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A controversial Supreme Court case challenging a ban on so-called conversion therapy, as it pertains to treating “transgender” children, is attracting unlikely allies.
At issue in Chiles v. Salazar, soon to be argued before the Supreme Court, is whether a Colorado law prohibiting “conversion therapy” for pediatric patients unconstitutionally restricts a counselor’s free speech rights, via viewpoint discrimination, when that therapist wants to counsel children experiencing gender dysphoria toward embracing their biological sex.
A number of traditionally progressive third parties are siding with the plaintiff, Kaley Chiles, a licensed Christian counselor who nudges clients to “live consistently with God’s design.”
Of note is an amicus brief filed by the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), a “radical feminist” organization whose membership is 40% lesbian and bisexual, in support of Chiles, though not from a religious standpoint.
In the friend-of-the-court filing, WoLF raises concerns regarding the impact of restrictive counseling legislation, like the one in Colorado, on gender dysphoric gay youth. WoLF warns that such laws will effectively “trans away the gay” by banning exploratory talk therapy that examines the underlying causes of bodily discomfort, rather than indulging in ideations.
THE TRUTH ABOUT A BAN ON ‘CONVERSION THERAPY’ FACING SUPREME COURT SCRUTINY
Many gender-confused minors ushered along a path to medical mutilation wind up realizing post-transition that they were “just a gay kid,” WoLF says, yet left permanently disfigured with more mental distress.
Our Duty-USA, which represents a group of detransitioners who were groomed as children in therapeutic settings into assuming their transgender identities, then later on in life came out as gay, offered similar sentiments in a separate submission to the Supreme Court.
“[T]he transgender movement targets children who would likely be same-sex attracted as adults, do not fit the regressive stereotypical roles for their sex, or have mental health issues,” Our Duty-USA’s amicus briefing argues.
In one of several testimonials, Our Duty-USA shared with the Supreme Court, a gay man named Ari lived as a girl for more than a decade due to childhood counselors affirming, without question, his self-declared gender identity because he felt too feminine to be male.
And so, Ari underwent facial feminization surgery; a “back alley” orchiectomy, the surgical removal of one’s testicles; and vaginoplasty, in which the penis is inverted to cosmetically create a pseudo-vagina. At each step, he had mental health providers blindly supporting his sex-change ambitions.
According to Our Duty-USA, states with statutes outlawing conversion therapy require that mental health professionals operate under “a gender-affirmative care model” or risk loss of their license, fines, and disciplinary action. These laws compel an affirmation-only approach to treatment plans and impose a chilling effect on counselors otherwise willing to intervene, challenge, or outright attempt to disrupt a child’s feelings of dysphoria, as opposed to fueling their gender confusion.
Conversion therapy by another name
The filing frenzy from outside observers is diversifying the debate around what “conversion therapy” means today, compared to how the public has historically understood it to be.
Employing the term evokes a horrid history of institutional abuse against gay people.
The state of Colorado’s brief, entered on behalf of Patty Salazar, executive director of the state’s Department of Regulatory Agencies, cites past abusive practices, such as electroconvulsive-shock experiments, arousal reconditioning, nausea inducement, and other aversion tactics to conjure imagery of the sort of conversion therapy banned by the law.
However, in this particular case, Chiles says she solely engages in talk therapy and ostensibly does not set out to “cure” or “convert” clients. Psychotherapy, i.e., talk therapy, is a widely practiced discipline and considered by some pediatric physicians to be the best non-invasive method for alleviating early-onset gender dysphoria.
A contingent of gay rights groups sees “gender-affirming care” as contemporary conversion therapy, coercing children to physically alter themselves into something they are not, instead of growing up gay.
“Gay adolescents are more likely than their straight peers to feel they don’t fit in with their sex class,” gay rights advocate and attorney Glenna Goldis told the Washington Examiner. “Gender-affirming therapists reinforce their alienation instead of helping them thrive as nature designed them—people who defy sex stereotypes.”
Indeed, in May, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report, which concluded that childhood gender-nonconformity is “strongly associated” with homosexuality in adulthood, documented an overrepresentation of gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents among gender clinic patients who were prescribed irreversible procedures.
To that end, gender medicine is the most effective form of anti-gay conversion therapy, Goldis said. Puberty blockers, which suppress hormonal production, prevent sexuality from developing in the first place. Penile-inversion surgery is rumored to render the tissue numb. Some homosexual women reported that taking testosterone, an anabolic steroid, made them want to have sex with men, perhaps a byproduct of overall higher sex drives.
WoLF says gender identity crisis is often rooted in societal expectations or “internalized homophobia,” a phenomenon of self-shame leading internally conflicted gays to seek to change their gender so that they appear “straight.”
“For whatever reason, they do not feel it is okay to be gay,” explained Elspeth Cypher, a retired Massachusetts Supreme Court judge serving as WoLF’s counsel of record in the case.
“Transition solves the fear of being gay because they will be attracted to the ‘opposite sex,’” Cypher told the Washington Examiner. “They think this anyway. Often, they are not able to have sex or feel sexual feelings.”
Gender ideologues, meanwhile, tend to misuse the term “conversion therapy” as a catch-all phrase in furtherance of the transgender cause.
According to transgender activists, anything not gender-affirming constitutes conversion therapy. That includes policies not remotely related to therapy. As Goldis points out, this is evidenced in the previous writings of American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio, who argued on behalf of the transgender lobby in United States v. Skrmetti. Strangio asserted that barring biological boys from competing in female-only sports is state-sponsored conversion therapy.
“[I]f you tell a young person…they must exist in accordance with their assigned sex at birth, then you are instructing the state to engage in a process of coerced conversion therapy,” Strangio said in a 2021 thinkpiece.
LGB rethinks the T
The Chiles case shines a spotlight on a growing schism in the LGBT base between gender-critical gays and their transgender counterparts.
WHY THE TRANSGENDER MOVEMENT IS LOSING TRACTION, INSIDERS EXPLAIN
The statutory language in Colorado’s conversion therapy law treats sexuality and gender identity as equally protected, parallel characteristics.
As written, the state’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law, introduced as House Bill 19-1129, broadly defines conversion therapy as any treatment “that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Opponents of gender ideology say grouping the two distinctly different terms together erodes decades of progress made by the gay rights movement.
Civil rights protections hinge upon a protected class being “born that way,” Cypher explained. This shared characteristic must be immutable and inherent, she added.
Gay equality activists fought for a long time to depathologize homosexuality, previously classified as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual up until 1973. The medical industry recognizing that gay people cannot be “counseled” out of their sexual orientation—and that sexuality is hard-wired—marked a monumental achievement.
“This is all put at risk when the two terms are conflated,” Cypher said.
Whereas gender identity, which can change on a whim, was recently introduced into the mainstream and arises from fringe queer theory.
Cypher lamented that most of the public is not well-versed in this area and will group “gay” in with transgenderism.
Consequently, anything negatively precipitating from transgender activism “splashes back” on gay people, Cypher continued. So the transgender side “drags them along,” she said, and the sociopolitical problems brought about by pro-transgender activism, such as the end of sex-segregated spaces, can be blamed on the LGBT community at large.
