Kagan and Sotomayor are idiots. I expect the other 6 to side with the genocidal maniacs called the Republican party, but honestly I thought they might be more interested in saving children's lives than in some pedantic argument about "free speech" because some religious nutter's rights are more important than the children subjected to this torture's rights.
The states should issue mandatory warnings for conversion therapy, like cigarettes and vaping e.g., this type of therapy is known to result in increased risk of suicide and death. That's free speech too!
There should be a requirement that any client considering conversion "therapy" should be given accurate information on all risks involved, including psychological harm and increased risk of suicide, and the success rate. Then they can make an informed decision and bluntly I wonder how many would continue in that event..
And this is the same thing as SCOTUS declaring there can be no such thing as fraud in medical care or advertising for it with respect to communicative media, no fraud is possible with the written or spoken word. They have just stripped states and implicitly the federal government of all such authority to criminalize fraudulent medical claims as to what is proper medical care.
I fully believe the midterms will render a 55/45 count of Ds/Rs in the Senate, and a House willing to impeach again and this time the Senate Rs will a good third of them be sweating bullets and may be willing to remove Trump! & Co. root and branch. This can include removing judges and SCOTUS justices.
The Supreme Court’s decision striking down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy represents a profound failure to fully consider the real-world harm caused by these practices.
While the Court framed its ruling primarily through the lens of free speech, it overlooked the overwhelming medical and psychological evidence showing that conversion therapy inflicts lasting emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical damage — particularly on vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth.
Major medical and mental health organizations have long condemned conversion therapy as unsafe, ineffective, and harmful.
By prioritizing a narrow interpretation of speech rights over established medical consensus and patient protection, the Court has created a dangerous gap in safeguards for young people.
Colorado must now act swiftly and responsibly to revise its legislation so that it is grounded firmly in medical regulation and professional standards of care rather than framed as a restriction on speech.
States retain both the authority and the obligation to regulate licensed healthcare practices to protect patients from harm.
This ruling should not mark the end of protections — it should be a call to strengthen them.
The focus must remain where it belongs: on preventing medically discredited practices that endanger the health, dignity, and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ individuals.
So bans of gender affirming talk therapy for minors (shown to be highly effective treatment) = legal. Bans of conversion therapy for minors (shown to be highly deleterious to health) = illegal.
Make it make sense. This is what happens when conservatives decide their feelings are more important than facts. We are being pulled backwards in time by these asshats.
Yes, I was wondering if anyone else sees the irony in the decision compared to the ban on gender affirming care. Irony no longer exists as a guiding light.
And they just boil it all down to a simple "First Amendment" issue as though merely talking does no harm to a person, despite the AMPLE evidence that Conversion Therapy is EXTREMELY harmful and dangerous to its victims. It's like they have these blinders on as to just how dangerous speech can be, especially in an environment that is literally hostile to a queer youth's mere existence.
I thought better of those two. I expect this sort of backwards bullshit from the conservatives, but having Sotomayor and Kagan shit on us like this hurts. I hate having to be as wary of our so-called friends as we are of our enemies.
If efficacy is irrelevant when it comes to free speech, what’s to stop insurance companies from saving tons of money by making conversion therapy a preferred treatment for chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and hypertension, especially in light of past rulings favoring a company’s right to free speech?
I am a licensed counselor in Montana with over 40 years of experience treating trauma survivors, Transgender youth and adults, and others. I've also been a clinical mental health member of WPATH and before that the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. What that means as a MtF transgender woman ,who is also a mental health professional, I have lived my own transgender life through two marriages, two chidren, and so far three granschildren I've been in this fight for a while and learned a bit along the way. For me the way forward through the whole anti-transgender mess is for we who work to serve others who struggle with their gender identity is for us to visibly continue to serve transgender people openly, with wisdom, compassion, skill, empathy, guided by PROFESSIONAL ethics and standards of care. So to the anti-transgender folks I'll listen to you and you have the right to live your lives and conduct your lives and professions the way you want to but for the sake of all that's holy, "Get Your Sticky Fingers Out of Our Lives!!!!!!!"
I say that it’s time to tell the ASSHOLIOS of the Fascist Court of Trumpism to get STUFFED! 🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽The MAGAT CULT is the entity that needs “CONVERSION THERAPY!” They still don’t understand that we outnumber them by the millions!!! I say it’s time for a revolution in America! DOWN WITH THE TYRANNY OF TRUMPISM! NO MORE COSPLAY FROM THE BIGGEST LIARS ON THIS PLANET!! 🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽😈🔥🔥🌈🌈🌈
That's more serious than you might think. The journal reports referenced in this post (and others which can be followed from them) make it clear that ultraright-wing politics literally fits the professional definition (a la DSM-V) of mental illness (narcissistic personality disorder).
Jayna, I 100% agree. I have family members who cannot see the writing on the wall with where the republican party is and has been headed for quite a while. They will go down fighting with it while we watch them, from a distance because of it. Not for lack of attempting to reason with them.
Respectfully, can we fight the evil that's taking over the US without resorting to sanism ourselves? I have a personality disorder myself and it always freaks me out whenever I see my own community saying this same kind of stuff as the alt-right, just with different targets. I would rather fight hate with love, that is to say, helping marginalized people in danger, building networks, and recognizing that there's as many different ways to be human as there are humans. I don't mean to be divisive, rather suggesting more effective ways to resist all this
Please read the linked post. It explicitly says " “mentally ill” shouldn’t be a pejorative, and treatment may range from optional to essential" - plus other caveats and framework.
I would be happy to have you engage with my post, and guide me into more constructive language in the future (which there will be). I will say it again here: there is nothing "wrong" with having a mental illness any more than any other illness or injury. I think it is undesirable to be unwilling to accept treatment.
I understand what you're saying, and I did read your post. I appreciated your explicit statement there, and I think we largely agree on the path forward. I think that my issue isn't really a question of inclusive language, but rather the presumptions underlying the language. Namely, that there is one correct neurotype and all other neurotypes need to be fixed or, to use your word, "treated," to accord with a socially acceptable neurotype.
I find it odd that your argument at the same time acknowledges that "while their clients don’t start with a mental illness, society’s treatment of them is often effective at creating one" (true), but then goes on to say two sentences later that "the mental illness resides in those who deny the reality of gender incongruence, not the other way around. And that is not name-calling."
So which is it? Is mental illness just a byproduct of the insurance bureaucracy or set in stone as Reality? Set in stone only for them but not for us? Personally, I'm 100% with you on the former, because the latter, again, seems to be sanist. That is to say, it presupposes that one neurotype, worldview or perspective is the Objectively Correct one - usually the perspective that the one making the argument already has, imagine that! - and that others need to be fixed/treated/whatever word you want to use.
Your argument, if I may paraphrase, is that it is a real phenomenon that gender incongruence is simply a natural human variation (also true), and thus, since bigotry is a result of a denial of reality, that denial constitutes a mental illness. And I'll be honest, the idea sounds superficially appealing. It feels *good*, in a guilty pleasure sort of way, to turn the alt-right's rhetoric back on it, to pathologize them as much as we ourselves are constantly put under the pain and scrutiny of the medical and psychiatric establishment. I admit it.
The problem, as I see it, is that it not only throws mad or insane people under the bus by propping up an ideological system developed (by the bigots themselves, no less!) to imprison, silence and dismiss them, which honestly feels like a cheap shot given our community's history with those spaces and those people; but also that it simply doesn't work. "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." (Audre Lorde, 1979)
But I agree that the alt-right can't just be allowed to hurt people. So I propose that, rather than viewing them from a pathologizing lens, that we recognize that the root of the problem lies in fear - a fear of aging, a fear of death, a fear of strangeness. To them, the world doesn't look like it used to, and that's terrifying.
There's a reason why educated people tend to be politically leftist, and conservatives usually champion the side of ignorance, and it's not because conservatives "can't accept reality." It's because learning about the world broadens one's perspective, which in turn puts one's own life into perspective - people change. Societies change. On the contrary, simple boxes, easy categories that purport an unblinking, unchanging reality (such as diagnostic criteria like "narcissistic personality disorder", perhaps) squash and narrow perspective back into a conservative mindset.
So, in a roundabout way, like I said above, I agree with you - our power to effect change lies in our ability to educate, to broaden perspectives, and to *rely* on our differences as our strongest asset. And practically, that means getting out in the street and building coalitions.
Valuable inputs, Iris (as I asked for 😏). One is dancing around the value-laden difficulties presented by "mental disorders" (or any synonym there): psychology as a science has that problem embedded in it. For sure there are many neurotypes outside the "norm" (which is simply a mathematical treatment of large numbers, and isn't necessarily to be recommended even) that should be valued and honored, and others that should not be. And we don't have compact language to deal with that.
I'll only come back with my observation (from my studies) that there *are* mental conditions that will not change from the ordinary human interactions that constitute "building coalitions;" there are barriers (just as in chemistry) that require dedicated procedures to overcome. Getting James Inhofe to accept the reality of anthropocentric climate change will never come about by argumentation of any kind (for example). But there might be ways to get him to change the underlying psychology that makes him a science denier.
Anyway, stuff for another post (or more). I need to get back to athletics, which matches my scientific expertise much more closely, and is an urgent concern for trans people as well. Thank you once again; I really appreciate it!
It seems to me they are doing everything to make trans people "self deport" by suicide. It is disturbing. So glad my trans daughter is 23 and not under 19. Hang in there everyone! Sending love to all.
30 years ago, my mother was the victim of an unethical psychiatrist who experimented upon her with discredited practices like age-regression hypnosis to implant false memories in her, which led to her being dianosed with dissociative identity disorder with dozens of personalities and a lifetime of physical and mental issues she never recovered from. That psychiatrist later faced professional and criminal charges and ramifications from other patients that resulted in jail time. As far as I can tell, even though this ruling dealt with conversion therapy, there is nothing preventing unethical psychiatrists like the one my mother suffered from revising practices like those or devising new ones and never face consequences because they did so under the guise of "free speech". That psychiatrist from 30 years ago might have walked free of any consequences whatsoever from this Supreme Court. I am seething.
From what I read at the end of the article, this is not a free pass for psychiatrists to say anything and get away with it. Lawsuits for medical malpractice are based on damage done and not following best practice for medicine, not government restrictions on speech. Doctors can still be sued if they cause damage. I'm not going to tell you this is a great ruling, but I don't think it's a free pass for psychiatry.
Kagan and Sotomayor are idiots. I expect the other 6 to side with the genocidal maniacs called the Republican party, but honestly I thought they might be more interested in saving children's lives than in some pedantic argument about "free speech" because some religious nutter's rights are more important than the children subjected to this torture's rights.
Agreed, I think it is a mistake to expect any sort of consistency from the conservative majority. Strategic mistake.
Oh I expect them to make the worst possible decisions based on whatever screws marginalized groups and elevates religious zealotry.
Supreme Court missed the point!
Talk therapy is not “free speech”. Talk therapy is medical practice. Conversion therapy is medical malpractice.
Fuck this timeline.
And Brown said exactly that Tracy. And obviously I love you last line of text.
The states should issue mandatory warnings for conversion therapy, like cigarettes and vaping e.g., this type of therapy is known to result in increased risk of suicide and death. That's free speech too!
There should be a requirement that any client considering conversion "therapy" should be given accurate information on all risks involved, including psychological harm and increased risk of suicide, and the success rate. Then they can make an informed decision and bluntly I wonder how many would continue in that event..
And this is the same thing as SCOTUS declaring there can be no such thing as fraud in medical care or advertising for it with respect to communicative media, no fraud is possible with the written or spoken word. They have just stripped states and implicitly the federal government of all such authority to criminalize fraudulent medical claims as to what is proper medical care.
I fully believe the midterms will render a 55/45 count of Ds/Rs in the Senate, and a House willing to impeach again and this time the Senate Rs will a good third of them be sweating bullets and may be willing to remove Trump! & Co. root and branch. This can include removing judges and SCOTUS justices.
Exactly! This will let every antivaxxer hang up a shingle and tell people it's fine to get shingles
This is terrible…
The Supreme Court’s decision striking down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy represents a profound failure to fully consider the real-world harm caused by these practices.
While the Court framed its ruling primarily through the lens of free speech, it overlooked the overwhelming medical and psychological evidence showing that conversion therapy inflicts lasting emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical damage — particularly on vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth.
Major medical and mental health organizations have long condemned conversion therapy as unsafe, ineffective, and harmful.
By prioritizing a narrow interpretation of speech rights over established medical consensus and patient protection, the Court has created a dangerous gap in safeguards for young people.
Colorado must now act swiftly and responsibly to revise its legislation so that it is grounded firmly in medical regulation and professional standards of care rather than framed as a restriction on speech.
States retain both the authority and the obligation to regulate licensed healthcare practices to protect patients from harm.
This ruling should not mark the end of protections — it should be a call to strengthen them.
The focus must remain where it belongs: on preventing medically discredited practices that endanger the health, dignity, and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ individuals.
This Supreme Court has no concern for Americans rights.
And it DEFINITELY has no concern for the rights of queer folks, that's for sure.
So bans of gender affirming talk therapy for minors (shown to be highly effective treatment) = legal. Bans of conversion therapy for minors (shown to be highly deleterious to health) = illegal.
Make it make sense. This is what happens when conservatives decide their feelings are more important than facts. We are being pulled backwards in time by these asshats.
Yes, I was wondering if anyone else sees the irony in the decision compared to the ban on gender affirming care. Irony no longer exists as a guiding light.
Conservatives AND two Liberal turncoats.
𝘘𝘶𝘪𝘴𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴. With "allies" like these, who needs enemies?
And they just boil it all down to a simple "First Amendment" issue as though merely talking does no harm to a person, despite the AMPLE evidence that Conversion Therapy is EXTREMELY harmful and dangerous to its victims. It's like they have these blinders on as to just how dangerous speech can be, especially in an environment that is literally hostile to a queer youth's mere existence.
I thought better of those two. I expect this sort of backwards bullshit from the conservatives, but having Sotomayor and Kagan shit on us like this hurts. I hate having to be as wary of our so-called friends as we are of our enemies.
The Supreme Court empowers quacks. What's next? Horse dewormer for all?
I hope so. Natural selection...
If efficacy is irrelevant when it comes to free speech, what’s to stop insurance companies from saving tons of money by making conversion therapy a preferred treatment for chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and hypertension, especially in light of past rulings favoring a company’s right to free speech?
Forced Conversion Therapy is Eugenics. Pure and simple. This is infuriating.
I am a licensed counselor in Montana with over 40 years of experience treating trauma survivors, Transgender youth and adults, and others. I've also been a clinical mental health member of WPATH and before that the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. What that means as a MtF transgender woman ,who is also a mental health professional, I have lived my own transgender life through two marriages, two chidren, and so far three granschildren I've been in this fight for a while and learned a bit along the way. For me the way forward through the whole anti-transgender mess is for we who work to serve others who struggle with their gender identity is for us to visibly continue to serve transgender people openly, with wisdom, compassion, skill, empathy, guided by PROFESSIONAL ethics and standards of care. So to the anti-transgender folks I'll listen to you and you have the right to live your lives and conduct your lives and professions the way you want to but for the sake of all that's holy, "Get Your Sticky Fingers Out of Our Lives!!!!!!!"
Thank you Anne, I appreciate knowing you are doing this work with professional ethics, and great wisdom and empathy. ❤️🩹💐
I say that it’s time to tell the ASSHOLIOS of the Fascist Court of Trumpism to get STUFFED! 🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽The MAGAT CULT is the entity that needs “CONVERSION THERAPY!” They still don’t understand that we outnumber them by the millions!!! I say it’s time for a revolution in America! DOWN WITH THE TYRANNY OF TRUMPISM! NO MORE COSPLAY FROM THE BIGGEST LIARS ON THIS PLANET!! 🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽😈🔥🔥🌈🌈🌈
Thank you, Justice Brown. As for the other two, I have no words.
We need to have conversion therapy for republicans. So sad for this to happen today.
That's more serious than you might think. The journal reports referenced in this post (and others which can be followed from them) make it clear that ultraright-wing politics literally fits the professional definition (a la DSM-V) of mental illness (narcissistic personality disorder).
https://jaynasheats.substack.com/p/yes-science-denial-is-a-mental-illness
Jayna, I 100% agree. I have family members who cannot see the writing on the wall with where the republican party is and has been headed for quite a while. They will go down fighting with it while we watch them, from a distance because of it. Not for lack of attempting to reason with them.
Respectfully, can we fight the evil that's taking over the US without resorting to sanism ourselves? I have a personality disorder myself and it always freaks me out whenever I see my own community saying this same kind of stuff as the alt-right, just with different targets. I would rather fight hate with love, that is to say, helping marginalized people in danger, building networks, and recognizing that there's as many different ways to be human as there are humans. I don't mean to be divisive, rather suggesting more effective ways to resist all this
Please read the linked post. It explicitly says " “mentally ill” shouldn’t be a pejorative, and treatment may range from optional to essential" - plus other caveats and framework.
I would be happy to have you engage with my post, and guide me into more constructive language in the future (which there will be). I will say it again here: there is nothing "wrong" with having a mental illness any more than any other illness or injury. I think it is undesirable to be unwilling to accept treatment.
I hope that was as respectful as intended.
I understand what you're saying, and I did read your post. I appreciated your explicit statement there, and I think we largely agree on the path forward. I think that my issue isn't really a question of inclusive language, but rather the presumptions underlying the language. Namely, that there is one correct neurotype and all other neurotypes need to be fixed or, to use your word, "treated," to accord with a socially acceptable neurotype.
I find it odd that your argument at the same time acknowledges that "while their clients don’t start with a mental illness, society’s treatment of them is often effective at creating one" (true), but then goes on to say two sentences later that "the mental illness resides in those who deny the reality of gender incongruence, not the other way around. And that is not name-calling."
So which is it? Is mental illness just a byproduct of the insurance bureaucracy or set in stone as Reality? Set in stone only for them but not for us? Personally, I'm 100% with you on the former, because the latter, again, seems to be sanist. That is to say, it presupposes that one neurotype, worldview or perspective is the Objectively Correct one - usually the perspective that the one making the argument already has, imagine that! - and that others need to be fixed/treated/whatever word you want to use.
Your argument, if I may paraphrase, is that it is a real phenomenon that gender incongruence is simply a natural human variation (also true), and thus, since bigotry is a result of a denial of reality, that denial constitutes a mental illness. And I'll be honest, the idea sounds superficially appealing. It feels *good*, in a guilty pleasure sort of way, to turn the alt-right's rhetoric back on it, to pathologize them as much as we ourselves are constantly put under the pain and scrutiny of the medical and psychiatric establishment. I admit it.
The problem, as I see it, is that it not only throws mad or insane people under the bus by propping up an ideological system developed (by the bigots themselves, no less!) to imprison, silence and dismiss them, which honestly feels like a cheap shot given our community's history with those spaces and those people; but also that it simply doesn't work. "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." (Audre Lorde, 1979)
But I agree that the alt-right can't just be allowed to hurt people. So I propose that, rather than viewing them from a pathologizing lens, that we recognize that the root of the problem lies in fear - a fear of aging, a fear of death, a fear of strangeness. To them, the world doesn't look like it used to, and that's terrifying.
There's a reason why educated people tend to be politically leftist, and conservatives usually champion the side of ignorance, and it's not because conservatives "can't accept reality." It's because learning about the world broadens one's perspective, which in turn puts one's own life into perspective - people change. Societies change. On the contrary, simple boxes, easy categories that purport an unblinking, unchanging reality (such as diagnostic criteria like "narcissistic personality disorder", perhaps) squash and narrow perspective back into a conservative mindset.
So, in a roundabout way, like I said above, I agree with you - our power to effect change lies in our ability to educate, to broaden perspectives, and to *rely* on our differences as our strongest asset. And practically, that means getting out in the street and building coalitions.
Valuable inputs, Iris (as I asked for 😏). One is dancing around the value-laden difficulties presented by "mental disorders" (or any synonym there): psychology as a science has that problem embedded in it. For sure there are many neurotypes outside the "norm" (which is simply a mathematical treatment of large numbers, and isn't necessarily to be recommended even) that should be valued and honored, and others that should not be. And we don't have compact language to deal with that.
I'll only come back with my observation (from my studies) that there *are* mental conditions that will not change from the ordinary human interactions that constitute "building coalitions;" there are barriers (just as in chemistry) that require dedicated procedures to overcome. Getting James Inhofe to accept the reality of anthropocentric climate change will never come about by argumentation of any kind (for example). But there might be ways to get him to change the underlying psychology that makes him a science denier.
Anyway, stuff for another post (or more). I need to get back to athletics, which matches my scientific expertise much more closely, and is an urgent concern for trans people as well. Thank you once again; I really appreciate it!
It seems to me they are doing everything to make trans people "self deport" by suicide. It is disturbing. So glad my trans daughter is 23 and not under 19. Hang in there everyone! Sending love to all.
30 years ago, my mother was the victim of an unethical psychiatrist who experimented upon her with discredited practices like age-regression hypnosis to implant false memories in her, which led to her being dianosed with dissociative identity disorder with dozens of personalities and a lifetime of physical and mental issues she never recovered from. That psychiatrist later faced professional and criminal charges and ramifications from other patients that resulted in jail time. As far as I can tell, even though this ruling dealt with conversion therapy, there is nothing preventing unethical psychiatrists like the one my mother suffered from revising practices like those or devising new ones and never face consequences because they did so under the guise of "free speech". That psychiatrist from 30 years ago might have walked free of any consequences whatsoever from this Supreme Court. I am seething.
From what I read at the end of the article, this is not a free pass for psychiatrists to say anything and get away with it. Lawsuits for medical malpractice are based on damage done and not following best practice for medicine, not government restrictions on speech. Doctors can still be sued if they cause damage. I'm not going to tell you this is a great ruling, but I don't think it's a free pass for psychiatry.