Supreme Court Won't Hear Case on Teen's T-Shirts

The Supreme Court has decided not to hear a case brought on behalf of a middle schooler and his T-shirts. As NBC News reports, the unidentified seventh-grader in Middleborough, Massachusetts, was sent home from school in 2023 when he showed up to class wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "There are only two genders" and refused to remove it. The lawsuit, backed by a Christian legal advocacy group called Alliance Defending Freedom, challenged the ban on First Amendment grounds, per the Hill. The student also wore a short that read, "There are only [censored] genders."

The court didn't explain its decision, but Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented and said they would have taken the case.

• "This case presents an issue of great importance for our nation's youth: whether public schools may suppress student speech either because it expresses a viewpoint that the school disfavors or because of vague concerns about the likely effect of the speech on the school atmosphere or on students who find the speech offensive," Alito wrote.

The lawsuit argued that the school's ban on the shirts ran contrary to a Supreme Court ruling from 1969 that allowed students to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War. "It gives schools a blank check to suppress unpopular political or religious views," the lawsuit states. School administrators have pointed to the district's dress code banning "hate speech or imagery." (More Supreme Court stories.)