Religious Counselor Asks Supreme Court to Legalize Gay Conversion Therapy for Kids

The case spotlights a schism over homosexuality in the movement against gender ideology

“Some people experience same-sex attraction ... not because they were ‘born that way,’ but because they were born human into a fallen world[.]”

–Changed Movement (2025)

“I don’t believe I’m supposed to be feeling this way. Can you help me to align my feelings, and my understanding of who I am, with who Christ says that I am?”

–Ricky Chelette, Living Hope Ministries (2025)

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To many liberals, conversion therapy (CT) sounds like a relic. Some are skeptical this practice still exists because it only makes the news when “LGBTQ” activists are lying about it.

And yet I’ve lately run into conservatives who believe people with “same-sex attraction” should try to be straight. Layton Ulery, who is suing the gender doctor Jason Rafferty for fraud, explains she was vulnerable when she met him because she’d just escaped gay conversion therapy in a Christian cult setting. Detrans lesbians raised Christian have discussed the pressure they felt to straighten out – or else pretend to be male.

Gay gender-critical activists worry that homophobia is one of the pathways leading youths to use cross-sex hormones and seek sex trait surgery. In fact, we view gender medicine as a form of CT because it attracts gay patients who want to believe either they’re straight members of the opposite sex, or that they have some amorphous “queer” sexuality which is superior to being gay.

LGB Alliance USA’s Christina and Jose protest youth gender medicine at Miami Beach Pride (2025).

Most blue states and DC ban gay CT for minors, meaning, a licensed therapist’s efforts to change a kid’s sexual orientation. They also ban “gender identity” CT for minors. This idea is incoherent, as I’ll explain, but the laws make mental health professionals skittish about probing trans-identified patients’ mindset.

Now a licensed professional counselor in Colorado named Kaley Chiles is challenging her state’s gender CT ban. Great. She’s also challenging its gay CT ban. Oh dear. She says she wants to help kids “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions.” Chiles’ dreadful lawsuit, brought under the First Amendment’s free speech clause, could tank the worthy cause of repealing gender CT bans. It will certainly give the movement against gender ideology a black eye in the media.

Chiles is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian advocacy org that has been targeting middle and high school students with anti-gay messages for at least 20 years.

In this post I’ll explain conversion therapy and then analyze Chiles v. Salazar. The Supreme Court will hear the case next term, likely in October. (Here are the briefs so far.) I find that conversion therapists share an ethos with gender doctors: the customer is always right. Especially if she’s a 13-year old girl anxious about fitting in.

Can You Change Your Sexual Orientation?

Studies suggest sexual orientation is innate. Gay people have different brain structures than straights of the same sex and their brains light up differently when exposed to certain pheromones associated with sex.

How could talk therapy change brain structures and pheromone processing? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it requires a biological explanation. No one has begun to even theorize one, least of all faith-based therapists. They instead ramble off about addressing “root causes” of homosexuality, like the idea that boys go limp-wristed because they’re too close to their mothers and/or not close enough to their fathers. (I explored this in my post on Ken Zucker and Susan Bradley’s regressive 1995 book.)

“My mother got married in pants.”

The History of Homo-stasis

In the late 1930s and into the 1940s, pharma ads and sensationalized media coverage of hormone research gave some people the idea that hormonal imbalance drove their attraction to the same sex. Researchers tried curing men’s homosexuality by giving them testosterone but it only made them gayer (by supercharging their sex drives). Then, in the late 1940s, they began administering estrogen to gay men caught by the police.

In 1952, a young man named George Jorgensen underwent “sex reassignment surgery” (SRS) in Denmark after getting the idea – from a popular 1945 book called “The Male Hormone” – that he was essentially female. His return home to the US sparked a media frenzy that influenced young gay men and teen boys to dabble in estrogen. These “hair fairies” and “street queens” sometimes worked as prostitutes and actually passed as women. This way they could lead ostensibly hetero lives with boyfriends.

The psychiatrist Frank Samuel Caprio declared in his epic 1954 study of female homosexuality:

“Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are specific methods of treating lesbians. Attempts to cure homosexuals through endocrine therapy have proven futile.”

In We Walk Alone (1955), Patricia Highsmith (using the pen name Ann Aldrich) described a 33-year old bookstore manager she knew:

“[Millie] has lived alone since her breakup with a lesbian who was her roommate for close to five years. … She has three [psychoanalysis] sessions a week at a cost of $180 a month [over $2,100 in 2025]. This would be financially impossible for her were it not for a running bank loan. She is entering her fourth year of analysis. When we discussed the lesbian’s chances for cure through psychoanalysis once, Millie said she didn’t know what her chances were, but anything was better than the misery she had experienced in an overt lesbian relationship.”

Johns Hopkins University opened America’s first SRS clinic in 1966. Clinicians knew that gay men sought their services in order to become pseudo straight women but aimed to screen them out. They expressed no such squeamishness about transing lesbians.

The dawn of SRS coincided with conversion therapy’s heyday, according to a 2009 systematic review by the American Psychological Association (“APA SR”). Shrinks tried to cure gays through all sorts of modalities, from psychoanalysis to “aversion treatments” such as electroshock and “inducing nausea, vomiting, or paralysis.” “Cognitive therapists attempted to change gay men’s and lesbians’ thought patterns by reframing desires, redirecting thoughts, or using hypnosis.”

Patients’ gender-nonconformity seemed connected to their gayness. One behaviorist believed “homosexuality developed from a phobia of taking on the normal qualities of one’s gender and that sexual intercourse with the other sex would cure the so-called phobia.”

This creative research came to a screeching halt in December 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association declared – after intensive lobbying – that homosexuality was not a mental disorder. Now medical treatment was considered inappropriate (conversion psychoanalysis retained legitimacy until the late 1980s).

Five months after gays were dismissed from the leper colony, Stanford psychiatrist Norman Fisk argued that surgeons should cut off their penises:

“I feel that many of these [SRS] patients [are] in full flight from … effeminate homosexuality … and [are] rushing to embrace the diagnosis of transsexualism for many valid reasons.”

Challenging the prevailing view that SRS doctors should turn gays away, Fisk argued gay patients suffered from “gender dysphoria” that SRS could alleviate. He referred to homosexuality as a “supposed moral perversion.”

Today the mental health profession pays lip service to the 1973 declaration that gay people shouldn’t be changed but acts on Fisk’s 1974 vision of changing gays who ask to be changed. An outsize number of trans-identified people are gay, and their shrinks send them off for hormones and surgery on the grounds they suffer from “gender dysphoria.” Or, in the words of 2015 APA guidelines, “discordance they may experience between their sex assigned at birth … [and] patterns of sexual and romantic attraction[.]”

Gender medicine wasn’t the only refuge of sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) after 1973. It also found a home in religious settings where secular “experts” didn’t hold sway. In 1992 the few dissenting professionals formed National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and teamed up with the Religious Right to drum up business. Today, most conversion therapists are ministers who may or may not hold counseling licenses. Active ex-gay orgs include the evangelical Changed, Restored Hope, and Living Hope, and for Catholics, Courage.

LGB activists and others rally against pediatric gender medicine outside the US Supreme Court on Dec. 4, 2024. “Gender Medicine = Conversion Therapy.”

The Outcomes

None of this led to very reliable data on whether SOCE worked. According to the 2009 APA SR, the field was beset by “serious methodological problems.” But “the results of scientifically valid research indicate that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through SOCE.” The few participants who reported success tended to have bisexual histories.

Two studies of SOCE from the 2000s found that users of ex-gay services reported myriad harms:

(a) decreased self-esteem and authenticity to others; (b) increased self-hatred and negative perceptions of homosexuality; (c) confusion, depression, guilt, helplessness, hopelessness, shame, social withdrawal, and suicidality; (d) anger at and a sense of betrayal by SOCE providers; (e) an increase in substance abuse and high-risk sexual behaviors; (f) a feeling of being dehumanized and untrue to self; (g) a loss of faith; and (h) a sense of having wasted time and resources.

Interpreting SOCE failures as individual failures was also reported in this research, in that individuals blamed themselves for the failure (i.e., weakness, and lack of effort, commitment, faith, or worthiness in God’s eyes). Intrusive images and sexual dysfunction were also reported, particularly among those who had experienced aversion techniques.

A 2015 study looked at 1,600 Mormons who engaged in psychotherapy aimed at reducing same-sex attraction. Over 95% reported little to no change. 37% reported moderate to severe harm from the efforts.

The only effective gay conversion therapy is gender medicine. Puberty blockers prevent sexuality from developing in the first place – a leading gender surgeon acknowledges boys transitioned young may never experience orgasm. Estrogen disables penises. Penile inversion surgery is rumored to render the tissue numb. And some previously homosexual women report that using testosterone (steroids) makes them want to have sex with men, possibly as a byproduct of overall higher sex drive.

The Gay Christian Conundrum

Some religions condemn homosexuality. Their gay adherents have to choose between piety and romance. What’s the therapist’s role in all this?

When it comes to minors, according to the APA SR:

“[Therapists should] support children and youth in identity exploration and development without seeking predetermined outcomes. Interventions that incorporate knowledge from the psychology of religion and that increase acceptance, love, and understanding among individuals, families, and communities are recommended for populations for whom religion is important[.]”

In other words, the APA doesn’t know what to do with religious gay kids. They need to choose what part of their life to compromise and no one can do it for them.

State and federal laws ban deceptive conduct by businesses (that’s you, Doc). Deception doesn’t just mean making false statements. It includes misleading statements and omissions of material facts. Many laws also ban “unfair” conduct, which involves exploitation of power imbalance – a factor that could come into play when the client is a minor. In 2015, ex-gay survivors won a consumer fraud lawsuit against JONAH, a Jewish conversion therapy practice in New Jersey that has since gone bankrupt.

If a client tells a therapist they want to change their sexual orientation, I’d suggest therapists respond that sexual orientation appears to be innate, no reliable research supports the idea that it’s malleable, and no rational theory supports the idea that it’s malleable.¹ Even if the client presents their goal in a more ambiguous way – they want to explore whether they’re gay, for example – therapists should still provide that info up front. Depending on the situation, their parents should hear it too.

If a religious counselor wants to tell people their sexual orientation is not innate, or that they can stop feeling gay, then OK. That’s free speech. But they shouldn’t imply their words are a form of therapy sanctioned by secular authorities. That’s fraud.

This girl’s sexual attractions are discordant with her religion assigned at birth.

Is Gender Conversion Therapy Real?

Historically some therapists tried to change patients’ “gender identity,” most famously Ken Zucker. These patients were prepubertal kids. The idea was to prevent them from becoming “transsexual” adults. Advocates for blocking the puberty of “transgender children” in the 2000s made Zucker their foil, to great effect, because his method of taking boys’ dolls away was archaic and punitive.

Today many therapists recognize that gender medicine harms the body so they try to help kids critically examine their desire for it. That doesn’t mean the therapist aims to “change their gender identity.” Sasha Ayad, an LPC based in Arizona who publicly challenges the wisdom of transitioning minors, told me: “I don't agree with using manipulative tactics to help someone return to their birth sex identity.”

Trans activists argue “affirmative” therapy is the only appropriate mode. This term appears to be lifted from the gay context, where it basically means being nice to a client who expresses gay identity or attraction. (It’s all over the 2009 APA SR.) Gender-affirmation, by contrast, requires the therapist to enter the client’s fiction and reflect back to them that they are “who they say they are.”

Anything else, trans activists argue, is conversion therapy. Even acts that have nothing to do with therapy are somehow conversion therapy if they discomfit a trans person. Here’s ACLU lawyer and thought leader Chase Strangio in 2021 blasting laws that keep trans-identified boys out of girls’ sports:

“[I]f you tell a young person … they must exist in accordance with their assigned sex at birth, then you are instructing the state to engage in a process of coerced conversion therapy. And all the science we have demonstrates that not affirming trans and gender expansive kids in who they are results in catastrophic mental health consequences including devastating rates of suicidality.”

Kris Kaliebe, a psychiatrist at the University of South Florida, broke down the activists’ game in a 2022 expert report (citations omitted):

“The term ‘conversion therapy’ is often misused by the supporters of [gender-]affirmative care as an attempt to devalue and pathologize approaches other than purely affirming a patient’s gender self-identification.”

GICE bans should be null – unenforceable – because they’re not written in English but rather genderese. Colorado’s, for example, doesn’t define gender and defines “gender identity” circularly as “an individual’s innate sense of the individual’s own gender, which may or may not correspond with the individual’s sex assigned at birth.”

So any therapist attacked under a GICE law has at least one strong defense, probably more. But most therapists don’t want to be attacked in the first place. The bans become weapons for trans activists to turn against therapists who publicly challenge gender orthodoxy – who they like to target anyway.

Ayad has faced two meritless attacks on her therapist license. Christine Milrod, a trans rabble-rouser, claimed in 2017 that Ayad broke a rule by practicing across state lines (she had not broken any rule). And her former coworker, with whom she’d had a “cordial” relationship, reported her for conversion therapy in 2019. This was in Texas where there is no ban on GICE but a licensing board could still find it to be problematic. In addition to the anxiety those complaints provoked, Ayad spent $8,000 on lawyers to address the state-lines complaint (some of which was reimbursed by her insurance carrier). She was lucky to receive pro bono legal assistance on the GICE complaint.

Winn faced an investigation for GICE by her licensing board in Oregon, which does ban it. The board cleared her. (Winn and I discussed SOGICE bans in February [at 1:27].) Neither Winn nor Ayad goads kids to pursue an impossible goal. But Kaley Chiles might.

Meet the Conversion Therapist

Christian conservative law firms have challenged GISOCE bans since they first appeared on the scene in the early 2010s. Now ADF has finally landed a case before the Supreme Court, representing a Christian therapist named Kaley Chiles.

According to her website, Chiles’ practice is exceptionally goal-oriented:

“What’s unique about my approach is that I love to GET THINGS DONE so I work with clients to stay in touch with their goals, progress, or lack thereof and collaboratively problem solve to get results. I often see people who report having tried multiple solutions before starting with me, feeling a bit discouraged, exhausted and confused.”

ADF’s press release claims Chiles objects to the CT law² because she treats Christians who don’t want to be trans. There’s no mention of sexual orientation:

“[Chiles] helps clients with various issues, including gender identity. Many of Chiles’ clients come to her because they share her Christian worldview and faith-based values. These clients believe their lives will be more fulfilling if they are aligned with the teachings of their faith.”

Chiles’ petition seeking Supreme Court review (“cert petition”) reveals another side to her practice: efforts to change kids’ sexual orientation.

The Self-Determined Child

ADF refers to Chiles’ clients in generic terms. One might picture adults. But the CT law only pertains to minors. Important detail. As I quote ADF’s brief, I’ll replace “client” with “8th grade girl.” That’s a fair age to choose because I was around 13 when I began to realize I was attracted to girls; Chiles used to treat kids that young but stopped when the CT law was enacted.

ADF’s brief (citations omitted):

“[Chiles is] a practicing Christian who views her career as an outgrowth of her faith. Many of Chiles’s [13-year old] clients are also Christian and specifically seek her help because of their shared faith-based convictions and biblical worldview. These [8th graders] are sometimes referred by local churches.”

The brief continues:

“Some of the issues that [8th grade girls] want to discuss implicate Christian values about human sexuality ... At times, those [children] are living inconsistent with their faith or values, resulting in internal conflict, depression, and anxiety. They seek Christian-based counseling to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions …

“Like Chiles, these [8th grade girls] believe their faith and their relationships with God inform romantic attractions ... These [kids] … want to achieve freedom from what they see as harmful … sexual behaviors [like staying up until midnight planning their first kiss]. Chiles works only with voluntary [13-year old] clients who determine the goals that they have for themselves.”

This approach brings to mind gender affirmative therapy, in which kids tell the therapist what gender they are and the therapist unquestioningly helps them come out to their families and access transition drugs. Chiles’ clients are telling her the sexual orientation they want to be and she’s helping them work toward that goal. It’s the consumer model of mental healthcare.

ADF captures the issue perfectly in its press release:

“Colorado law censors Chiles from speaking words her clients want to hear[.]”

Apparently Chiles doesn’t aim to spark attraction to the opposite sex. The best these kids can falsely hope for is asexuality.

As I discussed above, data and logic suggest therapy can't “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions.” Chiles gets around this bad fact libertarian-style. She’s just giving the kids what they ask for:

“After a [13-year old girl] communicates … her goals, desires and objectives, Chiles provides counseling that aligns with the [child’s] self-determined choices. Together, Chiles and her [middle school] clients freely and fully explore issues about … sexual attractions, root causes of desires, behavior and values.”

The SOCE industry has deployed this freedom-of-choice branding since 2014.

ADF assures the Court that “Chiles never promises that she can solve these issues[.]”

But consumer protection law doesn’t let business owners get away with deceptive conduct by simply “never promis[ing]” results. Especially when the clients are kids. Plus, Chiles does actually promise “to get results” on her website. Colorado does not pursue a deceptive-practices argument here. But in 2015 ex-gay survivors won a consumer fraud lawsuit against a Jewish CT practice in New Jersey.

ADF argues the CT law restricts therapists from speaking a certain message, meaning the Court should subject it to “strict scrutiny” – the burden is on Colorado to prove it’s narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest. (In the lower courts Chiles also brought a claim based on free exercise of religion, which she lost and is no longer pursuing.)

Colorado argues that language used in therapy is “professional conduct” unprotected by the First Amendment’s free speech clause. If that’s right, then the Court must apply an easy test to it. The law stands unless the challengers can show it lacks any rational basis.

Neither of these approaches seems right. Therapy is not a political speech and it’s not not-speech. I’d argue therapy should be regulated as commercial speech. That would entail “intermediate scrutiny,” which sits between the two other tests, and it would allow states to protect therapy clients from fraud, abuse, and malpractice. No one makes this argument in Chiles.

Both the district court and 10th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Colorado, applying the easy test to the CT law and finding it passed.

But wait – the CT law isn’t so simple. It has two components, barring SOCE and GICE. I’ve been ellipsing out ADF’s points about the latter, but both are in fact up for grabs in this case. So how has that duality played out in the courts?

Everyone Agrees Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Are the Same

Neither ADF, nor Colorado, nor the district court judge, nor the majority of the 10th Circuit panel applied their preferred free speech test to sexual orientation and gender identity separately.

The 10th Circuit dissenter, Judge Harris Hartz, explored them one at a time. But his skepticism of gender-affirming therapy led him to doubt the ban on gay CT: “In that light, it is important to examine whether the evidence relating to [SOCE] is more settled …” All roads lead to SOGI.

ADF treats SO and GI as parallel. Both flow throughout its cert petition, no separate headings, and “LGBT” appears without quotation marks. In the district court, ADF argued that both “sexual orientated [sic] and gender identity are fluid over time.”

What Are These Fluids?

As to sexual orientation’s fluidity ADF cites Lisa Diamond, a loony queer who skirts questions of biology and opposes gay CT (“SOCE are not only ineffective in changing sexual orientation but are psychologically damaging”). Its other two authorities on SOCE are Diamond’s co-author, a law professor; and Nicholas Cummings, a psychologist born in 1924.

Me after the left finally cancels me and I have to make amends with ADF

Colorado retained an expert witness, Judith M. Glassgold. She’s the lead author of the 2009 APA SR. Her summary of that document and more recent SOCE studies seems fair except for goofy definitions.³ But when she slides into the subject of GICE outcomes (without separate headers or other notations of the difference) she loses coherence.

The GICE studies don’t aim to discover whether GICE works at changing “gender identity.” Rather, they’re surveys in which trans-identified subjects report that GICE hurt them. For example:

“A 2021 study of approximately 1400 14- to 83-year-old transgender individuals from New Zealand exposed to gender identity change efforts found that those who stated that they had experienced GICE exposure were more likely to report psychological distress, nonsuicidal self-injury, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempt than those who did not report such experiences.”

Recall – activists define GICE broadly. Could it be that unstable people are more likely to interpret normal therapy as evil GICE? Per Strangio, do they think being “exposed” to single-sex sports is conversion therapy?

Glassgold’s lack of rigor here is disappointing. The APA SR acknowledges the nuance of the subject matter and limitations of studies. It’s scrupulous in parsing the definition of sexual orientation, distinguishing it from “sexual orientation identity” (i.e., a closeted homo has a straight SO identity). But Glassgold’s expert report in Chiles doesn’t define gender and doesn’t use the term “sexual orientation identity.” She portrays sexual orientation as a social construct:

“Sexual orientation focuses on biological characteristics of sex as well as aspects of gender identity and expression and can occur in a variety of forms, but is usually discussed in terms of categories such as heterosexual, lesbian, gay, and bisexual (including e.g., bisexual, pansexual, queer, fluid).”

Gender identity:

“The modern scientific conceptualization of gender is as a nonbinary construct that allows for a range of gender identities. Gender identity is an established concept in psychology, referring to an internal, deeply rooted sense of oneself as being a girl, woman, or female; a boy, a man, or male; a blend of male or female, or for as some another gender [sic] … Most people have a gender identity that is congruent with their assigned sex at birth …”

Put down your drink and swallow before continuing:

“Harm has not been identified for [social transition and medicalization] when consistent with a carefully designed treatment plan that is consistent with existing professional guidelines, and conducted by appropriately-trained interdisciplinary health professionals.”

In fact, affirming a child’s “gender” locks in a trans identity and makes them terrified of puberty. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex trait surgery injure the body.

Split the SOGI

Gender-critical activists tend to oppose GICE bans and support SOCE bans (or at least the spirit behind them). ADF’s choice to take Chiles to the Supreme Court — opposing GICE and SOCE bans — should vex them.

First, Chiles’ endorsement of SOCE could alienate the justices so they set a low bar for defending both the SOCE and GICE bans by agreeing with Colorado that they’re “professional conduct,” not political speech. This seems unlikely given recent First Amendment precedent. But it’s possible because of how reviled SOCE is even among conservatives.

Second, even if the high bar of “strict scrutiny” is applied, the GICE ban could pass it on the strength of the evidence for the SOCE ban. That’s how both the district court and the 10th Circuit saw the case already (though they applied the easier rational-basis test).

Third, the choice to attack therapy restrictions under the First Amendment could complicate efforts to regulate therapy at all — including when it promotes trans identity.

Fourth, ADF is exploiting the GICE ban’s weaknesses to take down its old adversary, gay rights. The tactic of force-teaming gay and trans issues is copied from trans activists and it serves their interests. As a matter of propaganda, they want everyone to associate gay and trans.

Fifth, ADF is taking a non-ideological principle – therapists shouldn’t be terrorized with frivolous GICE ban complaints – and pairing it with a religious agenda, trying to change gay kids’ sexual orientation. That also plays into the hands of trans propagandists.

The media will no doubt amplify those fourth and fifth points. This will confuse the public about gender-critical ideas and stigmatize them.

The Supreme Court should block out the political noise and remand Chiles to the district court to separately analyze the bans on SOCE and GICE. No matter what free speech test that lower court applies, GICE bans should fail because they’re incoherent.

LGB Courage Coalition disapproves of gender-affirming care.

Many former leaders of the ex-gay movement have renounced their past work. Darlene Bogle left her leadership role in Exodus in 1990 because she fell in love with another woman she met there. 24 years later she reflected to Newsweek:

"In just trying to help, I did immeasurable harm. It's like when children are molested, and they live with that for their entire lives. They're still being harmed, even though it happened years ago. I think it's a lot like what happens when people are involved in ex-gay ministry."

Bogle devoted herself to spreading the message of gay acceptance:

"I'm trying to go back, to try to bring healing to those who believed my lie. It'll take the rest of my life.”

Gay people are a tiny minority who often feel conspicuous, under siege, and lonely. Many of them, especially when they’re young, would rather be straight. Doctors should tell them they can’t change sex. And therapists should tell them they can’t change their sexual orientation.

1. This isn’t legal advice. I haven’t fully researched the interplay of fraud, malpractice, SOCE, and free speech laws – and it varies by state. The suggestion I offer is based on ethical principles inspired by consumer protection law.

2. C.R.S. § 12-245-202(3.5) states:

(a) ‘Conversion therapy’ means any practice or treatment by a licensee, registrant, or certificate holder that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.

(b) ‘Conversion therapy’ does not include practice or treatments that provide:

(I) Acceptance, support, and understanding for the facilitation of an individual’s coping, social support, and identity exploration and development, including sexual orientation-neutral interventions to prevent or address unlawful conduct or unsafe sexual practice, as long as the counseling does not seek to change sexual orientation or gender identity; or

(II) Assistance to a person undergoing gender transition.

3. Glassgold’s report in Chiles does make me nervous that the APA SR is unreliable. But the parts I’ve used seem legit. I don’t think anyone disputes, for example, that the SOCE studies aren’t high-quality experiments. Today’s proponents of SOCE use that point in their favor — they say their faith-based view hasn’t been conclusively proved wrong.