(Image source: Keith Negley/Southern Poverty Law Center)

Kaley Chiles is a licensed therapist in Colorado who “believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex.” In her counseling work, Chiles helps people who wish “to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] physical body.” But in Colorado this constitutes what is known as “conversion therapy,” which the state banned in 2019.

Conversion therapy, according to Colorado’s statute, “means any practice or treatment … that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” At its most brutal, conversion therapy has involved children being rolled up into blankets and subjected to anti-gay slurs, physical violence including beatings, forced feeding or food deprivation, isolation and confinement, forced medication, sexual abuse including “corrective” rape of lesbian women, humiliation, electrocution, and lobotomies.

Today, many conversion therapists operate in secret. In the United States, most conversion therapists are religious officials, some of whom are also licensed practitioners in the medical and mental health fields. Instead of advertising “conversion” or “reparative” therapy, conservative pastors might offer counseling at their church to help people find “sexual integrity” or “wholeness.” As a result, too many Americans believe a widespread misconception that conversion therapy no longer happens. But as of 2018, almost 700,000 LGBTQ adults between the ages of 18 and 59 in the U.S. have been subjected to conversion therapy at some point in their lives, around half of whom were sent to conversion therapy during adolescence. Those who have experienced conversion therapy, which disproportionately affects Black men, are more likely to suffer from depression and to attempt suicide.

Today, conservative Christian groups and those in support of Christian nationalism are weaponizing the power of the nation’s court system to bring conversion therapy back to the brink of legitimacy, just like when they forced the reversal of Roe v. Wade to end national abortion rights. Given that conversion therapy still happens, even separate from the current Supreme Court case, we need to talk about why conversion therapy is dangerous, especially for the sake of queer and trans people throughout the country.

The Fight for Freedom of Speech

On October 7, 2025, Jim Campbell, Kaley Chiles’ lawyer, argued to the Supreme Court that when Colorado banned licensed therapists, like Chiles, from practicing conversion therapy, the state infringed on her First Amendment freedom of speech rights. Campbell and Chiles claim that if patients want help changing their sexuality or gender identity, she should be able to help them achieve that.

The problem? There’s no evidence that conversion therapy actually works.

“Ms. Chiles is being silenced,” argued Campbell, who is also Chief Legal Counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group. He claims what Chiles is experiencing is nothing more than “viewpoint-based discrimination.” For advocates of conversion therapy like Campbell and the ADF, it’s not about whether the practice works, but that people deserve the right to try if they wish to do so.

Arguing for the state of Colorado, Shannon Stevenson, the state solicitor general, told the Court, “That’s how [the country has] always treated speech—especially in the healthcare context.” Historically, she says, “this has been an area that has been heavily regulated… no one has ever suggested that a doctor has a First Amendment defense to say the wrong advice to their patient.”

“The harms from conversion therapy come from when you tell a young person you can change this innate thing about yourself,” argued Stevenson. “There is nothing about this statute, for example, that stops anyone from sharing any opinion about conversion therapy.”

(Image source: Axios)

Alliance Defending Freedom president Kristen Waggoner pioneered the use of freedom of speech as a defense for people who wish to discriminate against queer and trans people because of their religious beliefs. Waggoner solidified her success defending Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, whose own First Amendment freedom of speech rights, Waggoner argued, were infringed upon by Colorado after the state found him in violation of their anti-discrimination laws for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.

Outside of the courtroom, Waggoner has championed the work of Dr. David Schwartz, an Orthodox Jewish conversion therapist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 2019, alongside Colorado and 18 other states, New York banned conversion therapy, which threatened Dr. Schwartz’ conversion therapy practices. Waggoner has insisted that all Dr. Schwartz does is “simply and kindly converse with his patients, many of whom share his Jewish faith and they are adults who come to him and want to… overcome same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria.”

All Schwartz does, the Alliance Defending Freedom argued, is help those patients with “their own goals for their lives” and “towards adherence to the teachings of their Orthodox Jewish faith.” In other words, anyone whose religion has taught them to believe being queer and trans is wrong should have the right to try conversion therapy in order to live in accordance with their religious beliefs, no matter how harmful it might be. And those who stops them are intruding into private conversations. According to Schwartz’s lawsuit against New York City, “There is no coercion, no isolation, no promise of results.”

But, because conversion therapy relies on a humiliating, demeaning, and discriminatory idea that queerness and transness are problems to be fixed, there can’t really be proper informed consent. “Is it that people actually want to become straight, that people actually want to become cis, or is it that they’ve been made to believe they want to become that?” Lucas Wilson, a postdoctoral fellow who studies the relationship between conversion therapy and white Christian nationalism at the University of Toronto Mississauga, asks. 

A Trail of Harm

Wilson got his undergraduate degree at Liberty University, the world’s largest evangelical university in Lynchburg, VA. One of the main reasons he chose Liberty was to seek the help of Pastor Dane Emerick. “He was the pastor on campus that you could talk to if you were struggling with same-sex attraction,” says Wilson.

While he was studying at Liberty, Wilson was meeting with Pastor Dane every week, both individually and in a group counseling session known as the Band of Brothers. “He was telling me, ‘You’re doing a good job, you’re on the right track. You’re going to overcome this eventually,” Wilson recalls. “I always had this twisted hope for a better future that I was going to be able to be straight and that I was going to live a life of Godly normalcy.”

Years later, when a friend called Pastor Dane’s work for what it is—conversion therapy—Wilson started to fully understand the extent to what he was subjected to and the harm it had caused. “I just thought about it as pastoral counselling; that’s exactly what I called it,” he says. Wilson’s experience is common, which he attributes in his book, Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy, to the informal nature of many conversion practices and a narrow mainstream understanding of what conversion therapy looks like.

For gay men and boys, conversion therapy practices rely heavily on misogyny and emphasize a hatred of women. In the case of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), clients were forced to “cuddle and intimately hold others of the same sex including between young clients and older counselors,” and “violently beat an effigy of the clients’ mother with a tennis racket.” These so-called reparative practices were developed by two discredited proponents of conversion therapy, Richard A. Cohen and Joseph Nicolosi. They believed gayness can be cured by exposing children to “undeniable anatomical difference[s],” a belief which drove JONAH’s practice of forcing clients to hold people of the opposite sex. They also insist mothers are to blame for their gay sons. “The boy,” writes Nicolosi in his book A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, “must separate from the mother and grow in his differentness from his primary love object if he is ever to be a heterosexual man.”

When clients did not make enough progress toward heterosexuality, JONAH staff blamed the clients for not working hard enough, which turned out to be a lucrative business. JONAH charged clients upwards of $10,000 per year.

“Conversion therapy has never worked and never will work,” says Wilson. “No credible study has ever produced any research that is in support of conversion therapy.” Prior to 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder, some studies did conclude that a person could change, but most were methodologically flawed, or simply homophobic and transphobic.

In her defense of Colorado’s conversion therapy ban at the Supreme Court, Shannon Stevenson argued, “All of the theories underlying conversion therapy have been debunked. You know, initially it was homosexuality is a pathology that we need to treat. That’s been debunked. Then it was homosexuality is caused by trauma. That’s been debunked. Then it was homosexuality is caused by a relationship you had with your parents. That’s been debunked. There’s not even a working theory now.”

Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, conservative Christian and Orthodox Jewish leaders have continued to promote the idea that conversion therapy is a viable solution to a problem. And now, the fight to make conversion therapy legitimate is part of a broader push to allow conservative Christians, and their conservative co-religionists, to do as they please throughout the country.

Conversion Therapy and Christian Nationalism

Chelsea Ebin, an assistant professor of political science at Drew University who studies the Christian Right, says that conversion therapy could better be understood as a manifestation of what she calls “prefigurative traditionalism.” Conservative right-wing Christians in the U.S. have constructed an idealized past and in living out their own lives, attempt to embody the social norms of that narratively constructed earlier time period.

“We [queer people] have always been here; it’s not as if we’ve ever not existed,” Ebin says. “The organizing logic of [conversion therapy] is that we can erase the existence of queer people, and that’s as close to prefiguration as you can get: Let’s take queer folks and force them to live heterosexual lives; to embody an identity that they do not possess and act on desires they do not have in order to produce them as heterosexual.”

Attempts to pathologize and erase queer and trans identities have profound consequences on not only the country’s culture, but on people’s physical and psychological integrity and wellbeing. These consequences range from depression and anxiety to shame, self-hatred, suicidal ideation, and loss of faith. “I hated myself for a long time,” Wilson says, recounting the aftermath of his sessions with Pastor Dane. He remembers feeling “It’s not just that you’ve done something wrong, it’s that you yourself are bad or defective or deformed.”

In the case of Chiles v. Salazar, the question is not whether conversion therapy is a legitimate medical practice—in fact it doesn’t even mention conversion therapy. Chiles is asking the court to rule, “Whether a law that censors certain conversations between counselors and their clients based on the viewpoints expressed” is regulating her medical conduct or violating her First Amendment free speech rights.

Her case claims, “Amidst a nationwide mental health crisis, many minors struggling with gender dysphoria are seeking the counselling that Chiles would like to provide.”

Speaking about the Supreme Court case, Kristen Waggoner told Hugh Hewitt, a conservative political commentator and head of the Richard Nixon Foundation, that “what’s important about this case is that it involves counseling conversations, just listening and talking to kids. That’s it. Just hearing them out and helping them grow at peace with their body and realigning their identity with their God-given sex.”

In addition to the free speech defense, the Alliance Defending Freedom has begun to advance the false argument that gender-affirming care is itself conversion therapy. In a 2023 case in Washington, Tingley v. Ferguson, the Alliance Defending Freedom claimed that adolescents who are prescribed gender-affirming care “are victims of what is really malpractice and all who choose to reclaim their true identities are entitled to the help of professional counselors.”

From this perspective, psychologists and doctors who help queer and trans people live authentically are the ones who actually harm children. And since their practices aren’t illegal, conversion therapy shouldn’t be outlawed either. But a judge ruled the state has a constitutional right to protect children and young people from harm through enacting laws restricting conversion practitioners.

“What people like Kristen Waggoner are trying to do,” says Ebin, “is to create a system whereby their beliefs can be imposed on the country as a whole through the state… This is all about cultivating and crafting and coercing a very particular narrow white supremacist, Christian nationalist, and male supremacist set of ideologies and hierarchies onto society.” She says, “What we need to be focusing on as queer people is how to seize back those levers of political control from the people who believe that they’re entitled to impose their irrational and misguided beliefs on everyone else.”

One of the most powerful ways to fight back against conversion therapy is to build and maintain strong and easily accessible LGBTQIA+ affirming communities where young people can go for support and where they can express themselves freely. Queer and trans affirmation can come from a number of places: friends and family, at school—even seeing queer and trans representation in media helps. Embracing parts of themselves that they were forced to push aside in conversion therapy shows them that being queer or trans is something to celebrate, replacing the belief that queerness and transness are problems to overcome.

The Supreme Court likely won’t rule on Chiles v. Salazar until next summer. For the Christian nationalist movement, conversion therapy is just one step in a long political agenda to impose conservative Christian values on the country. For queer and trans people, it’s the difference between life and death; between pride and repression. That’s why we must keep talking about conversion therapy, and the danger it poses to young queer and trans people—who deserve to live with wholeness and integrity in their queerness.

Tom Sayers (she/they) is an independent journalist and podcast producer who tells stories about queer and trans identities and investigates anti-LGBTQIA+ hate.