Is there a 1st Amendment right to practice "conversion therapy?"

Chiles v. Salazar

March 31, 2026

This post is about today’s Supreme Court decision in the matter of Chiles v. Salazar, where the Court has stricken a Colorado law banning what it refers to as “conversion therapy.”

But first …

The Department of Justice has sued the state of Minnesota in federal court, arguing that the state’s policy of allowing men or boys to compete in sports intended for women or girls violates Title IX. In a statement issued on Monday, state Attorney General Keith Ellison said that the lawsuit “is just a sad attempt to get attention over something that’s already been in litigation for months.”

Well, yes, Attorney General, the question of whether men and boys should be allowed to compete in sports intended for women or girls has indeed been in litigation for months. Years, even! That’s because people like you keep insisting that men/boys can be women/girls if they say so and/or if they are on hormones to make them look more like women/girls. If you would knock it off already, we wouldn’t have to fight about this in court!

This week, delegates to the 2026 conference of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in Canada have spent several days debating “equity cards,” “points of privilege,” and the many various “gender identities” instead of doing anything of substance. Here is a fun example.

I mentioned earlier this morning that I recently got an opinion piece published in The Hill titled “The court case where ‘gender identity’ made women’s rights unspeakable.” This is how it begins:

“It is truly a testament to where we are as a society today that it must be said in the context of federal civil rights litigation that women don’t have penises.”

I wrote those words in an amicus brief filed by the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International in the case Olympus Spa v. Armstrong. In his March 12 dissent to a decision in the case, Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit put it more colorfully: “This case is about swinging d—s,” he wrote, using a vulgar term for male genitalia.

The language caused an uproar, and rightly so. But Judge VanDyke is not wrong.

Thanks so much to The Hill for publishing this.

As mentioned, this post is about today’s Supreme Court decision in the matter of Chiles v. Salazar, where the Court has stricken a Colorado law banning what it refers to as “conversion therapy.” I am extremely conflicted about this for a variety of reasons. Read on to learn more.

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