Thirteen-year-old student “M.P.” at Peoples Academy Middle Level school in Morristown, Vermont, recently donned a shirt displaying the woke-verboten statement that “There are only 2 genders,” and she was disciplined for it. In classic civil disobedience, M.P. bravely wore the shirt to school again. And the school disciplined her again.
Aghast that M.P. would be reprimanded for the simple, commonsense message on her shirt, her mother and stepfather contacted and retained the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm “defending life, family, and freedom.”
In a letter to school officials, Thomas More Society special counsel Adam Hochschild said M.P. had been illegally targeted by the school’s principal by “pulling [M.P.] out of class, reprimanding her, punishing her with in-school suspension, and calling her shirt ‘hate speech.’”
Hochschild invoked the 1969 Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which concerned students disciplined for wearing black arm bands in protest against the Vietnam War. The court ruled displeased school officials were not permitted to regulate such student speech: “Clearly, the prohibition of expression of one particular opinion, at least without evidence that it is necessary to avoid material and substantial interference with schoolwork or discipline, is not constitutionally permissible.”
Hochschild further criticized the school’s practice as violating M.P.’s religious liberties, because “her decision to wear the shirt is motivated, in part, by Genesis 1:27 (‘God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’)” As the Supreme Court recently recognized in a case involving a praying football coach, the free exercise and free speech clauses of the First Amendment “work in tandem.”
Thankfully, the school relented. Perhaps it was influenced by President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, executive order recognizing the “incontrovertible reality” that there are only two sexes and directing the termination of “federal funding of gender ideology.” Peoples Academy receives federal funding.
Even though the school had relented, sadly M.P. was threatened with discipline yet again by a teacher when M.P. next wore the shirt to school the following week. But the school acknowledged that should not have happened; the teacher’s errant rebuke was retracted.
M.P. is determined — backed by legal counsel, the president of the United States, the Constitution, and the school’s capitulation — to try to exercise her basic First Amendment rights unhindered by government restraint. She plans to wear the shirt to school again this month.
Similar Case in Massachusetts
Meanwhile, a virtually identical scenario involving another brave middle-school shirt-wearer from Middleborough, Massachusetts, is pending before the Supreme Court, with a petition filed by nonprofit organizations Alliance Defending Freedom and Massachusetts Family Institute. L.M. v. Town of Middleborough involves the exact same only-two-genders shirt. Unfortunately, the school in that case, unlike Peoples Academy in Vermont, stubbornly refused to recognize the First Amendment rights of its students. The student filed suit and lost in the lower courts.
Middleborough’s attorney Kay. H. Hodge absurdly explained:
At the present time, Massachusetts law provides protection against discrimination, harassment and bullying on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Those protections prohibit communications, whether oral, written, electronic or through the wearing of apparel, that may reasonably be considered intimidating, hostile, offensive or unwelcome based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other status protected by law and/or may otherwise be reasonably likely to lead to a disruption of its operations.
Isn’t the school’s LGBT messaging offensive to observing Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and thus a secular (and patently un-scientific) violation of the protections of those religions? “Protecting” people who are confused about their sex by eliminating scientific inquiry or banning expression of devout moral views is an overt attack on other people’s faiths and sex (actual “protected” categories under the law).
The Massachusetts school system is imposing a draconian regulation of speech that insists religious traditions’ millennia-old views (and biological fact) are somehow inherently cruel. This is utterly ridiculous — and passes unfair and unkind judgment on kids like M.P. and L.M. who want to express, as is their constitutional right, what they believe, which also happens to be a basic truth: that there are only two sexes.
As M.P. prepares to dress for her new free speech safe space at Peoples Academy Middle Level school, she is excited to express her views without the threat of official retaliation. She said: “I just wanted to wear a shirt that says something simple and true and important to me as a Christian. I’m glad the school is now letting me wear it!”
We may learn soon if the Supreme Court will take up L.M.’s case and recognize the same rights M.P. can now enjoy at her school.
School bureaucrats across the nation must reckon with the fact that they have abridged fundamental constitutional liberties in their zeal to indoctrinate and bully their young charges.
