By: Nelson Kramer

Editor-in-Chief

On Mar. 31, the Supreme Court heard a case involving resistance to Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL), which bans therapists from providing minors with conversion therapy counseling, a form of counseling typically aimed at changing someone’s sexual or gender identity. Medical professionals have widely discredited conversion therapy as an ineffective and unethical practice, often citing that it leads to higher suicide and depression rates across the board.

The petitioner against the MCTL is Colorado therapist Kaley Chiles, who argued that her practice never begins with any predetermined approach to supporting her clients. Her methods, which the MCTL holds up as illegal acts of providing “conversion therapy,” are through speech, and, she insists, to limit them would be unconstitutional. 

Chiles, holding a master’s degree in clinical mental health and a state license to practice as a therapist in Colorado, originally brought this challenge against MCTL; the U.S. District Court later denied the lack of merits to her motion. After pushing hard Chiles achieved a Supreme Court review of the case in which the justices decided eight to one that conversion therapy in cases like Chiles can fall under “protected speech.” The court also sent her case back to the lower court for reconsideration under a less strict standard of review.

Justice Elena Kagan, concurring with the majority, noted that if Colorado had enacted a neutral content-and-viewpoint law, the case would have been more complicated. This perspective contrasted with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent, emphasizing that many states have banned conversion therapy, including speech-based therapy like Chiles’s, regarding it as outdated based on prevailing medical opinion, harmful, and damaging to younger populations. 

Concordant with Justice Jackson’s argument, medical experts in many cases refer to conversion therapy as destructive, not achieving the proposed outcomes that stem from the discredited belief that LGBTQ+ identity is a mental illness requiring treatment. The American Psychological Association found that “youth whose parents attempted to change their sexual orientation at home and through therapists or religious leaders reported three times greater likelihood of high levels of depression, suicide attempts, lower educational attainment, lower income levels, and reduced life satisfaction in young adulthood.”

Although the Supreme Court ruling does not  have the final say on what will happen to MTCL and its limitations on talk therapy, its decision sets a precedent and could be cited in future cases. For many, a decision like this weakens the strength of laws protecting queer youth in the United States and could carve a clear path toward wider legalization of conversion therapy practices nationwide.

(Sources: APA, BBC, NBC, The Trevor Project, Supreme Court)