CNN
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal from a Massachusetts middle school student who was forced to remove a T-shirt that claimed “there are only two genders.”
Two conservative justices – Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas – dissented from the decision to not hear the case.
So long as the appeals court’s decision is on the books, Alito wrote, “thousands of students will attend school without the full panoply of First Amendment rights. That alone is worth this court’s attention.”
Liam Morrison wore the shirt to Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, in 2023 to “share his view that gender and sex are identical.” School administrators asked him to remove it and, when he declined, sent him home for the day. Weeks later, he wore the same shirt but covered the words “only two” with a piece of tape on which he wrote “censored.”
Morrison and his family sued the district in federal court, asserting a violation of his First Amendment rights. The district court ruled against him and the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision.
In a landmark 1969 decision, Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court affirmed students’ First Amendment rights at school, but the court qualified those rights, allowing school administrators to regulate the speech if it “materially disrupts” instruction at the school. The Vietnam-era case permitted a group of students to wear black armbands in protest of the war.
The appeals court held that schools can regulate a student’s speech under Tinker if it “assertedly demeans characteristics of personal identity” of other students if the message is “reasonably forecasted” to poison the “educational atmosphere.” Morrison, who is represented by the religious legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, argues that decision “sidelined” Tinker and “gave near-total deference to the school’s determination of what speech demeans protected characteristics and substantially disrupts its operations.”
In their written response to the Supreme Court, school officials noted they are aware of transgender and gender-nonconforming students “who had experienced serious mental health struggles, including suicidal ideation, related to their treatment by other students based on their gender identities” and that those struggles could impact the students’ ability to learn.
