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At the supreme court, the state of Colorado is arguing that it has interpreted the statute to prohibit therapies that would seek to reverse their orientation or identity, the state’s solicitor general Shannon W. Stevenson said, in answer to questioning from justice Samuel Alito, who repeatedly asked about hypothetical patients and what care they could be seeking from a talk therapist. Therapy that helps people “cope with their feelings” without seeking to change their orientation would be allowed, she said.

“If the therapist told him or he asked, ‘Can you help me become straight?’ The answer would be, it would be banned,” Stevenson said. “ … The harms from conversion therapy come from when you tell a young person you can change this innate thing about yourself, and they try, and they try, and they fail, and then they have shame and they’re miserable, and then it ruins their relationships with their family.”

Stevenson also sought to draw distinctions between how the law applies to medical professionals and not those whose standard of practice isn’t regulated by the statute. The state can make sure health professionals align with a “standard of care,” she said, and in this instance, there is not evidence that “conversion therapy” is within the standard of care. “Conversion therapy” is a “debunked” practice, she said.

The Colorado law prohibits any “licensed physician specializing in psychiatry or a licensed, certified, or registered mental health care provider” from engaging in “conversion therapy,” which it defines as “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.”

Alito questioned how the state was interpreting the statute and said it seemed to be regulating speech. “That seems like viewpoint discrimination in the way we would normally understand viewpoint discrimination,” he said. He also questioned whether ideology sometimes plays a role in what is considered a medical consensus.