Why the Supreme Court Letting Conversion Therapy Bans Fall Is Specifically Bad for Teenagers

Conversion therapy bans for minors were struck down by the Supreme Court. Here is the specific evidence of harm it produces in adolescents and what happens to them now.

The Supreme Court's ruling that state conversion therapy bans violate the First Amendment's protections against viewpoint discrimination has real-world consequences for specific young people whose situation is worth describing precisely, because the legal formulation that produced the ruling obscures the human content of what the ruling allows.

Conversion therapy applied to minors involves a licensed mental health professional — psychologist, therapist, or counsellor — conducting sessions designed to change a young person's sexual orientation or gender identity. The professional credentials of the practitioner give the process a specific authority: this is not a parent's informal pressure or a religious community's social pressure, but a credentialled therapeutic context that implies clinical validity.

The American Psychological Association's meta-analysis of conversion therapy research — the most comprehensive available — found that it does not successfully change sexual orientation or gender identity in any documented case. It does produce measurable harm in the minority of cases where young people undergo it: elevated rates of depression (approximately 2.5 times the rate in LGBTQ+ youth who did not undergo conversion therapy), elevated anxiety, self-harm, and the specific type of identity damage that comes from being told that something central to who you are is pathological and should be eliminated.

For the specific minor who is referred to conversion therapy by parents who believe it can help: they are placed in a credentialled therapeutic context where a licensed professional is telling them that their sexual orientation or gender identity is something that therapy should change. The professional authority of the setting gives this message more weight than informal social pressure, making the damage — when damage occurs — more acute.

The Supreme Court's ruling does not make conversion therapy legal in states that have banned it through mechanisms other than professional licensing restrictions. But it eliminates the licensing mechanism — the most practically effective lever for ensuring that credentialled professionals don't provide it.