Trump’s Trans Kid Story Doesn’t Add Up
The Trump administration is “working to protect our children from toxic ideologies in our schools,” President Donald Trump told the nation during a televised address to Congress last night. He went on to share a story about January Littlejohn and her husband, Jeffrey, who allegedly “discovered that their daughter’s school had secretly socially transitioned their 13-year-old little girl,” conspiring to “deceive January and her husband while encouraging her daughter to use a new name and…they/them pronouns.”
The school did this “all without telling January,” Trump reiterated, before touting his administration’s efforts to make public schools less friendly to “transgender ideology.”
Trump immediately pivoted to talking about how he would help pass a bill to criminalize “sex changes on children,” blurring the lines between mild actions like calling students by their preferred pronouns and major medical interventions of the sort that are exceedingly rare.
But that’s not the only way that Trump’s comments were misleading.
In Trump’s telling, the school was both pushing gender nonconformity on the Littlejohn’s child and doing so without the parents’ knowledge. But emails obtained by media outlets years ago suggest that not only did the parents know this was going on, it was they who first broached the subject with the school and suggested that staff follow their child’s lead on name and pronouns.
Emails Tell a Different Story
The reason that some outlets discovered this years ago is because last night’s Trump speech wasn’t the first time the Littlejohns have been used by politicians pushing an intolerant agenda. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “repeatedly pointed to the [Littlejohn family] to explain the need for a controversial new law, dubbed by critics the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, that bans schools from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity,” CNN reported in April 2022.
“We had a mother from Leon County, [Florida,] and her daughter was going to school and some people in the school had decided that the daughter was really a boy and not a girl. So they changed the girl’s name to a boy’s name, had her dress like a boy and on doing all this stuff, without telling the mother or getting consent from the mother,” DeSantis reportedly said at a news conference back then, referring to the Littlejohns. “First of all, they shouldn’t be doing that at all. But to do these things behind the parents’ back and to say that the parents should be shut out. That is wrong.”
Like Trump’s story last night, DeSantis’ tale suggested that the school was for some reason grooming this child to be transgender and doing so without any conversations with the parents.
But emails obtained by the Tallahassee Democrat in response to a public records request, and later obtained by CNN, show that January Littlejohn wrote the school in 2020 to announce that her child wanted to use different pronouns and go by a gender-ambiguous nickname.
“This has been an incredibly difficult situation for our family and her father and I are trying to be as supportive as we can. She is currently identifying as non-binary,” January Littlejohn wrote to a teacher at her child’s school in August 2020, per CNN. “She would like to go by the new name [redacted] and prefers the pronouns they/them. We have not changed her name at home yet, but I told her if she wants to go by the name [redacted] with her teachers, I won’t stop her.”
The teacher asked
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