The United States Supreme Court Should Be Ashamed of Themselves Let’s Discuss Conversion Therapy

by Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW

Today, I am scared... not for me but for our children.

Not the vague, ambient kind of fear that hums quietly in the background. I mean the kind of fear that sits in your chest like a stone — the kind that wakes you up at 3 a.m. because you keep thinking about a child you've never met, lying in the dark, being told they are broken and need to change.

Today, March 31, 2026, the United States Supreme Court ruled 8–1 to strike down Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for minors. Eight justices. One voice of reason. And a decision that will echo through the lives of LGBTQ+ youth across this country for years to come.

I need you to understand what that means. Not in legal language. In human language.

What We Just Allowed

Conversion therapy — also called sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts, or SOGICE — is the practice of attempting to change a young person's sexual orientation or gender identity. It has been condemned as ineffective, unethical, and deeply harmful by the American Psychological Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the National PTA, and virtually every major medical and mental health organization in this country. (Section 3)

It does not work. There is no credible scientific evidence that it can reliably change who someone is at the core of their being. (Section 3)

What it does do — and the data on this is unambiguous — is hurt children.

Young people who have been subjected to these practices have roughly 1.7 to 2.5 times higher odds of seriously considering or attempting suicide compared to peers who were not exposed. (Section 4) A 2025 Stanford Medicine study found that survivors of conversion practices showed greater symptoms of depression, PTSD, and suicidality — with the most severe harm documented in those subjected to efforts targeting both sexual orientation and gender identity. (Section 4)

Read that again. These are not abstractions. These are children. These are teenagers. These are human beings.

I Am a Psychotherapist, and I Am Telling You: This is Abuse

I have been a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist for nearly four decades. I have sat with trauma survivors. I have held space for people in the deepest, darkest places of their pain. I have accompanied people to the threshold of death in hospice work and watched what it means to leave this world with wounds that were never tended to.

And I am telling you, with every ounce of professional and personal conviction I have, conversion therapy is child abuse. The therapist that uses it is practicing child abuse. The parents that allow it is participating in child abuse. And the Supreme Court today is complicit in child abuse.

The fundamental ethical obligation of every therapist — every single one of us — is to meet the client where they are. We are not there to tell people who to be. We are not there to erase, suppress, or pathologize the core of who someone is. We are to provide a safe place where we help them find themselves, to help them feel safe in their own skin, to help them build a life that is theirs.

Conversion therapy does the opposite. It tells a child: You are wrong. You are broken. The very thing that makes you who you are is something we need to eliminate. And it does so under the guise of care. That is not therapy. That is harm wearing a professional credential.

The American Psychoanalytic Association reaffirmed in October 2025 — just months before this ruling — that conversion therapy is a widely discredited and dangerous practice that poses serious risks to LGBTQIA+ youth. (Section 3) The National PTA has explicitly stated that these practices provoke the mental health conditions that lead to anxiety, depression, and suicide. (Section 3)

And today, the Supreme Court decided that a therapist's right to say these harmful things matters more than a child's right to be safe.

The Children I Fear For

The Trevor Project has been tracking what is happening to our LGBTQ+ youth in real time. What they have found should stop every one of us in our tracks.

In a longitudinal study following more than 1,700 LGBTQ youth and young adults over the course of one year, researchers documented alarming increases across the board: anxiety rose from 57% to 68%. Depression climbed from 48% to 54%. Suicidal ideation jumped from 41% to 47%. (Section 5)

Those aren't percentages. Those are people.

And then there's this: threats of conversion therapy doubled — from 11% to 22% — in that same period. Actual exposure rose from 9% to 15%. (Section 5) More young people being threatened with it. More young people experiencing it. And now, a Supreme Court ruling poised to make it easier to access in states across the country, as analysts and advocacy organizations warn this decision could undermine similar bans in more than twenty other states. (Section 9)

Transgender and nonbinary youth — who are already the most vulnerable, who already face the highest rates of discrimination and the worst mental health outcomes — are at particular risk. (Section 5)

I think about those kids at night. I think about the teenager who finally found the language to describe who they are, and whose parents are now one Google search away from a therapist who will be legally permitted to try to take that away from them.

I am scared for those children. And you should be too.

What Protects Youth — and What Doesn't

Here is what the research also tells us, because I refuse to leave you only in the darkness.

When a young LGBTQ+ person has at least one accepting adult in their life, their odds of a suicide attempt drop by approximately 40–45%. (Section 5) When transgender and nonbinary youth receive affirming, identity-supportive care, studies show up to 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality. (Section 6)

Seventy-three percent.

Affirming care saves lives. It is not ideology. It is medicine. It is science. It is what the evidence tells us, overwhelmingly, without ambiguity. (Section 6)

And yet our legal system — on this day — chose to protect the speech rights of providers over the safety of children. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the lone dissenting voice, said it plainly: the Constitution does not prevent reasonable regulation of harmful treatments simply because the harm is delivered through speech rather than a scalpel. (Section 1) She was right. And she was outvoted 8 to 1.

Complicity Has a Cost

Before this ruling, roughly 22 to 24 states, plus Washington, D.C., had bans in place protecting minors from licensed providers who might otherwise subject them to these practices. (Section 2) Today, many of those protections are in jeopardy. Legal analysts warn this decision creates a framework — centered on the therapist's viewpoint-based speech rights — that could be used to dismantle similar laws across the country. (Section 2)

Meanwhile, some states have already been moving in this direction. Several have enacted laws preventing local governments from protecting their own communities. (Section 2) In some places, attorneys general have agreed not to enforce existing bans, effectively opening the door for providers to resume these practices even where the law technically still stands. (Section 7)

This is a system failing our children in real time.

And here is what I want to say directly, as plainly as I can: when institutions that are supposed to protect people instead create conditions for their harm — when courts and legislatures choose providers' rights over children's safety — they become complicit. They are not neutral. They are participating. (Section 8)

We do not get to look away from that.

What I Am Asking of You

I am a psychotherapist. I have spent my career helping people find their way back to themselves after years — sometimes decades — of being told they were wrong, broken, or too much. I have seen what it costs a human being to spend their formative years in a war against their own identity. That cost is steep. Sometimes it is everything.

The science is clear. The ethics are clear. The human cost is clear.

What is happening in our country right now — the rolling back of protections for LGBTQ+ youth, the legal shielding of practices that every credible professional organization has condemned — is not a political disagreement. It is a public health crisis. It is a child welfare crisis. And the fact that we are having this conversation at all, in 2026, with all the evidence we have, is something we should be deeply, collectively ashamed of.

Our youth are watching. They are counting on us to be the adults in the room. They are counting on us to say: No. Not on our watch. You are not broken. You do not need to be fixed. You are exactly who you are supposed to be, and we will fight to protect you.

Today's ruling is not the end of this fight. It is a call to action.

For the child lying awake in the dark tonight — I want you to know that there are people who see you. Who will not stop fighting for you. The world around you is failing you and that is on us to change.