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This article is adapted from an episode of our podcast, “Civic.” Click the audio player below to hear the full story.
Doctors and mental health experts across the country are warning of dire consequences as the U.S. Supreme Court takes up a case that could overturn a Colorado ban on conversion therapy for minors, a practice long tied to psychological harm and elevated suicide risk among LGBTQ+ youth.
If the court rules against Colorado, similar bans in 20 states could fall, leading to increased conversion efforts.
Jack Turban, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco specializing in adolescent mental health, joined the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics in filing an amicus brief with the court, saying such interventions that treat LGBTQ+ identities as pathological are ineffective and dangerous.
“If all of those laws go away, we’re going to see an increase in suicidality among those young people,” Turban said.
The case, Chiles v. Salazar, centers on a Colorado therapist who advertises counseling that encourages young clients to “resist” or “eliminate” same-sex attraction. Colorado regulators say that defies a 2019 state law forbidding licensed therapists from implying that a minor’s sexuality or gender identity can or should be changed. The law applies only to licensed therapists. Chiles argues the ban violates her free speech rights.
The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Colorado’s law in 2024 as a legitimate regulation of medical conduct, emphasizing that states have long had the authority and obligation to protect minors from harmful practices performed under the guise of health care.
But the Supreme Court’s majority of conservative justices appeared dubious at oral arguments in October.
“Just because they’re engaged in conduct doesn’t mean that their words aren’t protected,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.
The Court is expected to release a decision by June 2026.
This episode of “Civic” examines a U.S. Supreme Court case that could weaken or overturn state bans on conversion therapy for minors, drawing on survivors, experts and decades of research to understand what’s at stake for LGBTQ+ youth nationwide.
California passed the nation’s first ban on conversion therapies on minors in 2012 with legislation led by then-state Sen. Ted Lieu. Since his 2014 election to Congress, Lieu has made multiple unsuccessful attempts to pass federal legislation defining conversion therapy as consumer fraud. He argues that decades of research shows conversion practices increase risks of depression and death among minors.
A 2019 San Francisco State University study and a 2023 peer-reviewed analysis published in the Journal of Health Economics found that suicide attempts among LGBTQ+ young people more than doubled when parents tried to change their child’s orientation, and nearly tripled when both families and external practitioners were involved. The harm was even greater when the intervention occurred between ages 11 and 14.
The nation’s top medical and mental health groups agree that sexual orientation and gender diversity are part of normal human variation.
Harm that endures
One survivor, who asked that their name be withheld, described being 19 years old when they approached a trusted pastor in their conservative Southern Baptist community.
“It was a cry for help,” they said. “Like, ‘help, I’m dealing with this sin of homosexuality, and I need support with that.’”
A church mentor arranged a series of prayer sessions meant to “pray away the gay,” and referred them to an unlicensed conversion therapist who used pseudoscience to undermine them.
“They believed it was emasculation from older siblings and from my dad as the reason as to why I developed a sexual attraction towards male bodies, which is definitely false,” they said.
The survivor attended sessions for more than a year before suggesting God wanted them to be LGBTQ+. The therapist responded menacingly.
“He said, ‘Buddhists believe that we all live in a dream state,’” they said. “And then he brought out a pocketknife, and he said, ‘well, I bet if I stuck this in the kneecap of a Buddhist, they would wake up and see the pain around them is reality.’ It definitely was a veiled threat towards me.”
It took them years to come to terms with their trauma, eventually finding strength and comfort working to support other members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Sherilyn Adams, CEO of Larkin Street Youth Services, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization serving unhoused and vulnerable young people, said conversion efforts and family rejection are major drivers of homelessness for LGBTQ+ minors in San Francisco and across the country.
“LGBTQ young people are overrepresented in the homelessness population,” Adams said.
Adams said her organization’s philosophy is that acceptance is the path to healing.
“It’s how we roll,” she said. “Putting the young person at the center and really seeing them for who they are, believing them, and then start taking it from there.”