In different contexts, both conservatives and progressives often see children, meaning everyone under 18 years of age, as completely helpless wards, pawns, or victims of the adults around them. We see this playing out in the dispute over Colorado’s “conversion therapy” ban, which the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear.

Many conservatives describe minors who declare themselves gay or transgender as deluded by predatory adults who promote such self-identification for political or ideological reasons, or even to “groom” the child for sexual exploitation. In this mean-spirited view, we should not believe any child who says he or she is gay or transgender; we should instead look to blame some adult or group of adults for inculcating such false beliefs. (Some conservatives accept gay people but not transgender people; some accept both.)

Many progressives describe minors who say they made a mistake in coming out as gay or transgender as deluded by predatory adults who promote such claims for political or religious reasons. This view is contradictory, however, insofar as it holds that we should always trust kids when they say they are gay or transgender, but never trust them when they say they made a mistake in coming out as gay or transgender. (Some progressives do tend to believe kids on both sides.)

Here is an alternate view: We should recognize that older children (and younger children to a lesser degree), although still not at an adult level, are substantially able to think and choose for themselves. They have agency that we should respect.

The possibility often ignored in the debates over conversion therapy, meaning counseling that seeks to convince a child that he or she is not really gay or transgender, is this: What if a child sincerely wants to undergo conversion therapy? Should conversion therapy nevertheless be absolutely banned for licensed professionals?

A question of agency, not speech

Here is part of the petition the Supreme Court will consider:

“Kaley Chiles is a licensed counselor who helps people by talking with them. A practicing Christian, Chiles believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex. Many of her clients seek her counsel precisely because they believe that their faith and their relationship with God establishes the foundation upon which to understand their identity and desires. But Colorado bans these consensual conversations based on the viewpoints they express.”

Notice the word “consensual” here. But who is doing the consenting? If parents force their child to undergo conversion therapy, either physically or through threats of withheld privileges, the therapist consents, and the parents consent, but the child does not consent. Likewise, if the parents berate and badger their child into attending the conversion therapy, even if the child half-heartedly professes agreement, that is not genuine consent. That’s more like a coerced false confession.

On the other hand, can we safely assume that no child ever will authentically consent to attend conversion therapy? That’s what Quentin Young presumes in his recent op-ed against the practice. He writes, “Conversion therapy hurts kids. There’s no legitimate disagreement about that. . . . The right of a person to exercise religious faith does not confer special child-harming privileges. . . . Conversion therapy . . . [is] invariably an attempt to coerce LGBTQ+ people into straight, cisgender lifestyles.” (For the uninitiated, “cisgender” means not transgender, when one’s gender identity aligns with one’s sex chromosomes and genitalia.)

Invariably? Really? Has there never been a single case in which a child actually was straight and cisgender, but through confusion or social conformity self-identified for a time as gay or transgender? Has there never been a single case in which a child has said, “Although I’ve thought of myself as gay or transgender, now I’m not so sure, and I’d like to get the perspective of someone with a different point of view”? Come on now.

Even when a child is authentically gay or transgender, can we rightly tell the child that he or she absolutely may not explore, with a religious therapist, the possibility that the child maybe “really” is (or should be) straight or cisgender?

Although the lawyers are casting this case as about Chiles’s rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, what the case should be about is a child’s right (with the parents’ consent) to associate with Chiles (or any other therapist) to get a therapist’s insights or advice.

The limits of religious liberty

I agree with Young that parents should not be able to force unwilling children to undergo conversion therapy. That’s just straight-up child abuse, and neither parents nor therapists have a right to abuse children under the guise of religious liberty.

How many American conservatives believe that, in the name of religious liberty, parents may surgically remove their daughter’s clitoris? Close to zero. Again, religious liberty is no excuse for child abuse.

But many American conservatives believe that their religion gives them license to beat (spank) their children. Properly, hitting children should be considered criminal assault, and government should ban spanking.

Let’s say you disagree, and you think that a parent beating a child somehow is different from an adult beating another adult. It isn’t any different (unless you want to say it’s even worse because a child is more helpless), but let’s assume otherwise for sake of argument. What then should we make of Young’s remark, “The right of a person to exercise religious faith does not confer special child-harming privileges”?

Young is right that religious people should not have “special” abilities to harm children. But, in the case of spanking, all parents have the same ability, regardless of religious belief. The laws around spanking, whatever they are, should be uniformly applied, not applied differently based on the parents’ religious beliefs. If government banned spanking universally, as it should, that would be no violation of religious liberty.

How does that apply to the case of conversion therapy? It would be wrong for the legislature or the courts to proclaim that only religious people may engage in conversion therapy. Even if not a single secular therapist, in fact, engages in conversion therapy, in principle a nonreligious therapist should be bound by the same laws as a religious therapist.

A double standard

If you say that a child always should be able to consent to gender-affirming hormone treatments and even surgeries, but never be able to consent to conversion therapy, you’re not really taking the agency of minors seriously.

Yet the bill behind the current controversy, House Bill 19-1129, purportedly is against trans-to-cis and gay-to-straight conversions and for cis-to-trans conversions.

The bill defines “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 or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” But expressly exempted from this definition is “assistance to a person undergoing gender transition.”

Interestingly, we’re supposed to read the exemption as allowing therapists to assist children in “undergoing gender transition” to become or identify as transgender. But that’s not what the language actually says. The exemption doesn’t specify whether the child is “undergoing gender transition” from cisgender to transgender or vice versa. So an anti-trans therapist plausibly could claim merely to be helping a child “undergoing gender transition” back to cisgender. That the law is so stupidly written is grounds enough to throw it out.

Granted, the bill is more clear on the matter of sexual attraction. Generally I agree it’s bad for a therapist to try to “help” a child “eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” (It also would be bad for a therapist to “help” a child “eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals” of the opposite sex.) That’s just not a therapist’s proper job.

But, look, in a free society, people get to make their own decisions. If an older child wants to try to stop being gay, I think that’s tragic, but I also think that’s not my decision to make. If a professional therapist harms a child, litigation remains an option.

At some point, politicians, therapists, and parents should stop and ask a child, “What do you want?” No, as adults we should not always give in to a child’s demands. But we should also take a child’s preferences and choices seriously. I think this properly involves letting a child choose whether to engage with conversion therapy.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.