By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal from a Massachusetts middle school student who was forced to remove a T-shirt that claimed “there are only two genders.”

Two conservative justices — Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — dissented from the decision to not hear the case.

So long as the appeals court’s decision remains on the books, Alito wrote, “thousands of students will attend school without the full panoply of First Amendment rights. That alone is worth this court’s attention.”

The student, Liam Morrison, wore the shirt to Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, in 2023 to “share his view that gender and sex are identical.” School administrators asked him to remove it and, when he declined, sent him home for the day. Weeks later, he wore the same shirt but covered the words “only two” with a piece of tape on which he wrote “censored.”

The case arrived at the Supreme Court at a moment when transgender rights have become a political and cultural flashpoint. The high court is already considering other cases dealing with LGBTQ+ rights, including a major challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

David Cortman, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented Morrison, called the Supreme Court’s decision disappointing.

“Schools can’t suppress students’ views they disagree with. Here, the school actively promotes its view about gender through posters and ‘Pride’ events, and it encourages students to wear clothing with messages on the same topic,” Cortman said. “Our legal system is built on the truth that the government cannot silence any speaker just because it disapproves of what they say.”

Morrison and his family sued the district in federal court, asserting a violation of his First Amendment rights. The district court ruled against him, and the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision.

“We should reaffirm the bedrock principle that a school may not engage in viewpoint discrimination when it regulates student speech,” Alito wrote in his dissent. “By limiting the application of our viewpoint-discrimination cases, the decision below robs a great many students of that core First Amendment protection.”

In a landmark 1969 decision, Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court affirmed students’ First Amendment rights at school, but the court qualified those rights, allowing school administrators to regulate the speech if it “materially disrupts” instruction. The Vietnam-era case permitted a group of students to wear black armbands in protest of the war.

The appeals court in the T-shirt case held that schools can regulate a student’s speech under Tinker if it “assertedly demeans characteristics of personal identity” of other students because the message is “reasonably forecasted” to poison the “educational atmosphere.” Morrison argued that decision “sidelined” Tinker and “gave near-total deference to the school’s determination of what speech demeans protected characteristics and substantially disrupts its operations.”

In their written response to the Supreme Court, school officials noted they are aware of transgender and gender-nonconforming students “who had experienced serious mental health struggles, including suicidal ideation, related to their treatment by other students based on their gender identities” and that those struggles could impact the students’ ability to learn.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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