The Supreme Court endorsed a religious counselor’s challenge to Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” for gay and transgender minors, another legal setback for the LGBTQ community that will reverberate in nearly half the country. Follow for live updates.
The decision technically does not strike down the law, which remains in place at the moment. Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative justice, wrote the opinion for an 8-1 court.: Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took the rare step of dissenting from the bench, saying the decision “opens a dangerous can of worms” by undermining states’ rights to regulate medical care.
A person holds a flag during a Transgender Day of Visibility rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on March 31, 2025.The court’s ruling landed on a key day for transgender Americans: Tuesday is Transgender Day of Visibility. The day, which aims to celebrate the achievements of trans rights activists and increase awareness about ongoing challenges that transgender and gender-nonconforming people face, is observed annually on March 31. The day has taken on new significance in recent years as GOP-led states have plowed ahead with enacting legislation targeting members of the community and President Donald Trump moved quickly after returning to office last year to reverse recent gains made on the federal level by transgender Americans. The Supreme Court is expected to release another key ruling dealing with transgender rights in coming months. That case deals with whether states can ban transgender“This Transgender Day of Visibility comes at a time when hateful politicians are trying to divide us by targeting the trans community. But the truth is, the American people are far more united than extremists will admit. We believe in fairness. We believe in dignity. And we believe in treating people equally under the law,” Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement.Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch poses for an official portrait at the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court building on October 7, 2022.Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the court’s majority opinion, fired back at Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent arguing that the court should have given the state more room to regulate the speech of counselors under the First Amendment. Jackson’s basic point is that therapists are acting like health care professionals more than speakers and so governments should have more leeway to regulate them.The dissent, he wrote, “may believe that state-imposed orthodoxies in speech pose few dangers and many benefits in this field . But their policy is not the First Amendment’s.” “The Constitution does not protect the right of some to speak freely; it protects the right of all. It safeguards not only popular ideas; it secures, even and especially, the right to voice dissenting views.”The Trevor Project, a nonprofit suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization that supports LGBTQ youth, criticized the Supreme Court’s decision as “a tragic step backward for our country that will put young lives at risk.” “These efforts, no matter what proponents call them, no matter what any court says, are still proven to cause lasting psychological harm,” said the group’s CEO, Jaymes Black, in a statement. “LGBTQ+ youth subjected to conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide compared to their peers,” Black added. “That’s why protections have been enacted in more than 20 states, and are supported by every major medical and mental health association in the country.”Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson poses for an official portrait at the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court building on October 7, 2022.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson held no punches in her fiery, scorched earth dissent, warning that her colleagues hadn’t considered “the potential long-term and disastrous implications” of their decision. “Ultimately, because the majority plays with fire in this case, I fear that the people of this country will get burned,” she wrote. “We are on a slippery slope now: For the first time, the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment to bless a risk of therapeutic harm to children by limiting the State’s ability to regulate medical providers who treat patients with speech,” Jackson wrote. She continued: “What’s next? In the worst-case scenario, our medical system unravels as various licensed healthcare professionals – talk therapists, psychiatrists, and presumably anyone else who claims to utilize speech when administering treatments to patients – start broadly wielding their newfound constitutional right to provide substandard medical care.”Supreme Court Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, left, and Elena Kagan, during the session for the Court's official photo in October 2022.Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote a concurring opinion that stressed their belief the court’s ruling Tuesday is a narrow one. That likely explains why both of those justices, who are members of the liberal wing, joined the court’s majority. The problem with Colorado’s law, Kagan wrote, was it was “content-based” in its explicit focus on anti-trans therapy. A law that was neutral in its viewpoint “would raise a different and more difficult question.” “Fuller consideration of that question, though, can wait for another day. We need not here decide how to assess viewpoint-neutral laws regulating health providers’ expression because, as the Court holds, Colorado’s is not one,” Kagan said. Explaining why she was siding with the majority, she said that, “Colorado’s law, as applied to talk therapy, regulates based on viewpoint.” “Consider a hypothetical law that is the mirror image of Colorado’s. Instead of barring talk therapy designed to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity, this law bars therapy affirming those things,” Kagan wrote, concluding that such a law should be subject to similarly harsh scrutiny. “One of the real clues to both the significance and limits of today’s ruling comes from Justice Kagan’s short concurring opinion,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.as to the viewpoint they’re expressing. In other words, at least some of the justices aren’t averse to states regulating the speech of medical professionals; they just have to do it in a way that doesn’t prefer one viewpoint over another.”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the sole dissenter in Tuesday’s case, said that she thought her colleagues’ decision “opens a dangerous can of worms” by undermining states’ rights to regulate medical care. “The Constitution does not pose a barrier to reasonable regulation of harmful medical treatments just because substandard care comes via speech instead of scalpel,” wrote Jackson, a member of the court’s liberal wing who was appointed by former President Joe Biden. Underscoring her displeasure with the court’s decision, Jackson took the rare step of reading excerpts of her dissent from the bench.Justice Neil Gorsuch, the conservative who wrote the opinion for the court, said the Colorado law required a far more rigorous review under the First Amendment. “Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety,” Gorsuch wrote. “Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”the LGBTQ community that will reverberate in nearly half the country. The decision technically does not strike down the law, which remains in place at the moment, but means lower courts will now review it again by applying the highest form of judicial scrutiny – an outcome that puts the prohibition on exceedingly thin ice.That’s one of the first questions that comes up on Supreme Court opinion days. See, the court tells us when opinions will come, but not how many or in which cases. So it starts with the court staff putting out boxes of printouts in the press room. One box usually equals one to two opinions — the first indication of what the justices will announce. In the courtroom, the justices convene. Chief Justice John Roberts announces the case and the justice who wrote the opinion. He or she then reads the opinion in court. The paper is distributed to reporters and the opinion goes online. Rinse and repeat on opinion days until the end of the session, which usually comes at the end of June.The decision comes at a moment of upheaval for transgender Americans, who are facing legal and political headwinds during President Donald Trump’s second term. The president ran for reelection in part on a campaign of ending what he described as “transgender lunacy” and both his administration and several conservative states have taken steps to roll back gains made by LGBTQ advocates in recent years.AAron Ontiveroz/MediaNews Group/Denver Post/Getty Images Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor in Colorado, challenged the law on First Amendment grounds. She said she would engage in her “faith-informed counseling” only when clients sought it out. And she disavowed especially controversial practices, such as the use of electric shock therapy or drug-induced nausea. Chiles described her work as helping clients who “have a goal to become comfortable and at peace” with their body.Chiles was represented at the Supreme Court by Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious law group that has had considerable success in recent years. At the oral arguments in October, a majority of the court signaled it was prepared to rule against Colorado. Several justices appeared to reject the idea that a state could regulate “talk therapy” in the same way it regulates a medical procedure, suggesting First Amendment protections applied to speech even in the otherwise highly regulated space of a therapist’s office. Several of the justices also suggested that the answer for potentially harmful therapy was a malpractice lawsuit, not a preventative law.
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