Skip to content 187: Love That Refused to Affirm the Lie | January Littlejohn & Garry Ingraham Oct 27 · 1 hr 15 min ...more
187: Love That Refused to Affirm the Lie | January Littlejohn & Garry Ingraham
October 27, 2026 · 1 hr 15 min
January Littlejohn joins Garry to share her family’s experience when a school made decisions about her daughter’s identity without involving them. They explore parental authority, counseling, social transition, and the Church’s response. Listen as January shares how the crisis deepened her family’s faith and taught them to surrender to Christ.
Series Love & Truth Network Podcast - Video Edition
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October 27, 2026 · 1 hr 15 min · Love & Truth Network Podcast - Video Edition
January Littlejohn joins Garry to share her family’s experience when a school made decisions about her daughter’s identity without involving them. They explore parental authority, counseling, social transition, and the Church’s response. Listen as January shares how the crisis deepened her family’s faith and taught them to surrender to Christ. ...more Show the full description Show less January Littlejohn joins Garry to share her family’s experience when a school made decisions about her daughter’s identity without involving them. They explore parental authority, counseling, social transition, and the Church’s response. Listen as January shares how the crisis deepened her family’s faith and taught them to surrender to Christ.
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In this video 0:00 Surrendering to Christ in Crisis17:00 The Social Contagion of Gender Ideology37:00 Schools Secretly Transitioning Children58:00 The Harms of Gender Affirming Care1:06:29 Rooting Identity in Christ
Surrendering to Christ in Crisis 0:00 Our story started in twenty twenty when our daughter was just thirteen years old. When she went to middle school, a public middle school, initially, we were thrilled that she seemed to find this group of0:12 quirky friends that were into the same things that she was, the same books, they like to play games. When my daughter started to tell me that there were multiple kids in her friend group claiming to be0:24 non binary or the opposite sex, there were a lot of red flags.0:28 The way that we're handling this now is it's almost like you're making, the process of going through puberty and the challenges that come along with that and becoming an adult that we're somehow pathologizing that or0:39 something.0:40 She came to us in March of twenty twenty and told us she no longer felt like a girl. I immediately reached out to the guidance counselor and was called back with the assistant principal and0:52 the guidance counselor and told, missus Littlejohn, we cannot give you any information about the meeting we had with your child. She's now protected by a nondiscrimination law.1:00 When you're telling parents... Asking them, would you wanna have a live son or a dead daughter or vice versa, and you're telling them that this is going to be the outcome, you're not actually getting informed consent.1:12 You're terrifying the the parent into thinking that unless I go along with this, my child's gonna take their life.
1:17 This isn't normal. This is... This isn't happening naturally. This is a social contagion. We've got a whole wave of kids that have been potentially sterilized. They
1:29 will never have any kind of sexual functioning. You have destroyed their body with cross sex hormones. They will have lifelong issues that many doctors don't even know how to treat.
1:41 Putting a child at war with their natal body is evil. Making them wanna cut off healthy body parts, that's evil. And we need to call it out from a place of love and compassion and help
1:53 these kids find and root their identity in Jesus Christ because he is the only one that will
2:00 Welcome to the Love and Truth Network podcast, your guide for hope and healing in a hurting world searching for truth. Here, we explore God's extraordinary design for biblical sexuality, identity, and authentic
2:11 community. You'll be impacted by incredible stories of transformation, practical wisdom from pastors and counselors, and the power of God's grace that changes lives.
2:28 Hey, everybody. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Love and Truth Network podcast. We're so glad that you're here with us, and I have been wanting to have this conversation with January Littlejohn for
2:39 quite some time. Now you may be familiar with her name. You may not at all be familiar with her name, but you're gonna be very familiar with her story both in terms of her own personal story of coming to faith. All of
2:49 our podcasts involve our guests sharing that story and and their backstory and that kind of thing. But, boy, does she have something to share with us about, the last several years of, of walking with her daughter
3:01 and and dealing with a lot of things I'm gonna let her unpack for us. But I'm just glad that you're here and you get a chance to hear from January directly. January, thank you so much for joining us and taking the time
3:12 to be here.
3:14 Thank you so much for having me, Gary.
3:16 You bet. Absolutely. Well, I would just love to dive right in and just kinda begin with some of your own origin story and your your story of coming to faith, and, and then we'll kinda pick up with what's been going on
3:28 the last few years.
3:30 Sure. I'm originally from Memphis, Tennessee. My parents divorced when I was only in second grade. So I do come from a a broken home, a single mom who was a nurse, and I think did the very best
3:42 she could. But faith was not a strong foundation in our home. We would go to church on and off, especially when I was young, but then fell away when we moved from Memphis to South Florida.
3:54 And so I think that like many kids and adolescents, I was searching for identity for a very long time and always claimed to be a Christian. I certainly believed in Jesus, that
4:06 he was our Lord and savior. I believed in God, but I wasn't following Christ. I didn't even really understand what that meant until this crisis hit our
4:18 family, really. I certainly was not. You hear a lot about the salad bar. I would pick and choose what to believe, what fit in with my value system
4:30 as opposed to really learning about what God's word says and being obedient to his word and his will.
4:37 Yeah. That's powerful. And, at some point along the line... So when would you say that you gave your life to Christ? It sounds like, if I'm not mistaken, it sounds like that happened maybe fairly early on. But
4:49 in terms of really getting rooted in discipleship that came later. Definitely, more recently, the depth of it really took root. But how would you kind of set that up
5:01 in terms of, chronology of of faith?
5:06 Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it's like the parable of the seed. My seeds weren't rooted. They would burn up or they would blow away. And so I wish that weren't the case, but that
5:18 is a part of my journey, and I hope others learn from that because I think I could have saved myself a lot of grief and maybe even the way that I was raising my children would have been very different than it is now.
5:29 Yep.
5:30 But, really, I think the tipping point for us, even my husband, we both came to really follow Christ at the same time because of this issue, because it's really so evil
5:43 that we didn't have a choice but to turn to God. And
5:46 so Yeah.
5:47 That's... Twenty twenty would be the time that we really started walking with Christ as opposed to just sitting in a pew. Because we were going to church. We were doing all the things, but, again,
5:59 it's it's really not the same.
6:02 Well, I I... So I love actually what you're talking about there, and I wanted to spend a moment that this is the primary reason that we connected and wanted to do a podcast together. But I think what you're sharing is so
6:14 important, so critical. And you mentioned, you know, it... It's something that other people need to think about. For example, you know, my audience knows I I gave my life to Christ finally at the age of twenty three. I
6:24 grew up in a Christian home. I'd said the sinner's prayer a number of times, you know, and I and I grew up in denominations, like, that says, you know, once and done kind of, but I knew something wasn't taking. I knew
6:35 something wasn't changing in my life. And and so I was going through all the motions of a very kind of religious respect... Or ideas and trying to do the right things and yet failing constantly at at... You
6:47 know, my story is, we don't need to get get in that now. My audience knows that. But a lot of brokenness, a lot of double living as a as a young person, as a teenager, and a young adult. But, I think what you're
6:59 sharing is so critical that... And it's something important I really want people watching or listening to what we're talking about to consider for themselves or maybe, you know, even others in their lives. We we don't
7:09 know where other people are at spiritually. I think sometimes people do come to faith and through a lack of discipleship, they kind of, they're kind of dormant, you know, for quite some time until that's really
7:20 activated. But I think so many of us have become inoculated to the gospel or have been around religious things for a long time, but we really aren't in. They're really... Like, we're... Maybe we
7:32 try to apply truth and religious ideas and and Christian principles, which benefits anybody by doing that. But it's not the same thing as being in faith and being a Christ follower and being born again and
7:44 being filled with the Holy Spirit and those kinds of things. So it sounds like what you're describing is having lived a life around Christianity for a long time, having dabbled in that even as a kid and with your, you
7:56 know, with your mom for sure. But but actually surrendering your life to Jesus, that was a newer experience.
8:04 Yeah. Absolutely. And even really, you know, being consistently in God's word was a new experience. I prayed a lot even when I wasn't necessarily following Christ and bending
8:15 to his will. But being in God's word, I mean, that really is our protection armor against what's happening in the future. And I don't think people understand that enough that when we really
8:27 draw on the Holy Spirit to help us and guide us and convict us, when you're reading God's word even. And so just even all of that has been a very new experience for me. And Yeah. When I really
8:39 started listening to God's calling for my life, that's when things really started to fall into place. And Right. You know, by the grace of God, I am saved. It is only by his grace.
8:49 And so
8:50 my sin is erased. And that is just such a miracle to me that, I really am born again, and I certainly fall all the time. I do not judge other people where they are in their walk. But
9:02 if I can inspire other people to consider surrendering, you know, truly surrendering, surrendering, which is a daily surrender for me. That's right. And I started volunteering at
9:14 our church as a youth leader, and I started, you know, basically putting my money where my mouth was because if I'm telling parents they need to inoculate their children from this ideology,
9:27 I have the tools and skills to do that. And so I've really dedicated the last six years of my life to our youth administering to them and Mhmm.
9:39 Really helping them to understand that they are made in God's image as male or female and what the purpose in God's design is for their lives.
9:49 Yes. Okay. So there's already a bunch of things I wanna unpack, but I... Again, I want to just put a couple of exclamation points, behind what we just talked about because we're gonna get into quite a few things in our
10:01 conversation that are going to draw a lot of attention. And and it is the focal point of what I wanted to talk about, but I do not want people to miss what you just discussed and talked about. We can be
10:13 around Christian, ideas. We can be in church. We can be in a Christian family. We can do all the things and yet not actually be in the kingdom, not actually be a son or daughter of God.
10:25 And so it... That is so essential. And I, again, would love people to to really ponder about that for themselves, and and for those that, maybe have been in a similar
10:37 situation and and are hearing and maybe resonate with what you're talking about, it could very well be that even after decades of being around Christianity, they still need to surrender their lives to Jesus. And that is
10:48 critical to understand if, in fact, that's the case. So, but I I wanna shift to the conversation that we originally wanted to talk about, January. But you also just mentioned
11:00 something that I think is so critical, and I wanna use this kind of in between our next, what what you're really going to unpack. And it is the idea... I'm often saying and contending that I am more and
11:12 more, convinced that children that are growing up in Christian homes are are going to Sunday school classes. They are hearing a lot of things maybe in their home, certainly in their... In church about
11:24 biblical ideas and principles. Their minds may be filled with lots of bible stories, which all of that is wonderful. Every part of that is great. But in terms of their sense of identity, they are completely blank slates.
11:36 Nobody in church is actually writing beautiful and glorious things about the fact that they were made with God's incredible intention in who they are as boys or girls made in his image. They're
11:48 not just... This this is not just a physical representation of something. It's a representation of God's, identity for them. So everyone who is ever created, everyone who is,
12:00 comes into the world has an identity. Even as an unbeliever, they have an identity as an image bearer of God in their maleness or their femaleness, And we need to be doing a far better job in the church and in our
12:11 Christian families of really equipping and finding rich ways and frequent ways to talk about that reality. So when kids are exposed, whether that's in public school, or whatever... I mean, we know
12:22 kids that... I've been through public school, Christian school, and homeschooling, but there are kids that that get exposed to this stuff because of the Internet or whatever, even in homeschool situations. But one of the
12:33 reasons that kids are so susceptible is because they're blank slates even though they've grown up in Christian homes and have gone to church for forever. So could you maybe speak to that issue first, and then let's shift
12:44 to talking a little bit about your story, in relationship to, I mean, I wanna say in sense your activism, but you're standing up against the onslaught and the tsunami of confusion around identity in our
12:56 culture.
12:58 Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, you know, we're here to really unpack gender identity ideology and how that issue impacted our family and really propelled us, you know, on this kind of mission to save
13:09 other families from going through what we did. But in terms of these kids, I think parents need to really understand this ideology, this notion that
13:21 we have this, you know, this feeling of our gender, which is separate from our sex, because that's what's being taught to children either explicitly or implicitly. But this ideology has infiltrated
13:33 every institution in our culture, even the judicial institutions in many of our states. And so for a long time, especially back in twenty nineteen,
13:45 twenty twenty, we were really playing catch up on what was actually happening. And so, you know, it's not just in our schools, which it absolutely is. Even here in Florida,
13:57 we still have issues and we can talk about those mechanisms as to how this is still being taught to children, even with the really great laws that we have passed. Right. But it's in the media.
14:08 It's in children's programming. It's, of course, all over TikTok, Instagram. You've got trans influencers that are normalizing this, glamorizing this, and children see
14:20 it. You know, you have pride flags everywhere, especially in the month of June. It's all of these little signals that we may not have even picked up on that are subliminal to these kids where
14:32 it's normalizing this identity crisis. And if we are not being very intentional about teaching children the truth from a very young age,
14:44 I fear that families are going to be caught off guard just like we were.
14:51 Yep. Yeah. It's so true. It's so true, January. And I, what what actually happened? What was the... Where would you like to kind of pick up the the story, the narrative
15:03 about what happened with your daughter, what happened with you guys as a family?
15:07 Sure. So, you know, I think that a lot of us and and rightly so wanna forget what happened during COVID. We wanna forget how chaotic that time
15:19 period was for children, for families, for schools, but that's really where our story started. And I... My fear is a lot of people think
15:30 this issue has been solved
15:33 Right.
15:34 That we don't need to, stand up against it anymore. And what's really happened is many many of these activists and ideologues are dormant
15:46 and they're waiting. And so our story started in twenty twenty when our daughter was just thirteen years old. She's gifted, but she's also
15:58 ADHD. And so at that time, it really read a little bit like autism because she had a tendency to perseverate on on things or, book series, music, and then she would have a
16:09 difficult time talking about anything else or even introducing anything new into her life. And so that can be very off putting unless you find a group of friends that also
16:21 has that same interest Right. And those likes. And and we're talking about things that aren't mainstream. So she didn't fit in with mainstream kids. She's very artistic. She loved theater, which a lot
16:33 of these kids do that are falling prey to transgender ideology. And so when she went to middle school, a public middle school, initially, we were thrilled that she seemed to find
16:45 this group of quirky friends that were into the same things that she was, the same books. They like to play games, things of that nature. But then I started to have concerns because they seem to
16:57 be hyper focused on LGBTQ identities. Mhmm. So many of these kids, and these were eleven and twelve year olds, were claiming to be pansexual,Show more
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