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Judge rules against Middleborough student who wore ‘there are only two genders’ shirt, case may go to Supreme Court
Liam Morrison's lawyers said they will consider appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court after their appeal was denied.
A federal judge denied an eighth-grader’s appeal, upholding another judge’s ruling that a Middleborough middle school didn’t violate his first amendment rights when he was required to remove his “There are only two genders” shirt last year.
Liam Morrison, a then-seventh grader at Nichols Middle School, was sent home from school in March 2023 after he refused to change, according to the United States Court of Appeals’ decision filed Sunday, which upheld a District Court decision from last summer.
The case was filed on behalf of Morrison and his family last year by two conservative Christian groups, Alliance Defending Freedom and the Massachusetts Family Institute.
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Sam Whiting, a staff attorney with MFI, wrote in a statement that the group is considering appealing again to the Supreme Court.
“This case is about much more than a t-shirt,” he wrote. “The court’s decision is not only a threat to the free speech rights of public school students across the country, but a threat to basic biological truths.”
Decision: Morrison felt his views weren’t ‘inherently hateful’
Morrison also wore a “There are CENSORED genders” shirt in protest last year, which depicted a piece of tape over what was “two genders.” School officials asked him to remove the shirt then, and he complied, according to court documents. He was not disciplined for wearing either shirt.
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“(Liam Morrison) wore the Shirt both to express his own views, which he understood to be contrary to those NMS espouses on the subject and to convey his belief that his views are not ‘inherently hateful,’” the judge wrote in the decision.
Morrison’s father reached out to the school when he was initially asked to remove the shirt. School officials said per the dress code, the shirt targets “students of a protected class; namely in the area of gender identity,” according to the decision.
The judge agreed. Chief Justice David Barron wrote that the shirt Morrison wore is generally understood in a middle school setting to “demean the identity of transgender and gender-nonconforming NMS students.”
“The question here is not whether the t-shirts should have been barred. The question is who should decide whether to bar them – educators or federal judges,” Barron wrote. “We cannot say that in this instance the Constitution assigns the sensitive (and potentially consequential) judgment about what would make ‘an environment conducive to learning’ at NMS to use rather than to the educators closest to the scene.”
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