The Supreme Court's revival of harmful "conversion therapy"

The long march toward protecting young LGBTQ people from this destructive quack therapy will be rolled back by a devastating court decision.

I felt immense sadness in listening to the oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, the case that came before the Supreme Court yesterday in which a Colorado licensed therapist represented by the Christian nationalist Alliance Defending Freedom claims her free speech is threatened because she can’t practice “conversion therapy.”

Before we get to the heart of this case, let’s be clear: This is about children, and the torment they have faced at the hands of quack therapists who their parents bring them to in what we should deem child abuse.

And the sadness I felt is about how far we’d come in a decades-long battle against this harm, and how many kids may have been saved from psychological damage and even suicide over the last 13 years as over 20 states have passed laws banning this practice by licensed therapists—laws that will now likely be wiped out.

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Yes, religious groups have still been able try to “convert” people in their own programs. But the states in which there are laws had no longer licensed anyone as a therapist who performs conversion therapy, just as they don’t license astrologers or fortune tellers whom some people might desperately seek help from (rather than going to just for fun).

Many children will be hurt, and will be still more victims of the MAGA era. Donald Trump not only created this radically theocratic Supreme Court, but the U.S. government—with his solicitor general—was arguing there before the Supreme Court fighting to legally allow these quack therapies that harm children.

A massive cultural shift

It wasn’t just legislation and court battles that took us out of an era of destruction against LGBTQ people in decades past. It was a massive shift in American culture, as people saw the damage done. And that was because of the tireless work of so many, including many queer people who’d experienced the harm first-hand.

Leaders of so called “ex-gay” groups, like Alan Chambers at Exodus International in 2013, apologized for the damage they’d done and closed up shop. That one couldn’t be made to be “ex-trans” or “ex-gay,” and that sexual orientation and gender identity couldn’t be changed—despite someone trying to “control” their behaviors—had broadly taken hold.

The American public saw the danger of these therapies and supported ending them, as the scientific and medical consensus that began taking hold in the late 1990s became more widely known. But now, with the panic over transgender people whipped up by the MAGA movement and its conspiracists—which has now morphed into a dangerous and dehumanizing purge by Trump—corporate media has brought this issue back into the spotlight without critical coverage, and that’s allowed it to have legitimacy again.

The Supreme Court's campaign to destroy LGBTQ rights

As Mark Joseph Stern at Slate noted, the Chiles case is essentially a “fake” case before you even get to the arguments, because the case was “manufactured.” We’ve seen this before with the Supreme Court and this Christian nationalist legal group, including with the Colorado web designer, Lorie Smith, whom the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 could not be asked for make a site for a gay couple’s wedding even though no such couple had ever asked.

The case of Kaley Chiles, a licensed therapist in Colorado Springs, is, as Stern described, similarly engineered:

A case riddled with distorted facts, fabricated injuries, and flimsy evidence. For instance, the plaintiff, Kaley Chiles, has disclaimed any desire to change her minor patients’ sexual orientation or gender identity, so it is unclear why she has standing to challenge the law in question.

Her lawyers insist that banning conversion therapy hurts patients who voluntarily seek it out, but their proof for this assertion is anonymous Reddit posts. Chiles’ attorneys also claim that even LGBTQ+ advocates believe sexual orientation can be altered—but according to the very researchers cited in their brief, they “profoundly misrepresented” those findings through “deceptive” quotations.

Chiles lost in the federal district court and at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, both of which affirmed that the state of Colorado has a broad right to regulate licensed professionals based on standard of care and the consensus of the accredited medical community, which overwhelmingly views “conversion therapy” as harmful.

The American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association and a myriad of other groups that oppose these so-called treatments to turn people heterosexual or cisgender have looked at the body of studies that show that it’s both not possible and potentially very harmful.

But it’s clear that the Alliance Defending Freedom knows that all it needs to do to win is get a case to this Supreme Court involving LGBTQ people and the supposed “religious liberty” of anyone serving the public. This is a pact between the extremists on the high court and the Christian nationalist movement, represented by this legal group.

This is, for Trump, the bread and butter of his administration, keeping the Christian nationalists happy, for now, in stripping rights for LGBTQ people while they’re demanding much more that’s still a heavy lift, like a federal abortion ban and an end to the abortion pill.

To show how it went at the court yesterday, here’s a bit more in Slate from Stern, who comes on my SiriusXM program every Tuesday and who spoke with me about the case yesterday:

When Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson pointed to [the] expert consensus, Justice Samuel Alito was quick to contest it. “Have there been times when the medical consensus has been politicized, has been taken over by ideology?” Before Stevenson could fully reply, Alito cut in: “Isn’t it a fact that it’s happened in the past?”

He then brought up Buck v. Bell, the high court’s notorious 1927 decision upholding the involuntary sterilization of “feeble-minded” people. In Alito’s telling, the lesson of Buck is not that courts should vigorously defend the rights of the marginalized, but that medical expertise is just another form of elitism that warrants suspicion, not respect.

So that’s how it went down, with Any Coney Barrett trying to claim that there are “competing” medical consensuses—trying to push the idea that a court shouldn’t take a side—when in fact there is only one consensus, and a handful of cranks driven by animus challenging that consensus. As Colorado’s lawyer pointed out, the Alliance Defending Freedom can’t point to one study that shows both efficacy or lack of harm regarding conversion therapy, while there have been several studies showing harm, including a higher rate of suicide.

Liberals resigned to defeat?

The great sadness I felt in listening to the arguments also stemmed from the lack of fight among the liberals on the court. The entire proceeding was all too normal, with no real fireworks. The conservatives strongly challenged the state, while the liberals were tepid in their questioning of Chiles’ attorney, except for some slight sharpness here or there from Sonia Sotomayor or Ketanji Brown Jackson.

They seemed resigned, seeing how far the court had gone on this issue and knowing they can’t stop it, and also having the weight on their shoulders of so much more Trump fascism coming before the court. I don’t want to say they gave up, as I believe the court’s liberals are doing all they can in exasperating times. It just became clear that they see the realities before them, and that was pretty gutting.

Make no mistake: we have gone from a world in which we saw a cultural shift toward ending these abuses and securing rights for LGBTQ people to one in which a vocal, aggressive minority with enormous power is attempting to make us invisible—to make us literally not exist. With trans people, we see how they’re literally removing references to them, misgendering them, changing passports, purging them from government and the military.

The validation of conversion therapy is an attempt to erase all gay, lesbian and bisexual people too. After all, if you can “change”, then you really don’t exist. You’re just an idea, a behavior, a sinner, not a valid person with an identity like other minority groups.

None of this, however, means that we give up. As I wrote in my 2015 book It’s not Over, the march toward equality is never done and we will always experience backlash and setbacks. It’s true that Trump is not a just setback—he’s been a nuclear bomb dropped civil rights. There’s a lot to come back from.

Kim Davis, marriage equality and the Supreme Court: An explainer

But I hope this coming Supreme Court decision will be a major wake up call, and one that gets thousands of young LGBTQ people into the streets when it’s handed down in June. The court is likely not taking up Kim Davis’ case challenging Obergefell, but does anyone truly believe there won’t be a challenge to Obergefell at some point in time as the high court wait for the right case, nor that there won’t be more exemptions before the justices regarding “religious liberty” and marriage equality?

For all those queer people who might have thought that trans rights and the current vicious attacks on trans people were distinct from gay, lesbian or bisexual people—as Trump’s band of gay apologists, including the few quislings in his administration, claim—this case should underscore that they’re coming for all of us.