WASHINGTON DC, Feb 23 — January Littlejohn is a stay-at-home mom and a licensed mental health counselor. Back in 2020, as COVID swept the nation, her 13-year-old daughter told her that “she no longer felt like a girl.” Her mom described it as a devastating revelation in a recent interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens and host of AMAC’s Better For America podcast.
January said it happened “shortly after three of her friends at her local middle school had also suddenly declared a transgender identity. Transgender is really an umbrella term for any identity that a child chooses, and children are being taught through gender ideology that they can choose to be a girl, a boy, neither or both. And so, at the time of our daughter coming to us and expressing confusion, she was identifying as gender fluid, which is one of these made-up identities. Over two years, her identity changed four times. So it became very clear that our daughter was confused. I was a volunteer of the year at this middle school, and I was also a substitute teacher in our county. So I was well known and when school started in the fall we let a teacher know that our daughter was confused, that we were not affirming the identity at home, that I thought it was directly related to her friend group and that we were seeking counseling to help us navigate this issue as a family. Two weeks after I confided in the teacher who, by the way, turned out to be the LGBTQ advocate on campus, my daughter said she had a meeting about her name [and] wanted to rename herself and go by different pronouns. She told me she had a meeting that I was not aware of, and so I immediately contacted the guidance counselor and assistant principal who said they could not give me any information about the meeting they had with my child, that my child was now protected under a nondiscrimination law.“
January said that the school’s actions left her in disbelief. “I was in shock, especially when they told me that they would not give me information about my child. So my husband and I didn’t let this go. We continued to push and ask for legal justification for their meeting with our 13-year-old child without our knowledge or consent.” She noted that it took some seven weeks to get a meeting with the school’s principal and it was at that meeting that she was shown for the first time “what they had done with my child behind closed doors. It was a transgender support plan in support of the social transitioning of my child. This was not just about names and pronouns. They asked her which restroom and locker room she preferred to use. They asked her which sex she preferred to room with on overnight field trips. And then they asked her how they should refer to her when speaking to us, her parents … we were finally shown the LGBTQ guide that they were using as justification to meet with our child. And it turns out our situation was not an isolated event. The more I dug into it, I realized that these types of LGBTQ guides were all over the state of Florida, and they had been put in place by a partnership with an activist organization called Equality Florida. In fact, Equality Florida had a whole department called Safe and Healthy Schools that was dedicated to infiltrating the public school systems and ensuring that these guides and pseudo policies were in place. And they called them guides for a very specific reason, because if it was an actual policy, it had to go through school board approval. But since it was called a guide, they could essentially treat it as de facto policy and train everyone in the school system.”
January went on to say that what happened to her daughter was “a gross violation of our parental authority … It caused a huge wedge between us and our daughter. It was hard enough that she was experiencing distress over her sex and rejecting her natal body. That, in itself, was causing trauma. But then to have school officials cheer her along this path of self-harm, because social transitioning is the first step toward medical transitioning. And we often hear these euphemisms used like gender affirming care and hormone therapy. But when you pull back the layers as to what these really are, most people are horrified to learn that the off label drugs that they are using and calling health care are actually causing great medical harm to these very vulnerable individuals, these children that do not have the ability to consent to these irreversible changes that these medical interventions are causing. Young girls as young as 12 years old getting double mastectomies. We’re talking children on the autism spectrum potentially being sterilized by high levels of testosterone before they’re even reaching adulthood. So I realized how significant this issue was, and that we were not, by far, the only family that this had happened to.”
NOTE: January Littlejohn is a Parent Advocate at Do No Harm. She also recommends the advocacy organization, Child & Parental Rights, for more in information about parental rights.
John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.
