On Twitter, Matthew Lilley points out that, during yesterday’s oral arguments in the case of Chiles v. Salazar, the lawyer for Colorado said the following in defense of the state’s ban on “conversion therapy”:

And the reason why is because the harms from conversion therapy come from when you tell a young person you can change this innate thing about yourself, and they try and they try and they fail, and then they have shame and they’re miserable, and then it ruins their relationships with their family or —

And:

And, again, the — the harm from it comes not from the — from the aversive practice; it comes from telling someone there’s something innate about yourself you can change, and then you spend all kinds of time and effort trying to do that, and you fail.

There are, of course, certain circumstances in which the government may regulate the speech of those who provide a commercial service — yes, including healthcare providers. Under current precedent, for example, it would not be a violation of the First Amendment for the state of Colorado to pass a law that, either explicitly or implicitly, rendered it illegal for a doctor to tell a patient that he should stick a carving knife into his neck. Obviously, though, there is a lot of distance between that rule, which is obvious and uncontroversial, and rules relating to transgenderism, which is currently the topic of of fervent political, moral, and scientific debate. Repeatedly, Colorado’s lawyer suggested otherwise — even going so far as to claim that the matter had now been settled. But that isn’t true, and the fact that a reasonable person could read the two quotations I cited above and remain unsure as to whether they had been advanced by the pro-Colorado side or the anti-Colorado side ought to illustrate that beyond all doubt.

Look, again, at this sentence:

when you tell a young person you can change this innate thing about yourself, and they try and they try and they fail, and then they have shame and they’re miserable, and then it ruins their relationships with their family or —

If that had been uttered by a detransitioner, would you have blinked?

How about this one? Does it not sound like every argument against so-called “gender-affirmation” you’ve ever heard?

it comes from telling someone there’s something innate about yourself you can change, and then you spend all kinds of time and effort trying to do that, and you fail.

For Colorado to have determined that counselors who live in the state are legally unable to tell people that they cannot change their gender — a position that, until about ten years ago, had been uniformly accepted through all of human history — is an astonishing overreach. Quite where the line sits between free speech and professional misconduct is hard to tell. But it’s certainly not there. Properly understood, this isn’t a regulation; it’s an attempt to steal hundreds of bases by silencing the other side of the fight. The First Amendment doesn’t permit that.