This is a companion podcast. Read my original news article at GoPride.com.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could reshape the legal status of conversion therapy bans across the country. The case out of Colorado, Chiles v. Salazar, asks whether a licensed counselor’s attempt to change a young person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is protected speech under the First Amendment—or whether states have a right to stop practices that medical experts have called harmful, discredited, and cruel.

Let’s be clear: conversion therapy is not therapy. It’s psychological harm dressed up as compassion. For decades, LGBTQ people—especially youth—have been subjected to this practice by people who insist that being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender is something that needs to be cured. Sometimes it looks like religious counseling. Sometimes it’s so-called “talk therapy.” And sometimes, tragically, it has involved physical punishment or aversion tactics. No matter the form, the message is the same: who you are is wrong, and we will try to fix you.

That kind of message can shatter a person’s sense of self. Studies show that LGBTQ people who go through conversion therapy are far more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. For youth who are already facing rejection at home or bullying at school, being told by a trusted adult that their identity is broken is devastating. When survivors of these programs tell their stories, there’s a heartbreaking consistency to them: the shame, the loneliness, the feeling of being erased from your own life.

Major medical and mental health organizations have condemned conversion therapy for years. The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics—all of them agree it doesn’t work and that it causes real harm. And still, there are people fighting to keep it alive, often in the name of free speech or religious freedom. But the issue isn’t about silencing faith or ideas. It’s about stopping licensed professionals from using their credentials to legitimize cruelty.

To me, the argument that banning conversion therapy violates free speech misses the point. Therapists aren’t just speakers—they’re practitioners of care. We already regulate what doctors can prescribe, what lawyers can advise, what teachers can teach. Words, when used in a professional setting, can heal or they can wound. When those words tell a child that God will love them only if they change, that’s not healing. That’s harm.

What makes this Supreme Court case so dangerous is that it could open the door for conversion therapy to come back in states that worked hard to ban it. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia currently have laws protecting minors from it. If the Court sides with the counselor in this case, those protections could fall apart, and so could the message that every young person deserves to be accepted as they are.

It’s not hard to imagine the ripple effect. LGBTQ teens who were once protected by law could find themselves back in rooms with adults who tell them they’re sinful or sick. Parents who are struggling to understand their children could be pulled toward “ministries” that promise change. And a generation of kids could grow up with scars they didn’t have to carry.

I think about how many of us spent years trying to unlearn the damage from being told that our existence is a mistake. Conversion therapy takes that pain and formalizes it. It makes rejection a profession. It makes cruelty a credential. And calling it “therapy” doesn’t make it any less violent to the soul.

As the Supreme Court deliberates, the question isn’t just about free speech—it’s about who gets to define care. Do we protect a counselor’s right to say harmful things, or a young person’s right to live without being told their identity is wrong? The Court will issue its decision next year, but for the LGBTQ community, this fight is about more than law. It’s about survival, dignity, and the simple truth that love does not need curing.

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