Teed Off

It may have been on the school bus that the idea first took root in Liam Morrison’s mind. You can think about a lot of things on those short rides, surrounded by an unpredictable sampling of your peers. There’s so much you can’t help seeing, or hearing, amid those rows of worn, vinyl seats.

What Liam heard and saw one morning was a couple of fellow students who were opting to identify as transgender. Liam had been curious about this idea for a while now, wondering what might prompt people to think about gender this way. So, he politely asked these two some questions, made some observations. What came out of that, over the next few days, was an on-again, off-again conversation between Liam and the duo.

The conversations confirmed to Liam that he thought about gender in a very different way. Which made him all the more conscious of something he’d been noticing for a while: that a different set of views about gender was being promoted around his middle school campus. Pride flags, posters, subtle and not-so-subtle urgings to celebrate one view: that gender is a limitless spectrum defined only by each person’s self-identification.

Liam draws inspiration from two primary sources: his father’s probing questions and what he reads to feed his considerable curiosity.

That emphasis on one particular point of view troubled Liam, for several reasons. One, of course, was that it was a point of view he disagreed with. Two, it was a point of view that he felt was being pressed on himself and his peers in the name of education — when, if anything, it seemed a lot more about politics. And third, it was a point of view that, from what he was learning, could eventually lead kids his age into dangerous and irreversible medical procedures.

That’s a lot for a 12-year-old to be thinking about — but Liam is nothing if not a thinker. And the more he thought, the more it began to weigh on him that maybe he should say something. That other voices really needed to be heard on this issue.

And that maybe one of those voices should be his.

That’s when he decided to look for a T-shirt.

Liam has spent all 14 years of his life in Middleborough, Massachusetts — established in 1669, population 24,000, and the self-proclaimed Cranberry Capital of the World. (Ocean Spray Cranberries is headquartered in the town.) Over the last few years, he attended Nichols Middle School, where he liked most of his courses, but particularly science (“the most energizing class,” he says). He had his own circle of friends on campus and a reputation as an excellent student who consistently made the honor roll.

If school gives him a lot to think about, he credits his dad, Chris, with teaching him how to think … albeit through some rather unconventional lessons.

“When I was younger — when I was a lot more gullible — he would tell me these absurd stories and let me come to my own conclusions on whether or not they were true,” Liam says. Stories, for instance, about the time Chris ran in the Boston Marathon (“he’s not the type,” his son decided) or climbed Mount Everest — in one day.

At the time, Liam says, he believed that last one, “because he’s my father — this big, mighty being.” But on reflection, young Liam dismissed that story, too. “He’s not the guy that’s capable of that.”

Along with the tall tales, though, Chris took the time to point out interesting things in the news and made a point, around the dinner table, of challenging the family for their thoughts on current events. “That eventually developed into me being able to form my own opinions,” Liam says.

Liam formed them at school, too. By the time he entered sixth grade, he and his friends began to notice a growing promotion of particular ideas about gender and sexuality around campus. A poster in the guidance counselor’s office, showing gender as a spectrum of possibilities rather than just two. Pride flags. Pride Month activities. Students invited to wear clothing to celebrate these ideas.

“They’ve definitely taken their position,” Liam says. “It’s not always discussed, but it’s known amongst the students. That it’s what people who run the school want us to think — and what they think themselves.”

But it wasn’t, Liam decided, what he thought. And — having been encouraged not just to think for himself but to speak those thoughts when appropriate — the then-12-year-old began to wonder if it might be about time to express, out loud, a different point of view than the one being pushed on campus.

The conversations on the school bus convinced him the time had come.

He talked with his dad about how he was feeling. “I wish there was a good T-shirt,” he said. His dad found one online with a message that seemed to make Liam’s point.

“There are only two genders,” the shirt read.

Liam asked his dad if he could wear it to school. “I didn’t think it would be a big deal,” he says.

Liam’s dad and stepmom wondered. They faced the same mixed feelings every parent faces if their child decides to stand up and speak up for what he believes: a certain amount of pride, and a certain amount of hesitation.

“I do not like to be the center of attention,” Chris says. “But it was up to him. He’s a good kid. Respectful. Kind. And he thinks for himself. It was his idea. We just let him kind of roll with it.”

The rollout didn’t get far. His first-period P.E. class had barely begun when the principal showed up and motioned for Liam to follow her. “People are complaining,” she said. “They’re upset.”

In the school office, she and the guidance counselor asked Liam to take off the shirt. As he explained his reasons for wearing it, the adults seemed ill at ease. But neither could tell him exactly who or how many had complained about his shirt, and he soon decided, “I didn’t want to back down.”

“I just felt that taking off the shirt was unnecessary,” he says, and that ordering him to do so was “not something they had the power to do.” Finally, they gave him an ultimatum: sit in a room alone all day or call his folks to come get him. Liam chose the latter.

His parents came, but their conversation with the principal went nowhere; she wouldn’t detail any of the complaints for them, either. She just told them Liam was violating school policy. If she thought his parents would be concerned that others disagreed with Liam’s decision to wear the shirt, she was disappointed.

“We were very proud of him,” says Sue, Liam’s stepmom. “He was standing up for himself. He’s a remarkable young man.”

On the way home, they offered to take Liam for pizza. He thought he’d better finish his homework first.

The next day, Liam’s fellow students had plenty of comments — all supporting what he’d done. Some had never said anything about the subject before. “I think seeing someone else do it just made them feel like they had the ability to say something about it themselves,” he says.

Chris sent an email to the district superintendent, questioning the principal’s decision. “There was nothing about [Liam’s] shirt that was directed to any particular person,” he wrote. “It simply stated his view on a subject that has become a political hot topic.”

The superintendent replied, supporting the principal — whose actions, it turned out, were based on one teacher’s complaint.

A school board meeting was scheduled for the following week. Liam got to thinking that might be a place to explain to the superintendent and others in authority why he’d done what he’d done. He and his parents began brainstorming ideas. He practiced what he wanted to say.

The night of the meeting, Liam was nervous, he remembers, but he said his piece, before an audience that included a good-sized group of family and friends — including his mom, Christie, who was on hand with plenty of representatives from her side of the family.

“Christie and her side of the family have been a great source of support and encouragement to Liam through all of this,” Sue says, gratefully.

“What did my shirt say?” Liam asked the board. “Five simple words. ‘There are only two genders.’ Nothing harmful, nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.

“I’ve been told that my shirt was targeting a protected class. Who is this ‘protected class?’ Are their feelings more important than my rights? I don’t complain when I see Pride flags and diversity posters hung throughout the school. Do you know why? Because others have a right to their beliefs, just as I do.

“Not one person — staff or student — told me that they were bothered by what I was wearing.”

“Liam wasn’t chasing trouble,” says his aunt, Julie Hamblin, who was there that night. “He was making a statement. It blew us all away … just how confident he was, and well-spoken. We were all looking at each other: ‘This is little Liam?’”

Family and friends cheered; board members made no comment. But someone recorded Liam’s speech and posted it online. It quickly went viral. Overnight, requests for interviews began to come in. So did support, from all over the country: letters, T-shirts, money, gift cards, books.

An acquaintance put Sue in contact with attorneys with the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI), who offered to send a letter to the school demanding they let Liam wear his shirt. The school’s attorney replied; the answer was still “no.”

So, the next day, Liam wore his T-shirt again, but this time he covered two of the original words with a piece of tape. On the tape, he stenciled the word “censored,” so the modified shirt now read, “There are censored genders.” That one didn’t last five minutes. He’d barely sat down at his desk before an administrator summoned him back to the office. This time — not wanting to miss more school — Liam took the shirt off.

Clearly, the school had no respect for Liam’s First Amendment free speech protections. The time had come for more serious action. The Morrisons enlisted Alliance Defending Freedom to come alongside MFI and help.

Filing a federal lawsuit can be a daunting proposition, and the decision wasn’t easy for the Morrisons. In the end, they left the final choice to Liam.

“We had agreed that [as long as] he was good with it, we would pursue it,” Chris says. “We didn’t want to put him in a position where he’s not comfortable.”

“All along, we’d been saying, ‘We’ll stop this anytime you want,’” Sue says. “But he’s determined.” When it came time to sign on for the lawsuit, Liam’s parents looked at him. “We sign this,” they said, “you’re in it.”

Liam said, “Let’s do it.”

“If we’d let this slide,” he says, “it would seem like I was willing to let someone tell me what I could and couldn’t say. That’s against the entire reason the United States was made — it would go against our core values.”

ADF attorneys asked a Massachusetts district court for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, either of which would have compelled the school to let Liam wear his shirt. A federal judge declined both requests.

In a previous case, says Logan Spena, legal counsel with the ADF Center for Academic Freedom, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school districts can limit student speech only if it “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others (Tinker v. Des Moines, 1969).” The key question, Spena says, is whether Liam’s speech actually had that effect.

But, since very few students or staff actually saw Liam’s shirt, he says, the school can’t point to any actual disruption to justify silencing Liam. And the school’s prediction that some disruption might have occurred in the future was rooted in viewpoint discrimination.

In other words, he says, “Other students are encouraged to express views about gender that contradict Liam’s, but Liam can’t say what he believes.”

ADF attorneys appealed the lower court’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, where judges heard arguments in February. In June, that court affirmed the decision of the lower court. ADF is likely to appeal the decision.

Ultimately, “We are optimistic,” Spena says, “since the administrators’ actions constitute a fairly remarkable expansion of schools’ authority to limit student speech — on any issue.”

Liam’s “speech,” he says, “was peaceful and respectful. He simply disagreed with an issue that the school already speaks on itself … and already permits other students to speak on. That’s pretty remarkable censorship.

“Clearly,” he says, “the administration was only hostile to his point of view.”

“Unfortunately, Liam’s school is no outlier,” says Tyson Langhofer, ADF senior counsel and director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom. “Schools throughout the country have shifted much of their focus from educating kids to indoctrinating kids with the educators’ preferred positions on controversial social issues. And many schools take things a step further.

“If a student, like Liam, expresses an opinion different than the school’s preferred message, the school attempts to censor the message by punishing the student.” That’s not only unfair to the young people, Langhofer says — it violates the First Amendment.

“This is the very thing the First Amendment was designed to protect against,” he says. “The government does not get to choose which viewpoints are heard and which are not.

“Schools should be encouraging their students to engage in civil dialogue on important issues. Instead, they’re sending a message that the way to deal with views you disagree with is to ask the government to shut them down.”

While many understand that public schools are increasingly promoting an aggressive sexual agenda, Spena says, “parents often don’t perceive the extent to which that’s going on right under their own nose, in their own school.” And that, to many of those pushing these things, “any dissent from their view is mischaracterized as inherently hateful and intolerant.”

“One reason that’s become so prevalent,” Spena says, “is silence. Parents need to be willing to talk to school officials and say, ‘This is unacceptable.’” The results, he says, can be far-reaching.

“Hearing other people express a contrary view could be incredibly important to a person who might otherwise be overwhelmed by pervasive ideology,” Spena says. Parents — and in some cases, even children — “can really affect their peers.”

“It’s not right that kids should have to do this,” Sue says. “But here we are. They’re the ones in the middle of it. If more people would follow Liam’s example, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Liam says he’s just hoping his example makes a difference. “I’d like people to see that they can speak up about different issues. You can share your views. And you shouldn’t be afraid.”

This has brought us closer together as a family,” Sue says. “It’s shown us how important it is for us to talk to our kids about these things.” Liam says that goes both ways.

“I’ve learned that my parents are very supportive,” he says.

“We’ve tried to teach Liam to think for himself,” Chris says. “That just because adults and educators say this doesn’t make it right.” He pauses, marveling. “He’s actually thanked us for raising him right.”

The Morrisons have seen changes in their son, these last two years. “Sometimes, we look at each other and say, ‘What have we created?’” Chris laughs. “Liam was always such a quiet kid.”

“I have seen Liam’s confidence grow throughout this process,” Langhofer says. “He has seen that speaking up can be difficult and may come with consequences. But I think he’s also learned that the benefits of speaking up and taking a stand far outweigh the downsides. I know his courage has inspired many others to do the same.”

Liam has too much on his mind to dwell for long on the changes in his life. He starts high school this fall at a local agricultural school. He hopes, he says, to become a blacksmith.

He ought to be pretty good at that. Iron, they say, sharpens iron.