How Unverified Testimony, Institutional Capture, and a Manufactured Consensus Built the Conversion Therapy Ban Movement—

And Why the Supreme Court Just Tore It Down

On March 31, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an 8-1 decision in Chiles v. Salazar that dismantled the legal framework supporting bans on conversion therapy across 23 states and the District of Columbia.

The ruling, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by all justices except Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, determined that Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law, as it applied to the talk therapy performed by licensed counselor Kaley Chiles, regulates speech based on viewpoint—and that the lower courts failed to apply the necessary level of First Amendment scrutiny.

The decision overturned the Tenth Circuit’s ruling that had classified Chiles’s counseling conversations as “professional conduct” subject only to rational-basis review.

The decision is narrow because it doesn’t directly invalidate Colorado’s law or any other state’s ban on conversion therapy. However, it is broad in that it mandates strict scrutiny for any application of these laws to talk therapy. When all the counselor does is speak, the Court has raised the constitutional standard to a level that few, if any, of these statutes can meet.

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, filed a concurrence agreeing with the majority but writing separately to note that a content-based but viewpoint-neutral law would raise “a different and more difficult question.” That question, she said, “can wait for another day.” Her concurrence effectively signals the next round of litigation: states will try to redraft these laws in viewpoint-neutral terms, and the constitutional issue will return to the Court.

Justice Jackson, in a lone dissent read from the bench, argued that states retain traditional police power to regulate medical practice and that the First Amendment should not prevent a state from “incidentally” restricting a healthcare provider’s treatment-related speech. Her dissent relied entirely on the premise that the “medical profession’s broad consensus” established that conversion therapy is harmful and ineffective—a premise she accepted without question.

It is that premise—the manufactured consensus—that I examine here.

The term “conversion therapy” itself is a form of deception. It merges two very different practices into one phrase, making any therapy aimed at addressing unwanted attractions sound like torture.

Aversion therapy—the use of electroshock, nausea-inducing drugs, ice, and other physically coercive techniques to condition patients against same-sex attractions—was a specific behavioral modification method primarily used in the 1950s and 1960s. It was discredited and has been out of mainstream practice for decades. The imagery that advocates invoke when they seek to ban “conversion therapy,” and what the public visualizes when hearing the term, is rooted in this history.

What Kaley Chiles does—and what these laws actually prohibit in their broadest scope—is talk therapy. A counselor sitting with a voluntary client, discussing the client’s self-defined goals, using nothing but conversation. No drugs, no devices, no coercion. The spoken word and nothing more.

This conflation wasn’t accidental; it was deliberate. It was premeditated.

The Trevor Project and the National Center for Lesbian Rights jointly created a “Sample Legislation and Advocacy Toolkit to Protect Youth from ‘Conversion Therapy,’” which served as the blueprint for the nationwide campaign to ban these practices. The toolkit’s talking points for mental health professionals clearly tell advocates to describe conversion therapy as involving “the use of shame, verbal abuse, and even aversion techniques like electric shocks.” The sample constituent email uses the same imagery:

“practices—which include the use of shame, verbal abuse, and even aversion techniques like electric shocks.”

However, the same toolkit in the model legislation does not target electroshock, ice, or nausea treatments because these practices have already been discredited and discontinued for years. The model bill is much broader, prohibiting “any practices or treatments that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation, including efforts to alter behaviors or gender identity or expressions.”

That language covers ordinary talk therapy—and that is exactly what it was intended to do. The messaging strategy used the fear of torture to promote a law that bans conversation.

The APA’s own amicus brief in Chiles illustrates a similar approach at the judicial level. Discussing the history of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Change Efforts (SOGICE), the APA lists traditional aversive methods—“inducing nausea and paralysis; electric shock therapy; shame-aversion therapy; and ‘systematic desensitization’”—along with “non-aversive” methods such as “assertiveness and dating trainings” and “hypnosis,” all within the same section and under the same heading. This links the entire category with the most extreme historical practices.

Justice Gorsuch identified this conflation as what it truly is: viewpoint discrimination. A counselor can support a client’s wish to transition but may not assist a client seeking to conform to his or her biological sex. The state has taken a side—and silenced the other.

Even Chiles herself did not challenge the ban on aversive physical interventions. Her objection was solely to how the law was applied to voluntary conversations between a willing counselor and a willing client. The Court agreed:

“Her speech does not become conduct just because the State may call it that.”

The legislative foundation for these bans was largely built on the testimony of one individual: Sam Brinton.

Brinton burst onto the public stage in 2010 by sharing about his childhood abuse at the hands of a conversion therapist. His account described ice, electrodes with needles, and forced exposure to pornographic images. The story was gripping, horrifying, and well-suited to the ongoing advocacy campaign to bring about a ban on conversion therapy.

California’s SB 1172, introduced in February 2012, became the first state to ban conversion therapy when Governor Jerry Brown signed it in September that year. New Jersey’s A3371 followed in August 2013. Brinton’s testimony was used across multiple states as the legislation spread.

There was one problem: the testimony couldn’t be verified. And multiple independent analysts came to the conclusion that it was untrue.

Wayne Besen, a gay activist and the author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, tried to verify Brinton’s claims and found him “oddly inaccessible.” Besen asked two basic questions: Who was your conversion therapist, and where was the therapy conducted? Brinton refused to answer. Besen later wrote that Brinton was “the only survivor of conversion therapy I’ve encountered since 1998 who refused to answer these questions.”

He warned the National Center for Lesbian Rights that they must verify Brinton’s testimony before using it. NCLR responded:

“We must believe all survivors.” Besen replied:

“Yes, we should trust, but shouldn’t we also verify?”

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr., whose father was the therapist most associated with reparative therapy, warned lawmakers in California and Massachusetts about the inconsistencies in Brinton’s account. Those warnings were ignored.

When the first wave of legislative activity started in 2011, I conducted an independent credibility assessment of Brinton’s claims. At that time, I was assisting Dr. Judith Reisman in exposing the serious flaws in the proposed legislation.

The red flags in Brinton’s claims were immediately obvious: his affect did not match the narrative, certain claims were clearly unlikely, details that could be checked were lacking, and his timeline changed across different retellings—including the age when therapy supposedly started (mentioned as 10, 12, or in his twenties), the location (Florida or somewhere else), and whether the therapist was a “religious therapist” or a “licensed psychotherapist.”

I could not confirm a single element of his account.

Dr. Reisman channeled my findings to the legal teams opposing New Jersey’s A3371—the second state to consider a ban. To no avail.

Besen later confirmed what the opposition had identified years earlier. He checked with a leading expert on conversion therapy in the Orlando area, who reported that no known conversion therapy office in a strip mall—where Brinton claimed on at least one occasion that the therapy took place—existed during those years. Besen also contacted Brinton’s mother, Peggy Jo Brinton, who told him that her child had attended therapy but said, “it was not a conversion therapist.”

Brinton founded the #50Bills50States campaign in 2016, served as head of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project from 2017 to 2020, and co-chaired the National Center for Lesbian Rights’ #BornPerfect campaign. He was later appointed to a senior position at the Department of Energy under President Biden, from which he was dismissed after being charged or arrested three times for luggage theft. By then, his unverified testimony had helped pass laws in more than twenty states.

The Trevor Project’s advocacy toolkit shows how Brinton was part of the campaign. The toolkit explicitly calls for “conversion therapy survivors (those comfortable sharing their experiences)” to be coalition members for legislative efforts. Brinton was the marquee survivor—the human face of the model legislation—and the toolkit’s campaign plan was built to use that kind of story. No one questioned whether the story was true.

When the Trevor Project filed its amicus brief in Chiles v. Salazar, represented by Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, it described itself as “the nation’s leading crisis-intervention and suicide-prevention organization dedicated to serving LGBTQ youth.” That description is accurate to an extent. However, it omits the most important fact about the organization’s connection to this case: the Trevor Project co-authored the model legislation upon which Colorado’s law is based.

The Trevor Project and the National Center for Lesbian Rights jointly created a “Sample Legislation and Advocacy Toolkit” that offers state advocates a complete legislative package: a model bill with ready-made statutory language, pre-drafted legislative findings, talking points for lobbyists and spokespeople, coalition-building strategies, sample constituent emails, sample tweets, and even a litigation preparation playbook addressing First Amendment and parental rights challenges.

Compare the toolkit’s model bill with Colorado’s statute. The toolkit defines “sexual orientation change efforts” as:

“any practices or treatments that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation, including efforts to change behaviors, gender identity, or expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender.” Colorado’s statute at § 12-245-202(3.5)(a) describes conversion therapy as “any practice or treatment… that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors, gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

The language is nearly identical. Colorado adopted the Trevor Project’s model bill.

The toolkit’s exception clause—counseling that “provides acceptance, support, and understanding of a person or facilitates a person’s coping, social support, and identity exploration and development”—appears in Colorado’s statute at § 12-245-202(3.5)(b)(I). The Trevor Project’s amicus brief then quotes this exact language back to the Court as evidence that Colorado’s law is “carefully tailored.”

The organization that wrote the law is telling the Court that the law is well-crafted.

The toolkit’s pre-written legislative findings are a collection of position statements from the APA, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, the AAP, the American Counseling Association, and other professional groups. The toolkit instructs advocates to embed these findings directly into legislation, which means the “legislative findings” courts later rely on as evidence of independent legislative judgment were not the result of independent inquiry.

Instead, they were pre-written by advocacy organizations and inserted wholesale into state statutes across the country.

The toolkit also anticipated the constitutional challenges that would follow. Its “Preparing for Litigation” section offers scripted rebuttals to First Amendment and parental rights objections. The argument that “these laws regulate professional conduct, not protected speech”—which was the Tenth Circuit’s holding below and the core of every respondent-side amicus brief before the Supreme Court—was scripted by the Trevor Project before the laws were enacted.

The legal defense strategy was built into the legislative campaign from the beginning.

Under Supreme Court Rule 37.6, amicus briefs must disclose whether counsel for a party authored the brief and whether any outside entity funded its preparation. There is no similar disclosure requirement for whether the amicus authored the legislation being defended. The Trevor Project met the technical rule but omitted the most material fact about its connection to this case.

The organization that designed the model law, scripted the legislative findings, planned the litigation defense, orchestrated the messaging strategy, and employed Brinton during the peak of the #50Bills50States campaign appeared before the Court as if it were merely a neutral provider of “data and experience.”

Having built the machinery, the advocates only had to turn the key. The strategy was developed quietly, behind closed doors, and without public debate. By the time the model legislation was unveiled, the operation was already fully mobilized. Witnesses were lined up, financing was secured, lobbyists were hired, and legislative sponsors were prepared to initiate actions in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

When the effort to introduce and pass these bills finally unfolded, it was a coordinated blitz designed to overwhelm any opposition. It was an asymmetric, highly emotional campaign; for the few independent voices sounding the alarm about the constitutional and scientific flaws, it was like fighting the Mongol horde with 300 Spartans. By relying on prepackaged emotional narratives and overwhelming force, the campaign neutralized resistance before lawmakers even had a chance to read the fine print.

Brinton’s testimony supplied the emotional fuel. The Trevor Project’s toolkit supplied the legislative equipment. The institutional engine that powered it was created years earlier—inside the American Psychological Association.

Division 44 of the APA—the Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian and Gay Issues, founded in 1985—acted as the policy driver. Its members influenced the 2009 APA Task Force Report on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation, chaired by Judith Glassgold, whose members closely overlapped with those of Division 44.

That report clearly stated that conversion therapy was ineffective and potentially harmful, and it became the main source cited in nearly every following legislative effort.

The Trevor Project’s toolkit then incorporated the 2009 Report’s conclusions as pre-written legislative findings. State legislatures adopted them, and courts deferred to these legislative findings. Additionally, the APA filed amicus briefs referencing both the legislative findings and the courts’ deference as evidence of consensus.

This creates a self-reinforcing loop: advocacy organizations influence professional associations, which produce policy reports; advocacy groups embed these reports into model legislation; legislatures adopt the legislation; courts defer to the legislative findings; and professional associations cite court decisions as validation.

The amicus briefs filed in Chiles by the respondents clearly highlight this circularity. The APA’s brief portrays the 2009 Task Force Report and 2021 Resolutions as thorough, independent science. The Former Conversion Therapy Leaders’ brief includes personal testimonials requested by the toolkit’s campaign strategy.

The Trevor Project’s brief shows the organization’s own internal, unpublished, anonymized platform data as proof of harm. All three briefs cite the same few studies—Green et al. (2020), Watson et al. (2020), Turban et al. (2020), Campbell & van der Meulen Rodgers (2023)—and identical professional association position statements that originated from the Division 44-led policy process.

The treatment of dissenting research shows how the consensus is kept intact. All three respondent briefs devote considerable space to criticizing the studies by D. Paul Sullins, whose research found no link between SOCE and increased suicidality. The APA brief describes his work as a “fabricated timeline.” The Trevor Project brief highlights methodological flaws and notes that one of Sullins’s supporting studies was retracted.

The coordinated attack on Sullins is important, not to assert his research is necessarily reliable. Whether it is or isn’t is beside the point. What’s important to understand is that it highlights the role of evidentiary gatekeeping: any study that produces an unfavorable result is systematically discredited by these minions of Division 44. In contrast, studies that support the consensus are considered definitive despite their own known limitations.

The APA’s own brief makes a notable admission here. It states that “numerous researchers and LMHPs have concluded that SOGICE should neither be studied nor provided precisely because SOGICE may cause harm to patients.” In other words, the widespread agreement against conversion therapy is partly maintained by the professional community’s refusal to carry out the very research that could test its validity.

The consensus is unfalsifiable by design: examining the issue is considered unethical, which prevents any new evidence from challenging the dominant view.

The Former Conversion Therapy Leaders’ brief offers a case study of how testimonial evidence functions within this framework. It features nine former leaders who have renounced conversion therapy, anchored by Alan Chambers’s claim that “99.9% of participants have not experienced a change in their orientation.”

However, that number comes from a 2014 CNN appearance, not a controlled study. Michael Bussee’s statement that he has “never met a gay person who became heterosexual through conversion therapy” is an unfalsifiable personal claim. The brief relies on testimonial evidence, not empirical data, which is precisely the kind of evidence the Trevor Project’s toolkit was designed to produce for legislative hearings.

Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion cut through this entire narrative. He refused to defer to the “prevailing standard of care” as a basis for reduced First Amendment protection, observing that the American Psychiatric Association once classified homosexuality itself as a mental disorder.

“On the view Colorado and the dissent advance,” he wrote, “a law adopted during that era prohibiting counselors from engaging in the ‘substandard care’ of affirming their clients’ homosexuality would have been subject to only rational-basis or intermediate-scrutiny review—and likely upheld.”

The point was devastating: a “medical consensus” is only as reliable as the process that produced it.

The Trevor Project’s amicus brief heavily relied on the Court’s 2025 decision in United States v. Skrmetti to argue that the Court should “leave questions regarding scientific and policy debates to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.”

However, Gorsuch’s majority took the opposite approach — precisely because the “democratic process” that the Trevor Project invoked was one the Trevor Project itself had engineered. Deference to a manufactured consensus is not the same as deference to genuine scientific inquiry.

The oral argument on October 7, 2025, exposed the constitutional issues with Colorado’s position before the opinion was drafted.

Justice Gorsuch asked Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson whether, under her theory, a state in the 1970s could have prohibited therapists from affirming homosexuality, when the professional consensus classified it as a disorder.

Stevenson conceded: “That’s right.”

Gorsuch pressed further: could a state pass mirror-image laws prohibiting affirmation of gender transition if the standard of care shifted?

Again: “That’s right, Your Honor.”

Colorado had conceded on the record that its legal theory gives the state unlimited power to dictate what therapists may say based on whatever the prevailing consensus happens to be.

Justice Kagan explained viewpoint discrimination to Stevenson: one therapist can say “I’ll help you accept being gay,” but another cannot say “I’ll help you change.”

Stevenson responded honestly,

“I don’t disagree with that, Justice Kagan, and that’s why medical treatment has to be treated differently.”

Colorado agreed there was viewpoint discrimination and argued it simply doesn’t matter in the medical context.

Justice Alito asked whether the medical consensus has ever been “politicized” or “taken over by ideology.”

Stevenson acknowledged: “I think that’s certainly a concern.”

Alito then referenced Buck v. Bell—the 1927 decision in which the Court upheld forced sterilization based on the prevailing medical consensus—asking:

“Was there a time when many medical professionals thought that certain people should not be permitted to procreate because they had low IQs?”

Perhaps the most revealing point made by Campbell was about parental rights: Colorado permits a 12-year-old to undergo counseling that affirms a gender transition without parental consent, but a 12-year-old with parental consent cannot seek counseling in the opposite direction. This asymmetry is not accidental.

The movement to ban conversion therapy has always been portrayed as a child protection effort. However, the truth is more complex—and darker.

These laws, by banning any therapeutic conversation that might lead a minor away from a same-sex identity, create a legal obstacle to detecting childhood sexual exploitation. Research shows higher rates of childhood sexual abuse among those who later identify as same-sex attracted. When a licensed counselor is not allowed to explore the origins of a minor’s sexual attractions—because that could be seen as trying to “change” the child’s sexual orientation—the practical result is that abuse histories often go unexamined. The counselor is told: affirm the identity, don’t investigate the history.

If the history involves a predator, that predator benefits from the prohibition.

The respondent-side amicus briefs filed in Chiles highlight this oversight through their silence. The APA’s brief—submitted by fourteen professional organizations representing the country’s mental health community—fails to mention the possibility that therapeutic exploration of same-sex attraction in minors could reveal histories of sexual exploitation. The Former Leaders’ brief also does not address this issue. The Trevor Project’s brief makes no mention of it either.

Throughout all three briefs, which total over a hundred pages, the word “abuse” is only used in relation to the alleged harms of conversion therapy itself—never in connection to the sexual abuse of children that a qualified therapist might uncover through the very conversations these laws prohibit.

Contrary to what some other experts allege, Dr. Judith Glassgold denies any connection between same-sex attraction and child sexual abuse. In her evidentiary declaration, she explicitly states:

“there is no credible link between a same-sex sexual orientation and sexual abuse.”

The entire respondent-side framework assumes that same-sex attraction in minors is innate and that exploring its origins is inherently harmful. That assumption prevents the clinical inquiry that could identify predators.

The conversion therapy ban is not a child protection measure. It is a predator protection measure—if not by intention, by its effect.

The Nicolosi amicus brief filed in Chiles documented how regulations are used as tools of control in practice. Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr., a licensed clinical psychologist in California, faced a Board of Psychology investigation based on an anonymous complaint—not from a patient—claiming that his YouTube videos had been taken down, that his father was connected to conversion therapy, and that his website “describes conversion therapy.” There were no allegations of patient harm.

The investigation lasted nearly two years before concluding there was “no evidence to establish a violation.” Three attorneys agreed to represent him but withdrew after seeing the words “conversion therapy” in the Board’s letter. He has received death threats. Therapists trained by his organization report hesitation to participate in evidence-based training programs out of fear of regulatory backlash.

The Cass Review—the independent, NHS-commissioned systematic review of gender identity services for children in England—found that conversion therapy restrictions have “left some clinical staff fearful” of “providing professional support” to gender-questioning young people. The Trevor Project’s amicus brief attempted to downplay this finding by citing Noone et al. (2025), which criticized the Cass Review’s methodology. But the brief also quoted the Cass Review’s own statement that “no LGBTQ+ group should be subjected to conversion practice”—cherry-picking the positive language while challenging the negative findings.

What the brief did not quote was the Cass Review’s observation that no formal science-based training in psychotherapy teaches or advocates conversion therapy, and that practitioners who do engage in such practices “would be acting outside of professional guidance.” If conversion therapy is already outside professional guidance, then the argument for a broad statutory ban—one that far exceeds the practices it aims to target—becomes difficult to justify.

The very laws sold as protecting children are preventing children from receiving care.

Chiles v. Salazar does not end the legal battle. It resets it. The decision sends the case back for further proceedings under strict scrutiny—a standard Colorado is unlikely to meet. The 23 states with similar laws will face immediate pressure from litigation. Some laws may be struck down on their face; others may survive as to physical interventions but fail as applied to talk therapy.

Justice Kagan’s concurrence has already signaled the next front: whether a “content-based but viewpoint-neutral” law can survive. States will try to amend their laws to avoid the viewpoint discrimination that led to Colorado’s law being struck down. Whether they can achieve this while still effectively silencing one side of the debate remains to be seen.

The decision also remains in unresolved tension with the Court’s 2025 ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld state authority to restrict certain gender-affirming healthcare for minors. The Trevor Project’s amicus brief attempted to leverage Skrmetti’s deference framework to prevail, arguing that “scientific and policy debates” should be left to legislatures. The Court declined. But the tension persists: it’s hard to reconcile allowing some states to ban gender-affirming care because they believe it’s harmful, while stopping other states from banning conversion therapy. After all, they also see it as harmful. This tension will likely lead to more litigation.

But the deeper significance of Chiles lies not in its immediate legal consequences but in what it reveals about how these laws were constructed.

The legislative foundation was built on unverified testimony. The “medical consensus” was shaped through institutional capture. The model legislation was drafted by advocacy groups that later defended it as amici without revealing their authorship. The legislative findings courts relied on were pre-written talking points embedded in the statute.

The courts relied on a self-referential body of authority that was never exposed to the adversarial scrutiny the legal system is designed to provide. And for fourteen years—from California’s SB 1172 in 2012 to the Supreme Court’s decision in 2026—the entire framework persisted because no court looked beyond the label.

Far too many laws today are, and have been, created in the same way. Laws based on propaganda, emotion, and narratives instead of facts, reason, and truth have no real foundation and will ultimately fail.

In the Chiles’ case, the Supreme Court has now examined it. And what it found was a house built on sand.

We can thank God that they finally looked. There is a lot more to go.