The seventh grader who wore a T-shirt with the words “There are only two genders” to school, but was barred from wearing it in class, had placed his hopes in lawsuit. That might have restored his freedom to speak. But the Massachusetts middle schooler, Liam Morrison, 12, was let down by a district judge’s decision in June denying his right to express his message in class.
“It makes me upset that I can’t wear my shirt to school,” Liam said in a statement. “The message is important to me, and I should be able to exercise my freedom of speech, just like everyone else.”
In March, Liam was pulled from class by his principal and a school counselor at Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, for wearing said shirt. He was told to remove it or else be banned from class. Refusing, he missed the rest of school that day.
After Liam conferred with attorneys from Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Massachusetts Family Institute, in May they filed a lawsuit against the school on his behalf. They accused Nichols Middle School of violating the seventh grader’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
“This isn’t about a T-shirt,” ADF legal counsel Logan Spina stated. “[T]his is about a public school telling a seventh grader that he isn’t allowed to hold a view that differs from the school’s orthodoxy.”
They argued that the school “encourages” students to speak in matters of sex and gender as long as they “express the school’s favored viewpoints” that “a person’s subjective identity determines whether a person is a male or female, not a person’s sex.” The school itself has vocally expressed this position, the attorneys added, and instituted annual events celebrating it.
Concurrently, the school “forbids” students from expressing contrary beliefs. “Public school officials can’t force Liam to remove a shirt that states his position when the school lets every other student wear clothing that speaks on the same issue,” Mr. Spina said.
Further, they argued that Liam’s belief is informed by his scientific understanding of biology—that there are only two sexes, and gender is “inextricably tied to sex”—and school officials can’t force him to “remove a shirt that states a scientific fact. Doing so is a gross violation of the First Amendment.”
Middleborough officials said they allow a multitude of messages on clothing but forbade Liam from wearing his because their dress code prohibits “hate speech and imagery” against group identities. Those include “race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, or any other classification.”
Liam protested his being silenced by returning to class with a different shirt that read, “There are censored genders.” He was promptly sent to the principal’s office and told he couldn’t wear that shirt either. His attorneys called the school’s doubling down by silencing his protest of being censored a “gross violation of the First Amendment that we’re encouraging the court to rectify.”
Last month, after hearing arguments from both parties, United States District Judge Indira Talwani sided with the school, declaring the institution had the right to prohibit speech that was in “collision with the rights of others to be secure and be let alone.”
Middleborough Public Schools representative Sean Siciliano told the newspaper they were “unable to provide specific details about the individual bills to families at this time due to privacy considerations,” but their “focus remains on fostering a safe and productive learning environment for all students.”
