A U.S. appeals court on June 9 upheld a ban preventing a Massachusetts middle school student from wearing a shirt reading “There are only two genders.”
Another prohibition by school administrators, this time blocking the same student from wearing the shirt with “only two” covered by tape, on which was written “censored,” is also allowed under court precedent, according to the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
“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. Based on Tinker, the cases applying it, and the specific record here, 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 us rather than to the educators closest to the scene,” U.S. Circuit Judge David Barron wrote for a unanimous panel of the court.
In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969 ruled that a ban on students wearing armbands in protest against the Vietnam War violated the students’ First Amendment rights.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani cited the ruling when in 2023 she ruled in favor of the administrators at the John T. Nichols Middle School (NMS) and Middleborough School District in Massachusetts against Liam Morrison (L.M.), the boy who wore the “two genders” shirt to school.
“[The school] permissibly concluded that the shirt invades the rights of others,” Judge Talwani said before quoting Tinker. “Schools can prohibit speech that is in ‘collision with the rights of others to be secure and be let alone.’”
Hellbound and Down 