Ron DeSantis busted lying about trans kid’s family to support Don’t Say Gay law

Ron DeSantis
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Florida Gov. DeSantis has been caught lying about the family of a transgender student in order to promote his state’s Don’t Say Gay law.

In the signing ceremony for the Don’t Say Gay law last week, DeSantis related the story of January Littlejohn, a mother in Leon County. He said that “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.”

Related: DeSantis’s press secretary says anyone who opposes Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill is a pedophile

The Don’t Say Gay law bans any discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary school and requires that such discussions be “developmentally appropriate” in older grades, and it allows parents to sue if they feel their school violated the vague terms of the law.

Supporters of the Don’t Say Gay law use stories like this one to argue that schools are violating parents’ rights by teaching that LGBTQ people exist – which conservatives have been calling “grooming” – or by somehow forcing kids to be transgender. They argue that the law is required to stop schools from exposing children to ideas that their parents don’t agree with and they use stories like Littlejohn’s to show that this is a problem.

But there’s a problem with DeSantis’s story about Littlejohn: it isn’t true.

While there isn’t much public information about her case, emails that have been made public quite clearly show that…

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