutiny.
The amicus brief submitted Monday agrees with the Littlejohns that the shocks-the-conscience test does not apply, but argues that even if it did, the Eleventh Circuit botched its application: the school district’s actions of deliberately defying and deceiving parents do shock the conscience.
“School is now like Las Vegas: ‘What happens at school stays at school,’” the amicus brief states.
As the amicus brief explains:
“The District in this case openly ignored the Littlejohns’ decision about what was best for their young daughter, did the exact opposite of what they had decided, and then attempted to keep secret from them what they were doing at school.
And the District knew, because the Littlejohns had told them, that their daughter was struggling with serious mental-health issues and was in therapy for them. The District had no basis to conclude that the Littlejohns were unfit in any way—it simply disagreed with their decision.”
The amicus brief argues that this case should be “easy on the merits” as the U.S. Supreme Court has “long recognized and recently reaffirmed, parents have a ‘constitutional right to make decisions concerning the rearing of [their] own [children]’” and any attempt by the government to supersede parental authority is “both unconstitutional and ‘repugnant to American tradition.’”
“Schools cannot give children a Tylenol without parental consent; facilitating a secret gender transition is far more serious. This Court should grant the petition and reverse,” the brief concludes.
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