US Supreme Court rejects Florida school gender-identity policy challenge

By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON, April 27 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear another bid by parents to sue a public school district over actions by teachers and officials to support the gender identity of students by not disclosing name or pronoun changes to parents without the child’s consent.

The justices turned away an appeal by the parents of a student who had self-identified as nonbinary while attending a middle school in Florida’s capital city Tallahassee after a lower court threw out their lawsuit. The justices turned away a similar case from Massachusetts last week. 

The plaintiffs had claimed officials treated their child as nonbinary and hid this information from them in violation of their fundamental parental rights as protected by the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment promise of due process. 

Disputes over efforts to support and protect the privacy of transgender and gender non-conforming students continue to play out across the United States. The court also previously turned away similar challenges in Wisconsin and Maryland.

The Supreme Court in March blocked measures in California that could limit the sharing of information with parents about the gender identity of transgender public school students without ​the child’s permission. 

Acting on an emergency request by Christian parents to reinstate a ‌judge’s ruling in their favor, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority ruled that California’s policies likely violated due process rights, as well as the religious beliefs of the parents about sex and gender.

The court is also confronting wider efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration and Republican-led states to restrict the rights of transgender people. 

In June 2025, the court upheld a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. In January, the court also appeared ready to uphold state laws banning transgender athletes from female sports teams.

The Florida parents, January and Jeffrey Littlejohn, said in court papers that officials at Deerlake Middle School in Tallahassee, part of the School Board of Leon County, created in 2020 a “covert gender affirmation plan” for their 13-year-old child after the student began to question gender identity. The parents had refused to allow their child to change names and use the pronouns “they, them.” 

The school board in 2018 had developed a guide for when students disclose to a school that they are transgender or gender non-conforming. Noting the potential dangers of outing such students, the guide said officials should seek the child’s consent before notifying parents. 

The Littlejohns sued the school board and certain officials in federal court in 2021. The parents claimed that the board’s gender support guide and its actions withholding information from them undermined their 14th Amendment rights, which the Supreme Court has long held protects the fundamental right of parents to direct the care and upbringing of their children. 

A judge dismissed the case, and the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision in 2025. The 11th Circuit concluded that, under Supreme Court precedent, in order to pursue the kind of claim the parents are alleging, the violation of rights by the public officials must “shock the conscience” – and this did not. 

The school officials did not force the child of the Littlejohns to take any course of action, the 11th Circuit said.

“And perhaps most importantly, defendants did not act with intent to injure. To the contrary, they sought to help the child,” it added. 

The school board’s guide has since been updated in response to a law that Florida adopted in 2021 bolstering parental rights, and now says officials must not withhold information from parents “unless a reasonably prudent person would believe that disclosure would result in abuse, abandonment or neglect.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)