What National Review Gets Wrong About Trans-Student Protest

​George Leef on National Review criticizes a federal court in New Hampshire for upholding restrictions on a protest over transgender players at a high school soccer match. He warned the court was accepting the dangerous notion that “speech is violence,” suggesting that this ruling is a broad erosion of First Amendment protections.
 
The case involved parents wearing pink wristbands marked “XX” to protest a transgender athlete’s participation in that game. NR sees this as censorship of symbolic speech. We disagree – and the reasons why are instructive. While we share NR’s vigilance in protecting free expression, not every speech regulation is an assault on liberty. A school official has the right to manage a limited public forum like a school-sponsored event, where viewpoint-neutral rules serve to safeguard students’ rights without silencing legitimate public debate.
 
As the court carefully explained, the soccer field during a school event is just such a limited public forum. In such spaces, schools may impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions without engaging in viewpoint discrimination​.
 
The key fact in this case is that the pink wristbands were not an abstract statement of policy, but a comment on a specific student playing in that game. The judge found that the wristband display was not a broad policy statement but a targeted message aimed at that student. As he explained: “Context is everything,” and school officials could reasonably interpret the message as “demeaning, harassing, and psychologically injurious” toward that transgender student​.
 
Critically, the court did not suppress the parents’ views on transgender participation. It enforced neutral rules that barred targeting any individual student at school events. Schools, the judge emphasized, have a “special interest in regulating speech that materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.”
 
This is in keeping with Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), a Vietnam-era case in which the Supreme Court rightly protected silent protest but also recognized that schools may intervene when speech substantially invades the rights of other students. Here, the court relied on concrete evidence, not ideological disagreement, to uphold a narrowly tailored restriction.
 
Free speech advocates must be wary of censorship dressed up as protection. But not every regulation is censorship. Sometimes it reflects the school’s duty to ensure that all students can participate safely and fully in public life. In defending free speech, we must also defend the simple, sensible rules that preserve limited public fora.
 
The First Amendment’s promise endures because it balances robust freedom with careful stewardship. Protecting it requires vigilance – and precision – in telling the difference.

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