How Colorado Outplayed the Supreme Court’s “Chiles” Decision, and Why We Must Still Sound the Alarm on an Active Genocide
On May 7th, 2026, the Colorado General Assembly passed HB26-1322 to protect youth from conversion therapy. The bill allows survivors to sue mental health professionals for damages caused by these practices, while entirely removing the statute of limitations so that claims can be filed at any time (Colo. H.B. 26-1322, 2026).
This victory was a direct reaction to a devastating blow from the Supreme Court. Just weeks earlier, on March 31st, SCOTUS ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar (2026), deciding that traditional conversion therapy bans unconstitutionally restrict clinicians’ “free speech.”
Colorado’s swift creation of a civil liability strategy is a moment to celebrate. It is also a powerful reminder of our collective ability to fight back against a dangerous national landscape.
Yet we cannot let a localized win blind us to a national reality: across the country, extreme, well-funded networks—fueled by far-right playbooks like Project 2025—are weaponizing this new “free speech” precedent to actively sue and dismantle protections against conversion therapy nationwide.
What was Chiles vs. Salazar All About?
In 2019, Colorado passed HB19-1129, the Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL), which prohibited licensed mental health professionals from practicing conversion therapy on clients under 18 (Prohibit Conversion Therapy for a Minor, 2019).
The law aligned with what medical experts had been telling us all along: that conversion therapy does not make youth safer or lead to more rewarding lives. There are decades of research to demonstrate that conversion therapy significantly escalates the risk of severe psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and suicidality among LGBTQIA+ youth.
But Kaley Chiles, a Christian, licensed professional counselor in Colorado who “seeks to live out her faith in every aspect of her life, including her work,” sued the state, claiming the minor conversion therapy law amounted to “unconstitutional censorship” that prevented her from helping clients “find peace with their biological sex” (Alliance Defending Freedom, 2026).
Chiles claimed that gender-affirming care led to “dangerous drugs and surgeries,” going so far as to call those practices coercive.
There is a profound hypocrisy in Chiles’ weaponizing the language of “coercion.” By labeling safe, consensual, and identity-affirming healthcare as coercive, she is distracting from the fact that conversion therapy itself relies entirely on psychological force to erase a person’s authentic self.
The March Chiles v. Salazar SCOTUS decision gave a green light to a more extensive, systemic assault on LGBTQIA+ lives, threatening the existing conversion therapy bans in 22 other states. By defending conversion therapy, her legal strategy attempts to pathologize LGBTQIA+ people by forcing them to conform to a gender binary rooted in systemic oppression.
It remains uncontested by any Justice that conversion therapy harms young people. Yet the United States Supreme Court issued a devastating 8-1 ruling in Chiles’ favor. The Court’s concern was a specific First Amendment issue: Colorado’s prior law, as applied to talk therapy, regulated a licensed therapist’s speech based on its viewpoint.
SCOTUS remanded MCTL back to the lower courts, legitimizing a dangerous framework nationwide, while leaving LGBTQIA+ youth unprotected.
How Bad Is Conversion Therapy?
The reality is devastating.
Conversion therapy is defined as efforts that attempt to “change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or related behaviors” (American Psychological Association, 2026).
In practice, targeting these “behaviors” means penalizing a person’s natural self-expression–essentially punishing ways of dressing, speaking, or existing that do not conform to standard gender binaries. Its main directive is to fundamentally alter who you are and how you present yourself in the world.
Some “treatments” include acts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, electrocution, forced medication, isolation, confinement, verbal abuse, and humiliation (United Nations Human Rights Office, 2020).
United Nations (UN) expert Victor Madrigal-Borloz believes that conversion therapy amounts to torture and should be universally banned.
In Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s lone dissent in Chiles v. Salazar, she explicitly names the torture methods used under the guise of “care”:
“Conversion-therapy efforts have historically included aversive therapeutic modalities. Those ranged from inducing nausea, vomiting, or paralysis in patients or subjecting them to severe electric shocks to telling patients to snap an elastic band on their wrists in response to nonconforming thoughts.”
“…survivors of conversion therapy continue to suffer from PTSD, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. As one survivor put it, conversion therapy ‘came close to killing me.’”
Therapy is not a neutral interaction; it is a space defined by a considerable power imbalance. The therapist carries a degree, licensure, and professional expertise that establishes them as authorities. The client, conversely, arrives vulnerable and possibly distressed. For youth, they are often sent to therapy by parents, schools, or churches, leaving them entirely without agency or meaningful consent.
The psychological distress caused by conversion therapy can result in confusion, depression, PTSD, and increased suicidality. According to one study, LGBTQIA+ individuals who experienced conversion therapy experienced 75% greater odds of planning to attempt suicide, and 92% were at greater odds of lifetime suicidal ideation (Blosnich et al, 2020).
Conversion therapy leaves lasting psychological effects, including high anxiety, low self-esteem, hypervigilance, dissociation, emotional dysregulation, toxic self-shame, lack of joy, increased hopelessness and despair, difficulty sustaining emotionally intimate relationships, and an increase in self-destructive behaviors (Villarreal, 2026).
It also inflicts intense and severe physical and psychological pain and is inherently degrading due to its discriminatory belief that LGBTQIA+ identities are “sinful,” “inferior,” or a “disorder” to cure.
Beyond the immense trauma, a 2022 study by The Trevor Project estimated that conversion therapy and its associated harms cost the United States $9.23 billion annually.
When the human cost is torture and the financial cost is in the billions, we have to ask ourselves: Why are we continuing to subsidize, protect, and pay for the infliction of state-sanctioned harm?
What Does This Have To Do With Mad Liberation?
The state has long weaponized the labels of “madness” and “mental illness” specifically to police and pathologize the LGBTQIA+ community.
LGBTQIA+ individuals and mad persons share a deeply historic, inseparable intersection. People in the mad community, queer community, or both, have historically been locked away, subjected to forced medication, isolation, and behavioral modification under the same lie: that they are intrinsically broken and need to be “cured.”
Pathologization is a form of social control. It is not accidental. For decades, the American Psychiatric Association used the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to pathologize queerness as a mental illness, using the exact same asylum walls and compliance-based tactics to police sexual orientation and neurodivergence.
Fighting against conversion therapy is fighting psychiatric coercion.
We believe that no one needs to be “fixed,” whether you are a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, someone labeled as “mentally ill,” or someone experiencing multi-layered, intersecting forms of social stigma and structural discrimination that threaten your autonomy and rights. True liberation means rejecting the idea that human variance is a defect.
How Can We Help Instead of Harm?
Imagine if we approached LGBTQIA+ youth with compassion, safety, and unconditional affirmation.
Unlike the traditional medical model, a social model of care shifts the attention from what is “wrong” with an individual to what has happened to them. It opens with understanding rather than judgment.
Under this framework, we recognize that a young person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is never the problem; the actual harm stems from institutional inequality, religious stigmas, poverty, and the distinct absence of safe environments. The issue isn’t who they are—it is a rigid world telling them they are unacceptable.
True support gives priority to a young person’s autonomy, dignity, and self-determination, rather than centering a therapist’s personal preferences or belief systems.
To protect our most vulnerable youth from the harm our society and its systems inflict, we must radically reshape what care looks like. That means a framework shift from medical to social and the implementation of Gender-Affirming Care as a universal standard.
The child shouldn’t have to change fundamental aspects of themselves so that adults with rigid beliefs can feel comfortable. We need to protect our most vulnerable youth from the harm that our society and its systems inflict upon them.
That means listening instead of fixing. Compassion instead of control. Safety instead of shame. Affirmation instead of punishment.
We need to start making life feel possible for queer youth, rather than pushing them to the point where death feels like the only answer.
What About A New Legal Framework?
This brings us to the brilliant mechanics of Colorado’s newly passed HB26-1322–the Civil Actions for Conversion Therapy Survivors bill, which completely bypasses the Supreme Court’s “free speech” trap from Chiles v. Salazar.
Under this new framework, the definition of conversion therapy is amended to prohibit a licensed mental health professional from seeking to impose a predetermined outcome on a minor patient regarding sexual orientation or gender identity, regardless of the direction of that outcome. A therapist cannot steer a young person toward a predetermined identity.
Because the prohibition applies completely evenhandedly, the law regulates a category of substandard professional conduct rather than a specific political or religious viewpoint.
Crucially, the new law extends the statute of limitations for malpractice—a massive win that directly acknowledges that survivors often take years, sometimes decades, to safely process and understand childhood abuse before seeking legal recourse.
But do not underestimate the Project 2025 agenda: while Colorado engineered a quick save, the national threat remains.
Immediately after the Supreme Court’s actions, therapists in Wisconsin filed a federal lawsuit against Governor Tony Evers, seeking to strike down their state’s conversion therapy protections (Gunn, 2026).
With federal bans on gender-affirming care surviving constitutional challenges nationwide—such as the catastrophic fallout from U.S. v. Skrmetti (2025)—the current legal environment shows a calculated, nationwide erasure of vulnerable people.
Call to Mobilization: Defending Our Joy
We envision a future in which the expansiveness of human life is celebrated, all people are valued, and self-determination is a right for all.
In times like these, we wish the late, legendary poet Andrea Gibson were still here with us today. They would have the exact words we need to fight back. In one of their many powerful poems, “Your Life,” they beautifully highlight the radiant reality and beauty of queerness amid the immense pain of oppression.
“They’re going to keep telling you your heartbeat is a preexisting condition.
They’re going to keep telling you you are crime of nature.
You’re going to look at all of your options and choose conviction.
Choose to carve your own heart out of the side of a cliff.
Choose to spend your whole life telling secrets you owe no one
to everyone, until there isn’t anyone who can insult you
by calling you what you are:
You holy blinking star.
You highway streak of light
falling over and over for your hard life,
your perfect life,
your sweet and beautiful life.” (Gibson, n.d.)
We imagine they would be profoundly angry to see the legal system legitimize such abuse in a state they loved, but also that they would demand that we keep hope alive.
Queerness is ancient, beautiful, valid, has always existed, and always will. It is entirely impossible to erase. We refuse to be immobilized by the fear they are trying to instill in us.
We encourage our community to stay proactive with us to prevent the Supreme Court from dismantling similar protections in Vermont.
We encourage our community to stay proactive with us to prevent the Supreme Court from dismantling similar protections in Vermont. Sign the pledge in solidarity with queer and trans youth through Outright Vermont. If you believe in a future where Vermont LGBTQIA+ youth have hope, equity, and power, take action with us. Together, we can make meaningful change.
Protecting Vermont’s youth begins with something uncomplicated yet innovative: believing them when they tell us who they are, and legislating a world that is safe enough for them to exist in.
References
Alliance Defending Freedom. (2026, March 31). Kaley Chiles’s story.https://adflegal.org/article/kaley-chiles-story/
American Psychological Association. (2026, April 1). The evidence against ‘conversion therapy.’ Insights from psychological research.https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/evidence-against-conversion-therapy
Blosnich, J. R., Henderson, E. R., Coulter, R. W. S., Goldbach, J. T., & Meyer, I. H. (2020, June 10). Sexual orientation change efforts, adverse childhood experiences, and suicide ideation and attempt among sexual minority adults, United States, 2016–2018. American Journal of Public Health, 110(7), 1024–1030. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305637
Chiles v. Salazar, No. 24-539, 607 U.S. (2026, March 31). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-539_fd9g.pdf
Colorado General Assembly. (2026). Civil Actions for Conversion Therapy Survivors. H.B. 26-1322, 75th Gen. Assembly. https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/HB26-1322
Colorado General Assembly. (2019). Prohibit Conversion Therapy for a Minor, H.B. 19-1129, 72nd Gen. Assembly. https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb19-1129
Colo. H.B. 26-1322, 75th Gen. Assemb., 2nd Reg. Sess. (2026). https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/HB26-1322
Conger, K. (2024, September 30). Conversion practices linked to depression, PTSD, and suicide thoughts in LGBTQIA+ adults. Stanford Medicine News Center. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/09/conversion-practices-lgbt.html
Gibson, A. (n.d.). Your life. Andrea Gibson. https://andreagibson.org/your-life
Gunn, E. (2026, May 7). Evers says state won’t repeal conversion therapy ban despite pressure from right-wing groups. News From The States.https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/evers-says-state-wont-repeal-conversion-therapy-ban-despite-pressure-right-wing-groups
The Trevor Project. (2022, March 7). New study finds conversion therapy, and its associated harms, cost the U.S. an estimated $9.23 billion annually.https://www.thetrevorproject.org/blog/new-study-finds-conversion-therapy-and-its-associated-harms-cost-the-u-s-an-estimated-9-23-billion-annually/
The Trevor Project. (2026, May 8). Colorado passes new law to protect LGBTQ people against harms of conversion therapy in wake of Supreme Court decision.https://www.thetrevorproject.org/blog/colorado-passes-new-law-to-protect-lgbtq-people-against-harms-of-conversion-therapy-in-wake-of-supreme-court-decision/
United Nations Human Rights Office. (2020, July 13). Conversion therapy can amount to torture and should be banned, says UN expert.https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2020/07/conversion-therapy-can-amount-torture-and-should-be-banned-says-un-expert
United Nations Human Rights Council. (2016). Report of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (A/HRC/31/57). Refworld. https://www.refworld.org/reference/themreport/unhrc/2016/108983
United States v. Skrmetti, 605 U.S. 495 (2025). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-477_2cp3.pdf
Villarreal, G. (2026, April 5). Why is conversion therapy so harmful? It’s all about how young people form their identities. LGBTQ Nation. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/04/why-is-conversion-therapy-so-harmful-its-all-about-how-young-people-form-their-identities/