This column is the second in a two-part AMAC Newsline series on January Littlejohn’s parental rights activism.

As parents continue to grapple with the rise of gender ideology in schools and pop culture, many American families are feeling discouraged and distraught. Perhaps no one in America can speak to these challenges more credibly than January Littlejohn, a Florida mother, mental health counselor, and parental rights advocate whose 13-year-old daughter was “socially transitioned” in middle school in 2020 without Littlejohn’s knowledge or consent. In other words, the school started treating her daughter like a boy without telling January and her husband.

In a recent interview with AMAC Newsline, Littlejohn detailed her experiences as a parent embattled by the pernicious lies of gender ideology—and offered heartfelt encouragement to other parents facing similar challenges. Below is Littlejohn’s interview, edited for length and clarity, with AMAC Newsline.

AMAC Newsline: How have you seen the landscape change when it comes to gender ideology in classrooms over the past several years—and where do you hope to see the movement head?

January Littlejohn: So that’s a great question. From the time that I became aware of what was happening in 2020, to now, there’s been good and bad. I think the good is parents are much more aware of what’s being taught in the classroom. They’re seeking out more, they’re demanding transparency from their school districts. There have been multiple states that have passed laws like the one that Florida has passed where they are not allowing gender ideology to be taught in certain grade levels, and they’re actually trying to stop schools from being able to secretly social transition children behind the backs of parents.

And compared to where we were in 2020, to where we are now, is night and day in terms of the resources available to parents. If you go to the Do No Harm website, there’s a Parent Resource page that I helped put together. There are now multiple organizations, multiple parent support groups, there are therapists willing to help. There are podcasts and documentary books. These were nonexistent in 2020, so to me, that is a huge amount of progress in the last four years—because when I was experiencing this with my child, who was 13 at the time, when I would Google this issue, the only thing that would come up was, ‘Affirm your child, or she’s going to kill herself.’

And so we had to, number one, tell people the truth. And number two, there had to be alternatives to that, so that parents fully understood what this issue is, that they understood that the vast majority of these kids will outgrow and resolve their distress if you allow them to go through natural puberty. We should not be socially transitioning or medically transitioning these children. And so, what we’ve accomplished now, with almost half of the United States having banned these interventions for children just in the last two years, I think people would have not believed we can accomplish that back in 2020 and it’s really been a grassroots effort, not just from me, but from other parents and concerned citizens and politicians.

I think the bad news is certainly in more blue states, where even school districts like in California that had chosen to take a stand and try to protect parental rights in this area, the state has actually come up against them and sued them. And so that was a case that happened in California where a school district tried to do the right thing, and the state basically shut them down and filed a lawsuit against the school district.

And so unfortunately, I think that this issue is not just a bottom-up, but it’s also a top-down. And right now, we’ve seen it come straight from the Biden administration—they have a very clear agenda when it comes to gender ideology. They’ve been very clear about it.

They have been on the side of medically transitioning children, which the evidence does not support, which is why other European countries have moved away and either completely restricted puberty blockers and surgical interventions and cross-sex hormones on minors, or they are really pulling back and only allowing very strict clinical trials to gather more data. But the U.S. is an outlier when it comes to how we are treating childhood and adolescent gender dysphoria, and at the end of the day, the people being harmed the most are families of children.

In terms of moving forward, what we really need to see are these medical professional organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society putting data, research, and evidence over ideology. Because the American Academy of Pediatrics has a conference coming up for their pediatricians, and they have invited Dr. Rachel Levine—Admiral Levine—to be their keynote speaker, who is well known in the Biden administration, to be pushing these medical interventions on children.

So it was like a slap in the face to parents experiencing this issue with their children that not only has the American Academy of Pediatrics completely abandoned ethics when it comes to this issue, they’ve also ignored The Cass Review out of the U.K., which was a very extensive four year systematic review of the evidence, but now they’ve invited a trans-identified man to be their keynote speaker and further normalize these interventions on children.

By the way, the American Academy of Pediatrics is involved in at least one lawsuit by a detransitioner. And so the good news is, the president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons just recently came out in the last week or week or week and a half, and has been very clear that their organization says that the evidence does not support doing “gender-affirming care” on children or adolescents.

So, I hope that that’s the kind of thread that we need to pull all of these organizations loose and give them permission to really follow evidence over ideology. I think we need more people to be filing lawsuits, especially the transitioners. We need these lawsuits to play out. Because you and I both know these lawsuits take many, many years, and we need more parents and concerned citizens standing up and saying no, that this isn’t reality, that this isn’t being kind, and we’re not going to allow males in female spaces. We’re not going to allow males in female sports, and we’re not going to allow our children to be indoctrinated into a false belief system that leads ultimately to irreversible medical harm.

AMAC Newsline: As families are beginning a new school year, what advice would you give to parents whose children are being affected by gender ideology and are facing the same challenges you did?

January Littlejohn: Well, first and foremost, if your parental rights are not going to be respected if you go to that school, the first thing is, parents need to be aware of what’s being taught. And if gender ideology is in that school system—and it’s in a lot of school system and states—and you know that their protocol and their policy tells them that if a child comes to them and wants to change their name and pronouns that the child’s wishes are going to be honored and not the parents’, you need to pull your child from that school. Your child is not safe.

I would also encourage parents to always get everything in writing. You can’t simply go into a classroom anymore and say, ‘Are you teaching gender ideology?’ You have to be smarter than that. Because I don’t believe that most teachers are on board with this. But it only takes one or two activist teachers or school counselors in a school to really get this going. This ideology is being taught in social-emotional learning. It’s being taught in sex ed programs. And if that middle school or high school has what’s called a ‘GSA club,’ which stands for ‘gay straight alliance’ or ‘gender sexuality alliance,’ you better believe that gender ideology is absolutely being taught in that school system, either directly or indirectly.

And so parents need to know what’s being taught to their child. They need to opt out when they can, and if they can’t opt out, or the or their parental authority is not going to be honored, they need to withdraw their child.

And these are just realities that I did not fully understand right away. In 2020, we did end up pulling my daughter. In fact, we pulled all three of our children from public school. But of course, hindsight is 20/20, and so that is my advice to parents. And if a child is struggling, you, the parent, are their best advocate. You know them better than anybody.

Parents have to be very careful if they source this issue to a counselor, because many counselors, unfortunately, will affirm a student’s confused identity and undermine parents even further, which creates an even larger wedge in the parent-child relationship. So parents have to do their research. Luckily, there are books like Lost in Translation and other books that I highly recommend, so that parents can get a handle on what this is, what their child has been indoctrinated into, and then how to parent their child.

AMAC Newsline: What do you say to parents who are concerned about the threats of gender ideology, but are afraid to speak out?

January Littlejohn: I would say our children are worth it. And I hope people don’t have to get to where I had to get where I almost lost my daughter to this, and I got to a place where—you know, we’re not wealthy, but we have a nice life. And I had to get to a place where I would have given it all up—everything—just to have my daughter back. That was most important to me. I would have given up my house, my life, any money. I just wanted my daughter back.

And so when people say that they’re scared to speak up, or they’re afraid that it’s going to impact their friendships or their livelihood, I would say to them, there are worse things. There are worse things that can happen. And so I think that courage is contagious. I think that we need to be actively inoculating children from this ideology, because laws and lawsuits are not enough. This ideology has literally permeated every aspect of our culture, and it’s going to take time to undo these lies that have seeped into our medical institutions, into my field of psychology, they’ve seeped into universities. I’ve seen pride flags in video games. These identities are being marketed directly to children.

But this is a unifying issue. The vast majority of Americans believe this is pseudoscience, nonsense. There are two sexes. Sex is binary. That is the reality, and this, ultimately, is a mental health issue, and we are seeing now the consequences of allowing this mental health issue to go unchecked, normalized, and even encouraged. We’re seeing the consequences, and they aren’t good.

It’s a nightmare for a family to navigate watching your child turn against themselves. Because I think what a lot of people don’t realize is most of these, especially the girls that are prey to this ideology, many of them not only have concurring mental health issues, but they are just filled with self-hate. Puberty is a tough time for girls in particular. I mean, it’s a tough time for all kids, but in particular for girls. And a lot of these girls have a real deep sense of self-loathing, and when schools and doctors and therapists and our culture at large are affirming these girls and these false identities, and encouraging them to become something they never can be, and then to encourage them along a medical pathway where they will be a lifelong medical patient that will have irreversible consequences.

It is still unconscionable to me that this is even happening. It is completely unethical, and I don’t think anybody needs to have an M.D. to know that cutting the healthy breast off a 12-year-old girl is unethical and a bad idea.

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The Parental Resource page referenced by Littlejohn can be accessed here.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.