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This op-ed was originally published via Alpha News

Kids and teens struggling with accepting their sex should be able to talk openly with a licensed counselor—someone who will listen to their goals and struggles without predetermined outcomes or fear of legal punishment. Based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Chiles v. Salazar, that kind of compassionate, client-centered conversation (also referred to as talk therapy) can no longer be treated as illegal conduct under the guise of banning so-called “conversation therapy.”

Last week, in an 8-1 decision, every U.S. Supreme Court Justice except Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson held Colorado’s counseling censorship law is presumptively unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. The Colorado law, much like the nearly identical Minnesota law, permits speech encouraging children to embrace their gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction, while banning speech helping children with gender dysphoria accept their sex. In other words, the lower courts got it wrong in failing to apply the more rigorous standard of strict scrutiny consistent with First Amendment speech protections. Arguably, this type of viewpoint-discriminatory language would never survive the more rigorous analysis.

My colleague Doug Wardlow and I represented Christian Counselors for Freedom Alliance, as well as Amici Nate Oyloe and Erin Brewer, in an amicus brief in the case supporting ADF client Kaley Chiles, the brave Christian counselor who successfully challenged Colorado’s unconstitutional law. In the amicus brief, Nate and Erin bravely shared how they personally benefited from the opportunity to talk about their gender dysphoria with licensed counselors.

While the Chiles Court just delivered a death blow to bans on voluntary conversations between kids and their counselors, Minnesota Democrats are committed to defending baseless claims about counselors in Minnesota. They’ve proven that they will stop at nothing to protect their ideology.

Only one week after Chiles held that kids should be able to talk about their feelings with a counselor, the Minnesota Senate Health and Human Services Committee had the audacity to hear two bills that fly in the face of that decision. One bill would expand Minnesota’s counseling ban to create a legal cause of action targeting counselors who help kids accept their sex, and the other would outlaw health plan coverage for counseling that helps kids accept their sex. I testified on both bills (you can view them here and here) alongside True North Legal client, Nate Oyloe, and others who expressed significant concerns about the impact of both bills on Minnesota counselors, children, and vulnerable adults.

Both proposed bills incorporate Minnesota’s definition of conversion therapy, using nearly identical language to Colorado’s law, thus the constitutional infirmities that plague the Colorado law apply with equal force to the Minnesota statute. Incorporating that definition makes clear these bills are not intended to protect young people or vulnerable adults from egregious practices like shock therapy. They are an end run around Chiles, placing a burden on speech with which the government disagrees. The real intent is to drive certain counselors out of the insurance marketplace based on the viewpoints expressed in clients’ private counseling sessions and fearmongering them into abandoning their practices or self-censoring for their survival. The premise of these bills are entirely inconsistent with the Chiles Court reiteration that, “the First Amendment protects all speech uttered by all persons — not merely some messages and some persons … every American possess an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas is the best means for discovering truth … any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an ‘egregious’ assault on both of those commitments.”

In practical terms, these bills presume the only path of counseling for young people is sex-rejecting procedures, inconsistent with science, and rooted in ideological activism. According to these bills, the best medicine for young people struggling to accept their sex is invasive surgeries and cross-sex hormones with life-altering consequences, while foreclosing much-needed opportunities for young people to freely talk about their thoughts and feelings in a setting where various viewpoints should be allowed. It is quite astounding that any adult, let alone a litany of medical and mental health associations that have supported counseling censorship laws (such as the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, to name a few), would claim that experimental sex-rejecting procedures often accompanied by significant consequences such as severe bone loss, removal of healthy body parts, sterility, and mental health crises—consequences that detransitioners, doctors, lawyers, parents, and recently jurors refer to as medical malpractice—are in any child’s best interest.

The Chiles victory extends beyond the counseling room, blunting a larger movement. It pierces the veil of fake science, chipping away at the foundation of gender ideology. Over the past few years, countries across the globe, such as Sweden, Finland and Denmark, have moved away from encouraging a sex-rejecting approach for children struggling with gender dysphoria. Biologists, feminists, and doctors, both religious and non-religious, have joined the choir of common sense holding that sex is binary and immutable in humans—boys cannot be girls, and girls cannot be boys.

Fake science is no match for a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the span of one year, the Court has issued three critical decisions exposing the lies perpetuated by the gender industry: United States v. Skrmetti (the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s law protecting children from puberty blockers and cross sex-hormones); Mirabelli v. Olson (a federal district court in Southern California enjoined policies that instruct school districts to lie to parents about a child’s gender transition at school); and most recently in Chiles v. Salazar. The Court is poised to deliver a fourth win for reality and common sense by the end of this term in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., as it signaled a strong likelihood of upholding state laws that prohibit males from participating in female sports.

During the Minnesota Health and Human Services Committee hearing, a Democratic senator passionately proclaimed: these bills are “talking about kids.” She’s right. We are talking about kids. That is precisely why it is important to protect Minnesota kids from counseling censorship laws that prey upon their trauma, insecurities, and self-doubt, channeling kids down a one-way path of sex-rejecting procedures and interventions, like the bills proposed in the Senate this week. There is a price to pay for activism leaving science in the dust, and it is the children who suffer most. Fortunately, on this issue, the wind is in our sails. As the Chiles Court reasoned, counseling censorship laws “ … censor[] speech based on viewpoint … [arguing the] polic[ies] as essential to public health and safety. Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

The Court is right. The First Amendment doesn’t end at the counseling room door.