On Tuesday, a Christian legal group will urge the US supreme court to overturn a ban on anti-LGBTQ+ “conversion therapy” in a case that could erode protections for transgender and queer youth across the country.
Lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights in high-profile litigation, are representing a woman challenging a 2019 Colorado law that prohibited conversion practices for youth under age 18. The ban applies to licensed clinicians who seek to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity, tactics medical groups have discredited as harmful and ineffective.
ADF’s petition in the case, Chiles v Salazar, cited several scholars to support its argument that conversion practices should once again be permitted. Two of those experts, however, told the Guardian that ADF had “profoundly” misrepresented their research, which discussed the “psychological damage” of conversion therapy.
The family of a deceased researcher, also quoted by ADF, said they were “deeply disturbed” by the “distortion” of his work.
“This is the most upsetting use of my scholarship that has ever happened in my career,” said Clifford Rosky, a University of Utah professor of constitutional law and civil rights. He has worked to ban conversion therapy, but ADF nonetheless cited his research on sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ rights, co-authored with renowned sexuality researcher Dr Lisa Diamond, to bolster its petition. “It’s upsetting because this is lethally dangerous to LGBTQ+ kids,” he said.
ADF defended its quotations as “accurate” in a statement.
Colorado is one of more than 20 states that have prohibited practitioners from using conversion tactics – bans that could be vulnerable if ADF succeeds.
Conversion practices, sometimes called “reparative” therapy or “sexual orientation change efforts,” can take the form of “pray the gay away” religious counseling, therapy aimed at suppressing patients’ behaviors and expression, or outdated techniques such as electrical shocks. The practice is condemned by the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association and other major groups, which note links to increased depression and suicide attempts.
Chiles v Salazar comes as US political attacks on trans and LGBTQ+ youth are dramatically escalating. The case originated with Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor who argued Colorado’s conversion therapy ban infringed on her free speech rights to discuss her Christian faith and beliefs about “biological sex” with patients. Chiles, ADF says, “has begun censoring herself in conversations with clients” due to the law.
Colorado’s attorneys responded that Chiles’s claim was manufactured: the state has not received a complaint about her nor disciplined her. Rather, she filed a “pre-enforcement challenge” in 2022, three years after the ban passed. The law, the state said, does not apply to clinicians outside of work nor to other professions, including religious ministers or life coaches.
ADF petitioned the supreme court to take Chiles’s case last November, days after Donald Trump was elected. The group previously represented a Colorado web designer who argued she had a free speech right to refuse to provide services to gay couples.
‘Deceptive and damaging’
While Chiles’s case focuses on free speech, ADF’s petition also asserted that scientific evidence supported its arguments, saying a “growing body of research reveals how critical Chiles’s counseling is”, demonstrating that “actions and desires related to human sexuality are … subject to change”.
ADF then cited Diamond and Rosky as “respected researchers who support LGBT advocacy”, quoting a section of the Utah researchers’ 2016 paper that said “arguments based on the immutability of sexual orientation are unscientific”.
The paper argued some people’s attractions can naturally shift over time – and LGBTQ+ civil rights should be protected regardless of whether people’s sexuality is fixed or fluid.
In another brief for Chiles, ADF excerpted a quote from the paper, writing: “Sexual orientation changes for many people. Respected researchers of LGBT issues have long observed that ‘longitudinal, population-based studies’ show ‘changes in the same-sex attractions of some individuals over time’.”
Left out of ADF’s reference was the sentence in the paper introducing those studies, which said the research was referencing “change that occurs outside the context of [conversion therapy]”. ADF also failed to acknowledge the researchers’ forceful rejection of conversion practices as “not only ineffective in changing sexual orientation but … psychologically damaging, often resulting in elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality”.
“They are using our work to minimize the harm of conversion therapy. There are few practices where there is as much demonstrated evidence of harm,” Diamond, a distinguished professor of psychology and gender studies, said. “That’s where I find the misinterpretation to be so profound.”
ADF, she said, was conflating naturally occurring sexual fluidity with efforts to force someone to repress their identity: “It’s erasing the fact that conversion therapy is motivated by shame, fear of disconnection, fear of expulsion, fear of the loss of God’s love, fear of abandonment. Those are triggers of suicidality. That’s where the damage comes in.”
“It’s deceptive,” Rosky said of ADF’s selective quotations. “Lawyers owe a duty of candor to the court. You cannot offer false evidence, and if you do so accidentally and find out, you have to correct that … They claim our work supports conversion therapy when our work clearly and specifically condemns conversion therapy on the same page they’re citing.”
Diamond and Rosky filed a brief with the court “to correct the mischaracterizations of their research”. ADF has never contacted them, the scholars said.
Jonathan Scruggs, ADF’s vice-president of litigation strategy and senior counsel, did not respond to detailed questions about specific citations and claims of misrepresentation, but said in a statement: “We stand by what we quoted in the briefs as accurate quotations.”
He repeated Chiles’s assertions that she is seeking to have “voluntary conversations” with clients, arguing there was “no proof” those conversations would “cause any harm”. Scruggs added: “Kaley is not forcing anyone to listen to her conversations and only counsels those who voluntarily come to her … It’s unfortunate that the state and certain ‘experts’ aligned with the state are trying to shut down conversations because they disagree with certain views.”
Rosky – who helped draft Utah’s 2023 conversion therapy ban – noted research finding 44% to 63% of youth who undergo conversion therapy attempt suicide: “We’re not talking about suicidal ideation. We’re talking about actual attempts. By kids. The stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s a grave public health threat.” He added: “All the scientific evidence is horrible for their side. I’m sure they felt they needed someone credible to cite, like Lisa Diamond.”
Diamond has for years spoken out about her work on sexual fluidity being distorted to support anti-LGBTQ+ causes. She gave a 2018 Ted talk about the article cited by ADF where she spelled out conversion therapy’s harms.
“That’s what’s diabolical about [ADF] using me. They know they are misrepresenting my views. It also feels very hard to counter because it’s not coming from facts or reason. It’s coming from animus,” Diamond said, adding: “This case could do some real harm to the very individuals we’ve spent our lives trying to protect.”
More ‘dubious’ claims
ADF also cited Nicholas Cummings, who served as the American Psychological Association’s president in 1979, writing: “After counseling hundreds of clients who successfully changed their unwanted sexual orientations and gender identities, Dr Cummings concluded that it is ‘a distortion of reality’ to suggest that change is impossible.”
The petition references a 2013 op-ed from Cummings, who said he oversaw thousands of gay and lesbian patients from 1959 to 1979 and the “majority were able to attain a happier and more stable homosexual lifestyle”. He said for a select group who “sought to change their orientation”, “hundreds were successful”. In 2015, he endorsed the Trevor Project, a leading LGBTQ+ suicide prevention group, and said efforts to try to “cure” gay people and turn them straight were “unethical and a violation of human rights”.
The family of Cummings, who died in 2020, wrote in a 2023 open letter that he “strongly condemned all forms of conversion therapy” and his statements had been “manipulated by those who support an anti-gay agenda”.
Asked about the supreme court citation, a family representative provided a brief statement referring back to its 2023 letter, adding: “We are deeply disturbed by and we regret any distortion of Dr Cummings’ work for political purposes.”
ADF also cited a 2022 paper titled “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts Do Not Increase Suicide: Correcting a False Research Narrative.” It was authored by Rev D Paul Sullins, a senior research associate at the Ruth Institute, which works to “defend traditional Christian sexual ethics”.
That paper was based on publicly available data from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a leading LGBTQ+ policy research center, which concluded in its own 2020 study that sexual minorities exposed to conversion therapy “had nearly twice the odds of lifetime suicidal ideation”. Those researchers reviewed Sullins’ work and said his conclusions were “invalid” and “not supported by the data”.
In a supreme court brief, the Williams Institute said it had reviewed 13 studies on conversion therapy published since 2020 – and Sullins’ was the only one that reported positive impact.
“You don’t go with the one study that showed the opposite of what everybody else found,” said Ilan Meyer of the Williams Institute, who co-authored the 2020 research. The literature, he added, was “straightforward”. “Conversion therapists do exactly the opposite of what mental health professionals recommend. If somebody is struggling with their sexuality or gender, you don’t tell them it’s right to feel shameful.”
Sullins defended his research in an email, asserting it was “false” to claim conversion therapy “induced suicide”.
Other “authorities” cited in ADF’s petition include an anonymous Reddit post from someone who said they regretted their gender transition, and an interview with a teenager who said she had identified as trans but later changed her mind, from a site that took down its article at the request of the subject.
Colorado’s lawyers noted Chiles had not put forward any expert declarations or affidavits to “develop a record to support her claims”, instead relying on “unvetted and irrelevant … material”.
ADF did not respond to questions about the Cummings and Sullins citations and its references to anonymous online commentary. A spokesperson for the Colorado attorney general declined to comment.
“The petitioner’s case is based on dubious science and practices that have been discredited,” said Tony Carrk, the executive director of Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog group that documented discrepancies in Chiles’s citations. “What does this mean for the supreme court that yet again they’re agreeing to hear another ideologically driven case propped up on flimsy scientific evidence and aimed at LGBTQ+ Americans?”
Fearing ‘catastrophic’ consequences
The supreme court’s conservative supermajority has repeatedly ruled against LGBTQ+ rights in recent years. That includes upholding a state ban on trans youth healthcare, siding with parents who objected to LGBTQ+ literature in schools, and in ADF’s 2023 case, ruling Colorado civil rights law violated the free speech of the web designer who didn’t want to serve LGBTQ+ couples.
That track record is worrying to advocates, who warn of far-reaching consequences if Chiles prevails, including similar efforts in other states.
The case is aligned with the agenda of Trump and his allies to remove trans people from public life and force trans youth to suppress their identities, said Julia Serano, an author who writes about gender and sexuality: “There have been relentless efforts for more than a century to try to make trans people not trans … This case, like a lot of policy interventions, is about making the existence of trans people questionable.”
Conversion therapy survivors said it was painful to think so much progress could be undone.
“It would be absolutely catastrophic,” Curtis Lopez-Galloway, the founder of the Conversion Therapy Survivor Network, said of a Chiles victory. He said he will face lifelong effects from being subjected to conversion therapy at age 16 and hoped the US could someday pass a national ban, akin to Canada’s, which broadly outlawed these practices for children and adults.
Cairn Journey Yakey, a Colorado licensed counselor who is non-binary, filed an affidavit with Advocates for Trans Equality about the conversion therapy they endured in church and the post-traumatic stress disorder that it caused: “It was a big moment when Colorado passed this law. We could take a deep breath because we took this step forward and collectively decided we can’t do this kind of harm in our state.”
If the ban is undone, Yakey said there would be renewed advocacy efforts to educate people about the dangers of conversion therapy and support LGBTQ+ youth and survivors. This moment reminded them of when Maine repealed marriage equality in 2009 soon after it had been passed: “That was my first time realizing our rights are not static. So there’s familiarity in what I’m feeling now, but also shock and sadness and grief that this ban is being challenged.”
