This week, the Supreme Court rightly held that Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” violated the First Amendment by dictating what counselors can say in therapy sessions. However, the therapist who sued Colorado isn’t the only winner—gender-confused kids arguably came out ahead, too.
Colorado’s law didn’t just aim to force therapists to endorse transgender orthodoxy—it also aimed to prevent kids from receiving the best kind of treatment for gender dysphoria (the painful and persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s sex).
Transgender activists push an extremely cruel agenda, dressed up as “gender-affirming care.” When a boy claims he suffers from a persistent and painful sense that he is “really” a girl, they say society should “affirm” his identity as a girl and that he should take experimental interventions to make his male body appear female.
Activists claim this is the only path, and that kids will commit suicide without “affirmation.” Some scientific studies, however, suggest that suicidal thoughts actually increase when minors take drugs to “block” puberty. Even hormones alter body chemistry and make patients dependent on doctors for constant injections, and surgeries often require gruesome forms of maintenance. If the patient later decides to detransition, care becomes even more complicated.
By contrast, studies have found that if kids are allowed to develop on their own without social “affirmation” of a transgender identity, between 65% and 94% of them will resolve their gender dysphoria and end up at peace with their sexed bodies.
Not only will these kids actually have their gender confusion resolved, but they won’t have undergone invasive sex-rejecting procedures that would have left them stunted, scarred, and often infertile.
Rather than “gender-affirming care,” boys and girls need reassurance in their own sex. If a boy suffers from the sense that he is “really” a girl, he needs counseling to realize that he is still a boy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. With time and appropriate counseling, he can resolve the underlying psychological issues that make him suspect he may “really” be a girl.
Colorado sought to outlaw this kind of counseling, and in doing so, it would have cut kids off from what they really needed.
The Supreme Court’s ruling opens the door for what may be termed “sex-reaffirming therapy,” counseling to help gender-confused people find peace with their bodies. In doing so, it offers hope for true resolution of gender dysphoria, not the false resolution of “gender-affirming care.”
So, how did transgender activists convince Colorado to ban it in the first place?
Historically, some therapists used unethical methods to “cure” patients of same-sex attraction. Some engaged in electroshock therapy to train men not to feel sexual attraction to other men. Since many of these therapists aimed to help patients live by traditional Christian sexual morality, opponents of these therapists branded these efforts “conversion therapy.”
Therapists today nearly universally condemn these methods, and mental health counselor Kaley Chiles, who challenged Colorado’s law, supported Colorado’s attempt to ban them. Yet Colorado also sought to ban “talk therapy”—the mainstream practice of asking questions and guiding a person to resolve psychological issues merely through speech.
Perhaps ironically, some feminists have warned that “gender-affirming care” is itself a form of “conversion therapy,” because many of the gender-confused men and women would otherwise identify as gay or lesbian, if they did not identify as transgender.
Yet transgender activists suggest that transgender identity is innate and unchangeable—such that therapies attempting to resolve it are unnatural and doomed to failure. For this reason, many activists lump in sex-reaffirming therapy alongside electroshock therapy as a form of “conversion therapy.”
Colorado’s law would have allowed talk therapy if it affirmed same-sex attraction or a transgender identity, but not if it might lead a patient away from such identities.
Of course, such a legal invasion of the therapy space is unwarranted because the best therapy aims to help patients resolve underlying trauma, not to shape patients into one kind of person or another.
The data suggest the best solution for gender dysphoria isn’t experimental drugs and surgeries but talk therapy to address the root cause of gender confusion—whatever that may be.
It is cruel, and arguably evil, to try to fix a psychological issue with invasive drugs and surgeries. But now, kids in Colorado have hope for a better path. I pray that therapists are brave enough to follow in Chiles’ footsteps and offer the sex reaffirmation these kids so desperately need.
