Defending Education Files Amicus Brief in Littlejohn V. School Board of Leon County, Florida, ET AL.

Defending Education is a national, nonprofit membership association. Its members include many parents with school-aged children. Launched in 2021, it uses advocacy, disclosure, and litigation to combat the increasing politicization and indoctrination of K-12 and postsecondary education. It has a substantial interest in this case. The Fourteenth Amendment protects the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. The panel’s decision, however, will prevent parents, including members of Defending Education, from meaningfully vindicating this fundamental right.

Facing parents of public school children is an explosion of policies that allow school personnel to socially transition their young children—giving children new names, pronouns, restrooms, and field trip bunks—in secret. Defending Education has found that nearly a quarter of the nation’s students are subject to these policies. These “social transitions” are not neutral interventions. While the overwhelming majority of children with gender incongruity grow out of it, most children who are
socially transitioned do not. Rather, they go on to increasingly invasive and irreversible interventions—puberty blockers, sterilizing cross-sex hormones, and experimental genital surgeries. Yet schools are refusing to even tell parents that they are setting their children on this dangerous pathway.

If the fundamental parental right to direct a child’s upbringing protects anything, it protects against state-sanctioned transition of a child without parents’ knowledge. But courts are leaving parents with no way to vindicate this right. When parents challenge a school’s policy—a “legislative” action—they are often told that their concerns are too speculative so they lack standing. And when parents challenge
a school’s application of its policy to their child, decisions like the panel’s tell them they cannot assert their fundamental right unless they clear an insurmountable hurdle: the “shocks the conscience” test. The result is to deny parents meaningful judicial recourse. To correct this result, the Court should grant rehearing en banc.