The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in Chiles v. Salazar, a case challenging Colorado’s ban on certain forms of counseling for youth experiencing gender dysphoria. The stakes couldn’t be higher for vulnerable young people and their families.

We make unlikely co-authors. Tyler Deaton leads American Unity Fund, which advocates for LGBT rights within conservative circles. Ryan T. Anderson leads the Ethics and Public Policy Center, applying Judeo-Christian moral tradition to law and culture. We’ve frequently disagreed — sometimes profoundly — on questions of marriage, sexuality, and religious liberty.

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Yet we’ve joined forces to file an amicus brief in this case because we share a fundamental conviction: Children struggling with gender dysphoria deserve compassion, individualized attention, and comprehensive mental healthcare, not a system that pushes only one predetermined outcome.

Colorado’s 2019 law — versions of which have been passed by over 20 other states — prohibits mental health professionals from providing any counseling that doesn’t “affirm” a minor’s stated “gender identity.” In practice, this means therapists can only validate a child’s desire to pursue sex change interventions, whether social, medical, or surgical; they cannot explore underlying issues, address co-occurring mental health conditions, or help children find ways to understand themselves that don’t include medically or surgically modifying their developing bodies.

The law’s defenders have labeled therapy that doesn’t “affirm” as “conversion therapy,” deliberately invoking a different and emotionally fraught topic. However, helping children work through distress about puberty — a universally difficult time — bears no resemblance to the coercive practices many gay and lesbian adults condemn.

This law isn’t protecting children from harmful therapies. It’s guiding them onto a medical conveyor belt that itself exposes them to serious risks of fundamentally experimental interventions that carry serious risks: impaired cognitive function, infertility, reduced bone density, and other lifelong health consequences.

It also tramples on the First Amendment rights of the therapists. Censorship has lately been a potent tool of far-left and far-right activism as censors embrace the illiberal impulse to silence or “cancel” any viewpoint they find objectionable. As an illuminating example, one of the authors of this piece published a book several years ago questioning the efficacy of medicalized treatments. It was met with outrage, but instead of this being followed by sober conversations about the evidence presented, Amazon pulled the book from its website, backing down instead of defending the author’s right to free speech and the value that serious, evidence-based, public discourse could bring to this debate.

But the Colorado law has backfired in tangible ways that are hurting the very population it’s claiming to protect; many of the therapists being silenced are themselves part of the LGBT community whose professional goal is to help the next generation of LGBT youth grow into healthy and successful adults. Instead, their businesses are being put under a microscope and damaged, ultimately resulting in fewer children having access to help and guidance when they most need it.

International evidence is mounting that there is no reliable benefit from medical sex-change interventions for minors. Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have all reversed course on so-called “gender-affirming care” after systematic reviews found the evidence weak or nonexistent, and instead recommend psychotherapy. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently concluded that “the best available evidence indicates that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery have not been shown to improve mental health outcomes” for youth with gender dysphoria. 

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Detransitioners — young adults who medically “transitioned” as minors and later regretted it — consistently report that their gender dysphoria stemmed from other issues that went ignored or unexplored and that they were fast-tracked toward permanent bodily modifications when what they needed was mental health support.

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The First Amendment protects many things, but at its core, it safeguards the marketplace of ideas and public debate — including professional discussions about the best ways to help struggling youth. Colorado’s law doesn’t just violate counselors’ free speech rights; it abandons vulnerable children to an experimental medical pathway that increasingly looks like malpractice.

Whatever one’s views on LGBT issues, surely we can agree that children deserve protection, not politics. As the Supreme Court considers this case, we hope the justices will recognize what’s really at stake: the freedom of mental health professionals to provide ethical, evidence-based care and the right of children to receive it.

Ryan T. Anderson is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Tyler Deaton is a senior advisor at American Unity Fund. They filed an amicus brief in Chiles v. Salazar supporting the petitioner.