Middleborough teen’s Supreme Court appeal over anti-trans T-shirt seems like a stretch

You may have heard that Liam Morrison, the Middleborough teenager who has sued for the right to wear an anti-transgender T-shirt to school, has appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

I wouldn’t get too excited about it, at least not yet. It strikes me as highly unlikely that the court — even this court — will want to undo precedents holding that public school officials have broad powers to control their students’ communications, whether it be the right to censor the high school newspaper or, in this case, to decide that a T-shirt’s message creates a disciplinary problem.

At the heart of Morrison’s argument is a form of fake both-sides-ism — that is, pro-trans messages have been allowed in school, so why not anti-trans messages? The problem with this is obvious. Anti-trans messages express hatred toward kids who are LGBTQ, while pro-trans messages harm no one.

As Christopher Butler reported Wednesday for The Enterprise of Brockton, Morrison is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), described as a “Christian” law firm. (Scare quotes warranted given that there are many varieties of Christianity, some of which even take seriously Jesus’ admonition to love one another.) Sandy Quadros Bowles of Nemasket Week and Travis Andersen of The Boston Globe reported on the appeal as well.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, the ADF agenda includes “the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S.” The organization also supports sterilizing trans people in other countries, has linked LGBTQ people to pedophilia and has “claimed that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society,” the SPLC says.

Morrison, then a seventh-grader, was sent home from the Nichols Middle School twice in the spring of 2023 — the first time for wearing a T-shirt that read “There Are Only Two Genders” and, the second time, for amending that to “There Are (Censored) Genders.”

Morrison sued and lost in U.S. District Court, and his appeal was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Chief Judge David Barron ruled that school officials did not act “unreasonably in concluding that the shirt would be understood … in this middle school setting … to demean the identity of transgender and gender nonconforming students.”

As for whether Morrison has a chance of riding his T-shirt to glory before the U.S. Supreme Court, as I said, it seems doubtful, but who knows with this group? It only takes four of the nine to agree to hear the case. And as Emily Birnbaum has reported for Bloomberg, the ADF “has won 15 Supreme Court Cases since 2011, and four since 2020, when Justice Amy Coney Barrett tilted the court into a 6-3 conservative supermajority.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine that the court is going to want to empower public school students to promote any message they want, especially if local school officials argue that to do so would be disruptive and create disciplinary problems. We’ll see.

Earlier coverage.