Colorado’s war on counseling

Suppose a teenage girl, struggling to accept her female body, seeks a professional counselor to talk out certain issues. Despite this struggle, she doesn’t want surgery or hormones. She just wants help accepting her body. In Colorado, that simple, heartfelt request just for a conversation would be met with silence—or worse, redirection.

Why? Because under Colorado law, licensed counselors are forbidden from using conversations to help minors pursue their chosen goal of affirming their biological sex if the child is experiencing gender distress. For Colorado, that voluntarily chosen goal is a forbidden goal. The law only allows counselors who counsel these struggling minors to affirm these children in an opposite-sex identity, one that would put them on a destructive path toward drugs, cross-sex hormones, and mutilating surgeries. And this isn’t just Colorado. It’s the legal reality in 23 states.

Not only is this an attack on the interests of children. It’s a blatant attack on counselors’ and clients’ freedom of speech under the First Amendment. And it’s why Alliance Defending Freedom is challenging Colorado’s censorship at the U.S. Supreme Court today. The outcome will impact scores of counselors and vulnerable kids who are now caught in the crosshairs of a state’s mandated ideology.

The plaintiff in this case is Kaley Chiles. Kaley’s desire is beautiful and simple: to help young people struggling with gender dysphoria open up and chat about their feelings, to help clarify their goals and values, and to pursue their goals to identify as God has made them and in ways that will fulfill them.

Like most of us, Kaley knows that adolescence is complicated. We all remember the strong, often conflicted emotions we felt as kids and teens. Particularly for those confused about their bodies, seeing a licensed counselor can help them untangle their feelings without permanently harming their bodies.

Astoundingly, Colorado says those conversations where clients pursue certain goals are off limits. The state misleadingly brands them as “conversion therapy,” but what it actually prohibits is a counselor helping a child get comfortable with her body and affirm her biological sex. Many think, for good reason, that encouraging a gender-confused child to alter her body is the real conversion therapy. Kaley is trying to help young people who seek to escape this devastating fate, which tragically makes them medical patients for life.

This is insane, and a growing majority of Americans recognize it as such. Seventy-one percent of Americans now support laws protecting kids from harmful gender transition drugs and surgeries. That viewpoint also lines up with the global medical consensus, which recognizes that giving kids irreversible drugs and surgeries is a grave mistake. In fact, the European nations that pioneered these surgeries for kids have rolled them back almost entirely.

Kids who struggle with their bodies need love. They need a chance to talk about and process their feelings. Colorado is robbing them of that chance. It is instead imposing a rigid, outdated, and discredited ideology on private conversations between counselors and child clients. Colorado’s kids deserve so much better.

We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will vindicate the free-speech rights of Kaley and other counselors in this case. Free speech is essential to client-centered counseling. It should never be infringed.

Free speech is part of the genius of America. It’s why the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk was an attack not only on his worldview but on our very way of life as Americans. While other nations censor speech for being “offensive” or “blasphemous,” America has remained the one bastion of verbal freedom where a thousand ideological flowers can bloom. We do not outlaw ideas and words here. We defeat them through dialogue and debate. Few things could be more odious to the First Amendment than a government regulating what words can come out of our mouths in private conversations. That’s what Colorado has done—and it’s what must be repudiated in this case.

Charlie Kirk reminded millions of Christians why we cannot abandon the public square. When we do so, others will step in and mandate their own ideology and viewpoint—and people will suffer. That includes children in the most vulnerable moments of their lives, when they are racked with questions and insecurities.

Now is the time for every Christian to speak truth more boldly than ever. That starts with caring counselors being free to speak with young people and help them pursue the goals they desire—goals that will preserve and affirm God’s good design for their bodies.