OAN Staff James Meyers
2:43 PM – Tuesday, May 27, 2025
The Supreme Court declined to hear a case on Tuesday involving a student’s appeal after his school district prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that read, “There are only two genders.”
The two conservative judges, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, noted that they would have reviewed the student’s case in Middleborough, Massachusetts, asserting that the lower courts were not following the First Amendment.
“If a school sees fit to instruct students of a certain age on a social issue like LGBTQ+ rights or gender identity, then the school must tolerate dissenting student speech on those issues,” wrote Alito and Thomas.
However, the lower courts ruled that the school’s ban doesn’t conflict with the Supreme Court’s 1969 decision “Tinker v. Des Moines,” which allowed students to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War.
The judges argued that students don’t “shed their Constitutional rights” when they enter “the schoolhouse gate.”
Christopher and Susan Morrison, the guardians of the student, who was not named in the case as he is still a minor, used the old case as an example and reason to sue the school district in 2023.
“It gives schools a blank check to suppress unpopular political or religious views, allows censorship based on ‘negative psychological impact’ or ideological offense, rejects a public school’s duty to inculcate tolerance, and lowers free-speech protection for expression that schools say implicates ‘characteristics of personal identity’ in an ‘assertedly demeaning’ way,” the lawsuit states.
“This flouts Tinker and turns the First Amendment on its head.”
Meanwhile, the student is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian and conservative legal firm.
The school district’s attorneys argued that the law group “attempts to rewrite the facts” and doesn’t focus on the affidavits submitted by school administrators at Nichols Middle School (NMS), which they claim provide “crucial context.”
“School administrators attested to the young age of NMS students, the severe mental health struggles of transgender and gender-nonconforming students (including suicidal ideation), and the then-interim principal’s experience working with gender-nonconforming students who had been bullied in other districts and had harmed themselves or were hospitalized due to contemplated, or attempted, suicide,” the district wrote in court filings.
Correction – 5/27/25 – 3:23 p.m. PT: the word “Meanwhile” was edited out of the tenth line.
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