This Wasn’t About Conversion Therapy – It Was About Free Speech

Headlines for the past few weeks have capitalized on the cruel connotations surrounding conversion therapy, proclaiming that the United States Supreme Court struck down “a conversion therapy ban.” The problem is that the Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision that included Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, told Colorado something that needed to be said: Your law was never actually about that.

Chiles v. Salazar is being reported as a “conversion therapy” ruling. That framing is a political bait-and-switch. What the court struck down was a government mandate on what therapists may say to a consenting minor, forbidden words depending entirely on which direction they pointed.

That is not a ban on conversion therapy. That is ideological discrimination dressed in therapeutic clothing.

Colorado’s statute did ban the coercive, aversive practices everyone agrees are harmful. Good. Full stop.

But it didn’t stop there. It also prohibited any licensed counselor from engaging in “any practice or treatment that attempts to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity,” including efforts to “eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” At the same time, it explicitly permitted “acceptance, support, and understanding for the facilitation of an individual’s identity exploration and development” and “assistance to a person undergoing gender transition.”

Read that again slowly. Counselors are permitted and encouraged to affirm one direction. Counselors are forbidden from helping a client pursue a different one, even when it is the client’s own freely stated goal within a voluntary therapeutic relationship.

Kaley Chiles does not use electric shocks or shame. She asks clients about their goals and helps them reach those goals. Some want help with a gender transition. Some wrestle with unwanted same-sex attractions they wish to reduce, perhaps because those feelings conflict with their faith. She helps both. All she uses is conversation.

Colorado said: You can do the first. You cannot do the second. If you try, we will fine you and revoke your license.

That is the state placing its thumb on the ideological scale of the therapeutic relationship and calling it public health.

Justice Gorsuch, writing for the court, was direct: The law did not just regulate the content of Ms. Chiles’ speech, it prescribed what views she may and may not express. Colorado disputed none of this. Neither did the dissent.

Even Justice Jackson, the lone dissenter, conceded viewpoint discrimination; she simply argued the medical context justified it. When your defense of a speech restriction requires that admission, you have already acknowledged the core problem.

Gorsuch’s majority raised a haunting parallel: Not long ago, the APA classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. Under Colorado’s logic, a law prohibiting counselors from affirming a gay client’s identity would have been upheld with equal ease. Medical consensus changes, which is precisely why it cannot function as a ceiling on professional speech.

The U.K.’s CASS Review (April 2024), the most comprehensive examination of gender-related care for children ever conducted, found the evidence for affirmative approaches in gender care for minors remarkably weak. Clinics had applied a single-pathway model to children who often presented with autism, trauma histories, and co-occurring mental health conditions – cases warranting careful, individualized exploration, not a fast track to a predetermined destination. England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland have all since moved away from the unquestioning affirmative model.

Colorado, meanwhile, was busy enshrining that model into law and criminalizing counselors who worked differently, even when clients asked them to.

A young person who says, “I experience same-sex attraction, and my faith leads me not to act on it. Can you help me?” deserves to have that goal taken seriously. That is not conversion therapy. That is client self-determination, the cornerstone of the profession. A young person exploring a gender transition deserves the same respect. The counselor’s job is not to drive toward a destination in either case but to create a safe, unhurried space where the client arrives at their own understanding.

What Colorado’s law produced was a prohibition on one kind of client-directed conversation while mandating the other. That is not protecting minors. That is substituting state ideology for professional ethics.

The high court’s ruling does not absolve the profession from regulation. Harm should remain legally actionable. But those standards must apply evenhandedly, not in a way that blesses one therapeutic direction while criminalizing the other. The First Amendment’s protection of viewpoint diversity in the therapeutic office is a bulwark against institutional capture by any political majority.

Conversion therapy is evil. Colorado’s law was not a conversion therapy ban. The Supreme Court, including two of its most reliably progressive justices, agreed.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.