Christian Law Firm Argues That Conversion Therapy Is Helpful, Actually

Campbell claimed that the conversion therapy ban harms kids struggling with gender dysphoria—but he meant the cisgender ones who won’t go on to transition. “One of the things that’s so problematic about Colorado’s law is that it undermines the well-being of kids that are struggling with gender dysphoria,” he said. “Colorado accepts that up to 90% of kids who struggle with that before puberty will work their way through it and realign their identity with their sex. But this law says that if any of those children go to a licensed professional and say, ‘I would like help realigning my identity with my sex,’ that licensed professional has to decline to help them.”

Incredibly, he doubled down on this argument multiple times and in increasingly gross ways. Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked how this law was any different from a state telling licensed dietitians not to encourage eating disorder patients to engage in restricted eating, noting that the state doesn’t need a study showing that’s harmful in order to regulate the practice of healthcare.

Campbell said her hypothetical “is very different than what we have here” because “the counselor or dietician is telling the client to do something that directly harms their body.” He continued, “In this case, Ms. Chiles is trying to help gender-dysphoric kids.” Chiles is just a nice lady, you see! In his rebuttal later in the arguments, Campbell again cited the 90 percent statistic before flatly stating, “This law harms gender-dysphoric kids.”

The attorney for Colorado, Shannon Stevenson, explained during her segment of the hearing why the law is justified. “The harms from conversion therapy come from when you tell a young person you can change this innate thing about yourself, and they try and they try and they fail, and then they have shame and they’re miserable, and then it ruins their relationships with their family.”

Then there was Justice Alito, who suggested that states can’t fully rely on scientific consensus to determine the standard of care and regulate providers because of shameful medical movements like eugenics. “The medical consensus is usually very reasonable, and it’s very important. But have there been times when the medical consensus has been politicized, has been taken over by ideology?” he said, adding, “‘Isn’t it a fact that it’s happened in the past—‘three generations of idiots are enough’?” Here he is mangling a citation of Buck v. Bell, the case where the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s eugenic sterilization law, though the opinion uses the word “imbeciles.” Alito also asked Stevenson, “Was there a time when there were many, many medical professionals who thought that every child born with Down syndrome should be immediately put in an institution?” He believes these decades-old beliefs are “gotchas” in a case about modern medicine.

Alito later argued that the law wasn’t a sensible medical regulation, but rather viewpoint discrimination against social conservatives. He seemed enraged that it bans counseling that discourages people from embracing their gender identity or sexual orientation, while allowing therapy to help people feel comfortable in their identity. Stevenson responded that the state will only enforce the law against therapists who seek to permanently change someone’s sexual orientation, not simply to lessen same-sex attraction.

A lawyer for the Justice Department, which supports Chiles’ position, implied that Democrats better hope the Supreme Court strikes down the conversion therapy ban; otherwise, conservative-led states could use Colorado’s logic to ban gender-affirming talk therapy in addition to the forms of care they already prohibit. And wouldn’t they hate that!

DOJ attorney Hashim Mooppan referred to the case decided earlier this year, US v. Skrmetti, in which the court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors, even with parental consent, to basically warn the litigants of an unintended consequence of letting Colorado’s law stand. He then claimed that Colorado’s position would have led to homophobic bigotry in the 1970s.

The DOJ lawyer supporting the therapist says the court needs to strike down the Colorado conversion therapy ban otherwise states could ban gender-affirming talk therapy. Cruelly cites how being gay was considered a mental illness in the 70s

— Susan Rinkunas (@susanrinkunas.com) 2025-10-07T16:05:44.066Z

In his rebuttal at the end of arguments, Campbell presented a parade of horribles that underscores conservatives’ larger goal: trying to prevent kids from transitioning at all. Colorado’s law needs to be struck down because, he claimed, once young people start affirming their gender, they get “locked into that path”—and then he brought up a highly biased medical review published in the U.K. called the Cass Report.

“Over 90% of the time, once they start down the path of social transition, it will lead to the route of medicalized transition, which the Cass Report tells us comes with a lot of harm and devastation,” he said. This gives away the game. ADF is arguing that therapists cannot affirm young people questioning their gender because that can lead those queer youth to pursue medical procedures like puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Wanting to prevent anyone from expressing their gender identity is eliminationist thinking, which is all the more striking given Alito’s invocation of eugenics.

This case is considered one of the biggest of the term, and the justices typically hold those opinions until the end of June. That means we get to wait several months to find out exactly how bad the ruling will be.

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