Either states can regulate what they see as the practice of harmful and dubious experiments on minors, or they can’t. It’s the same principle either way.

The Supreme Court this morning accepted a case challenging Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy.” Laws of this nature first sprang up to prohibit efforts to orient or reorient young people from homosexuality to heterosexuality and have expanded to include bans on efforts to get minors to accept their biological sex. In both cases, blue-state laws are one-sided, protecting both speech and medical therapies that aim to encourage homosexuality and transgenderism while banning those that swim in the opposite direction and even concealing pro-gender-transition efforts from parents while denying that this is a “medical” practice. The plaintiff in Chiles v. Salazar argues that this bias written into the law is a free-speech issue.

The Court already has before it, albeit on a limited issue, the case of United States v. Skrmetti, one of a number of legal challenges to red-state laws that take an essentially mirror-image approach in banning “gender-affirming” treatments for minors such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy for gender dysphoria. The challengers (no longer including the Justice Department, which brought the case) argue that it violates equal protection to not ban the same substances from being used for different treatments that actually affirm a minor’s biological sex.

When you step back, it’s apparent that these are two sides of the same coin. Whether it comes to gender transitioning or entering therapy to promote heterosexuality, I’m pretty strongly inclined to let adults make their own choices, even choices that may do them great harm. But in the case of minors, the state does and should have the power to discriminate between those approaches it thinks are valid and those it thinks are unscientific, unproven, crackpot, and damaging — and these decisions are grave enough that minors can’t consent to them, and parents can’t consent for them. And while courts should be leery of state laws that may be so vaguely written that they threaten free speech, they should not lightly use the guise of attacking “vagueness” only when it’s a law they don’t like. The level of specificity needed to enforce either of these bans is basically the same.

That said, it would not be entirely unreasonable for the courts to draw the line between speech and conduct. The state’s case for regulation is strongest when children are being subjected to surgeries or pharmaceutical interventions; it is weaker when they are merely being propagandized, with or without the guise of “therapy.” But again, whether adults are trying to talk a teenage girl out of being gay or trying to talk her out of being a girl, the legal rule should be the same: either the state must treat both sides equally, or the state must be free in either case to pick a side and regulate in favor of it as the democratic process sees fit.

Progressives, typically enough, want it both ways: to declare a constitutional right against state power when it’s exercised against what conservatives see as medical crackpottery and ideological coercion in gender transitioning and also to declare that there’s no legal limit on state power when it’s exercised against what progressives see as medical crackpottery and ideological coercion in gay conversion. But we’re right, and they’re wrong! they argue. This is a fine argument to make within a democratic system, even if it requires you to admit that your invocation of principles such as parental control or free speech or bodily liberty is selective. But arguing that the Constitution allows you to use the democratic process when you say you are right, but that it bars the other side from doing the same thing, is heads-I-win-tails-you-lose. (I don’t blame the litigants in Chiles for trying to get the courts to settle the principle; if they lose, at least it should be on a common principle applicable to both sides.) The other common move used by progressives is to claim that the whole thing should be decided, not by elected officials democratically or judges enforcing written laws consistently, but by the judgment of medical associations over which progressives have ideological control that is immune to popular accountability. By now, nearly everyone sees that claim for what it is.

Either states can regulate what they see as the practice of harmful and dubious experiments on minors, or they can’t. It’s the same principle either way.