As I write this, a transgender pride flag is whipping around wildly on my front porch. The flag keeps getting tangled up and so I periodically go out to unwind it. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the wind fuck it up.
Of course, I have no control over the wind. And even less control over the United States Supreme Court.
“The U.S. Supreme Court decided that a Colorado state law protecting LGBTQ+ young people from the dangerous, discredited practice of conversion therapy must be revisited in the name of ‘free speech,’” reads a statement by the Trevor Project. “This ruling is about how conversion therapy can be regulated, not about whether it is safe or legal. It isn’t. Conversion therapy is malpractice. Plain and simple.”
At issue was therapist Kaley Chiles, an evangelical Christian therapist in Colorado who wants to offer conversion therapy to kids. She—or, rather, the extremist legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)—argued that the state’s law infringed upon her First Amendment rights. And eight out of the nine justices sided with the therapist.
The lone dissenter was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
In Jackson’s dissent, she points out that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors, as well as other bans like it, are “based on the medical profession’s broad consensus that this medical treatment (which seeks to change a gay or transgender person’s sexual orientation or gender identity) is ineffective and harmful.”
As The Advocate reminds us, “[E]very major medical and mental health association in the United States has condemned conversion therapy, and that such practices have been linked to depression, anxiety, substance use, and suicide, particularly among minors.”
An important reminder that these bans are not based on some “woke” ideology like conservatives claim and Colorado did not enact such a ban just because they don’t like anti-LGBTQ Christians or want “transgender for everyone,” as our dipshit president likes to say.
“[The Court] majority has failed to appreciate the crucial context in which Chiles’s constitutional claims have arisen,” Jackson writes in her dissent. “Chiles is not speaking in the ether; she is providing therapy to minors as a licensed healthcare professional.”
In other words, if Chiles was standing on a street corner screaming about “curing” gay and trans kids, that would be protected by the right to free speech. But because Chiles actually wants to take this belief and bring it into her therapy practice, the stakes of the speech are much higher and thus Colorado has the right to tell her to fuck off.
Jackson warned that the court “could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers.”
Sounds bad! Especially given who this country currently has in charge of health policy: RFK Jr., a man who, in the fight between measles and vaccines, decided to side with measles. The attack on medical science is wild right now and the people attacking it are at the highest reaches of government.
But, as lawyer, journalist and podcaster Imani Gandy points out in a video posted to Bluesky, the ruling “could have been much worse.”
In the video, Gandy explains that no conversion therapy ban was yeeted out of existence with the ruling. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court to take another look. Granted, they want the lower court to look at it in a way that favors overturning the ban. But the Supreme Court did not overturn the ban itself.
Gandy argues that much of the media coverage of this ruling “serves the conservative legal movement.”
“[ADF] needs you to believe that the fight is over,” Gandy says. “The fight is not over. The correct reading of this ruling matters because if enough people understand that this case is coming back, that the merits are still live, that the court that decides the case ultimately doesn’t have to be this court full of jamokes, then maybe we get loud enough to change something. Maybe we get loud enough to demand court reform. Do not let them write the ending of this case before it is done.”
She ended her video with, “Trans rights are human rights. Stop fucking with trans kids.”
The Trevor Project also reminds us that the fight is not over.
“Regardless of the ruling, survivors still have legal options to fight back against the harms of conversion therapy, including consumer fraud claims, medical malpractice, and intentional infliction of emotional distress,” their statement concludes. “This is not the outcome that young people deserve, but we are already working with a coalition of organizations, allies, and advocates on new, impactful ways to continue fighting against these dangerous practices – regardless of the ruling.”
So, yeah. It’s OK to feel pissed. It’s OK to feel hurt. It’s OK to feel scared. But it’s also worth remembering that the bastards haven’t won yet.