There are few weapons in politics that are more effective than mass disorientation. If you can confuse people about obvious truths, then they become much easier to control. This is a familiar tactic to most living Americans at this point. We are, after all, the first generation in the history of the world to have to grapple with the absurdity that men can change their gender at will. But there’s really a whole art form to mass disorientation. It’s not just about spreading big lies. It also involves confusing people at every possible opportunity.
We’re confronted with deception like this all of the time. Media outlets and purported experts will repeatedly tell us to assume something is true, or to accept some new framework, even when it’s clearly false. This can continue for decades, without interruption or pushback from anyone.
Consider, for example, the topic of so-called “conversion therapy,” which the Supreme Court has just announced it will address in a few months. This could very well end up being the single most important free-speech case of our generation.
Before we get into the specifics of the case, it’s important to recognize that “conversion therapy” is a term that’s been widely adopted by every mainstream institution in this country. Look through newspapers going back decades, and you’ll find tens of thousands of articles using the term as if it means something. And in particular, we’ve been told, it means something very bad — like using some sort of coercive tactic to force a homosexual patient to become straight, or convincing a trans-identifying individual that, in fact, he’s not really transgender.
Without exception, you’re commanded to think of these alleged “conversions” as acts of unspeakable evil. As of today, for instance, YouTube places a disclaimer written by the far-Left group “The Trevor Project” underneath every video discussing the topic of conversion therapy. They’ll probably append this disclaimer to this episode, too. The disclaimer reads: “Conversion therapy refers to a range of dangerous and discredited practices aimed at changing one’s sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
Well, that sounds ominous. Conversion therapy, according to The Trevor Project and Silicon Valley, isn’t simply a bad idea. In fact, it’s “dangerous.” It’s like playing with downed power lines. You could lose your life because of conversion therapy. And indeed, the name “conversion therapy” is intended to bring images like that to mind. You’re supposed to picture horrifying scenes of people strapped to gurneys and given electric shocks or lobotomies.
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Amid all this discussion about how horrible “conversion therapy” is, the one thing you’re not supposed to do is pause for a second and realize that “conversion therapy” — at least as it’s described by the Left — isn’t a real thing. The leftist conception of so-called “conversion therapy” is a fantasy. It’s like Big Foot, or the bogeyman. It is a myth intended to scare people and disorient them. By endlessly warning of the dangers of “conversion therapy,” the Left has successfully reframed the debate, so that most people go along with the general concept. But there’s no reason to do that.
For one thing, “conversion therapy” when applied to “gender identity” is an entirely incoherent concept. To be very clear, they call it “conversion therapy” when a counselor or therapist doesn’t assist or affirm the attempted conversion of a boy to a girl, or vice versa. Counseling that helps a boy accept himself for who he is, or a girl for who she is, is considered “conversion therapy,” even though it’s precisely the opposite of conversion therapy. In fact, what they call “gender affirmation” is actually conversion therapy, and what they call conversion therapy is actually gender affirmation. They have completely inverted the meaning of the word “conversion,” so that trying to change someone is affirmation and trying to help them accept themselves for who they are is conversion.
There’s arguably a better case for calling Christian counseling around same-sex attraction “conversion therapy,” in a sense. The counselor would be trying to help a person overcome their same-sex attraction, thereby helping them “convert” from gay to straight (if that’s how you want to put it). But if that’s the framing, then all therapy is a form of “conversion therapy.” All therapy aims to convert patients from one state to another — ideally, from a less-functional state to a more functional one. A depressed person might go to the therapist in order to be “converted” into a happy person. A schizophrenic might go to the therapist in order to be “converted” to a patient who doesn’t hear voices. And so on.
So at worst, we have an incoherent term. At best, it’s redundant. And that’s precisely the reason “conversion therapy” has become a rallying cry for the Left. They know they can’t come out and admit that they want to ban speech, under the First Amendment. But when they cloak their speech bans by claiming they’re really banning “conversion therapy,” a lot of people will fall for it. In fact, I’m guessing if you did a poll of the average Republican voter and asked them how they feel about conversion therapy, a large number of them would insist that it’s an evil thing and they don’t support it.
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The goal here, of course, is to force mental-health professionals to baptize as many young people as possible into the LGBT religion. And the easiest way of doing that is to ban these mental-health professionals from saying anything that might steer young people away from that path. That’s why nearly two-dozen states have outlawed so-called “conversion therapy,” and several other states ban the use of government funding for the practice. If a young boy comes into a psychologist’s office and says he’s really a girl, then in many cases, it would be against the law for the psychologist to disagree. The psychologist is legally barred from telling the boy that he is in fact actually a boy.
This is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment — both because it restricts the freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion. The government is telling counselors — who are Christian in many cases — that they can’t say certain words or communicate certain ideas to their patients. And the counselors’ clients, who are also often Christian, are being told that they can’t seek this type of care. A grown adult with same-sex attraction is, under these laws, prohibited from seeking care to overcome that attraction. The law is saying that the same sex attracted person who wants to be straight is not allowed to want that. This is a position that the Left has staked out, even though it obviously contradicts their supposed commitment to “keeping the government out of the doctor’s office.” (How quickly that principle goes out the window, when there’s free speech to ban.) These are the people who also say that if a parent wants to get sex change treatments for their child, it’s none of our business. Remember that was the case Chris Hayes made to Bill Maher a couple of weeks ago. Well, what if a parent wants to get treatment for a child to help them overcome same sex attraction? Suddenly all of that “it’s none of our business” stuff disappears. Suddenly it is very much Chris Hayes’s business. Funny how that works.
After many years, as I mentioned, bans on so-called “conversion therapy” are finally heading to the Supreme Court. On Monday, the Court agreed to hear the case of Kaley Chiles, a Christian who’s also a licensed therapist. She’s banned under Colorado law from telling patients that there’s no way to change their gender. She’s also banned from counseling them against a homosexual lifestyle. If Chiles wins the case, then dozens of state-level bans on so-called “conversion therapy” could be struck down immediately. Watch:
The core legal issue, as you heard, is whether or not bans on “conversion therapy” constitute bans on speech, or whether they constitute bans on “conduct”. The various federal appeals courts are split on this issue, somehow. And now the Supreme Court is set to resolve this split among the lower courts.
Just to dissect that a little bit more, because it really is incredible — Democrats are arguing in court that it doesn’t violate the First Amendment for the government to punish therapists who say certain things to their patients. They’re arguing that therapy sessions are really a form of “conduct” — like a surgical procedure, for example — and therefore, they can be regulated extensively by the government.
As lawyers for the state of Colorado put it, “a professional’s treatment of her patients and clients is fundamentally different, for First Amendment purposes, from laypersons’ interactions with each other.” Therefore, they want the Supreme Court to uphold Colorado’s law, which defines conversion therapy as, quote “any practice or treatment by a licensed physician specializing in the practice of psychiatry that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” The ban includes, “efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
What’s left unexplained here is how, exactly, speech can become “conduct” simply because of the job of the person saying it. That doesn’t seem clear. Nor is it clear how the law permits the treatment of “de-transitioners.” These are people who often want a therapist’s assistance as they reject their own assumed “gender identity,” which under the terms of this law, would seem to be illegal. These are the kinds of problems you run into when you start regulating speech and pretending it’s “conduct.”
Fortunately, there are signs that this particular challenge will be successful. The Supreme Court recently turned away a similar challenge to a ban on “conversion therapy,” but they’re taking this case. And the plaintiff is represented in this case by the group Alliance Defending Freedom, which famously defended the Colorado baker who didn’t want to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. They also defended a web designer who didn’t want to make a website celebrating gay marriages. And Alliance Defending Freedom won both of those cases. They have a very long and successful track record of affirming the right of free expression.
But the clearest sign that Alliance Defending Freedom is going to win this case is that the Left’s fundamental position, when you follow it to its logical conclusion, simply does not make any sense. They say that sexual orientation is immutable and unchangeable, which is why they claim conversion therapy can’t possibly work. But at the same time, they also say that sex is very mutable and changeable. Put it mildly, this doesn’t compute. How can it be that a man might become a woman, but a gay person can’t possibly become a straight person? How the hell is one a matter of self-identity and the other isn’t?
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And on top of that, to change your sex is to change your sexual orientation. This is the logical problem that they can’t escape. If a straight man becomes a woman — and if he really is a woman, as they say — then he has not only gone from man to woman but from straight to lesbian. If sexual orientation is immutable, and if a sex is mutable, it would mean that every heterosexual man who transitions must transition into a heterosexual woman, which is to say he must now be attracted to men. But that’s not how it works most of the time. Usually by his own claim he goes from a straight man attracted to women to a lesbian woman attracted to women. That is what quote-unquote “trans women” say about themselves. They themselves are claiming that their sexual orientation changed.
Explaining all of this shouldn’t be necessary. It’s obvious to everyone when you spell it out. And of course, that’s why they came up with the term “conversion therapy” in the first place. The entire purpose of inventing the term is to obfuscate as much as possible, so that the issue is so muddled that no one can follow the logic anymore. It is yet another tool of mass disorientation, created by activists for their own political ends.
But in just a few months, these activists will have to take their case to the Supreme Court. They will have to convince the justices that a ban on speech isn’t really a ban on speech. It’s the kind of self-defeating argument that gender activists have successfully relied on for years, because no one’s ever challenged it. But that’s changing now. There’s a very real chance that the LGBT club is about to lose one of its most important tools for indoctrinating the youth, if this decision goes the way we think it will. For the benefit of millions of children seeking mental-health services, as well as anyone who values the First Amendment in this country, that decision can’t come soon enough.
