On Transgender Day of Visibility, a day meant to affirm that transgender people exist and belong, the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors. Tuesday’s decision did more than remove a state’s authority to regulate health care and more than revive a discredited practice that harms children. It advanced a broader project: erasing transgender people from public life.
Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific lie that LGBTQ+ people can be corrected out of existence.
Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific lie that through psychotherapeutic coercion and, in some cases, medical abuse LGBTQ+ people can be corrected out of existence. The actual science is clear. Conversion therapy is not real. Sexual orientation and gender identity cannot be changed, and attempts to change them are linked to severe mental health harms, including increased suicidality.
These findings have been reaffirmed time and again by every legitimate major medical institution, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The persistence of conversion therapy, then, is not a function of scientific debate. It is a function of political utility. More than two decades ago, activists on the religious right framed LGBTQ+ identities as disordered, treatable and something that could, and should, be changed.
Even as mainstream medical institutions rejected these ideas, these activists, led by large Republican-aligned institutions like the Heritage Foundation, doubled down, creating a parallel information environment that promoted fringe “experts” and deliberately deceptive medical misinformation. These activists framed their opposition to the existence of LGBTQ+ people as concern about children, or as parental rights, or as religious freedom or as, in the case of Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling, an issue of free speech.
Recently, these same activists have leveraged that same political infrastructure, supercharged by the right-wing media ecosystem, to focus the conversion therapy conversation on trans kids. These efforts revived the conversion therapy idea, which had been waning since the Obama administration called for an end to the practice. Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling represents conversion therapy’s revival.
Conversion therapy is a Holy Grail for the right-wing because it advances the idea that queer people aren’t real. Because if being transgender can be cured, then transgender people are not worthy of recognition by society.
Therefore, the Supreme Court’s decision alongside the current wave of anti-transgender laws sweeping the United States reveals the true goal of the anti-transgender movement: Deny transgender existence and remove transgender people from the systems that allow anyone to be part of everyday life — identification, public space and legal recognition.
Last year, the State Department eliminated the “X” gender marker option that had allowed many transgender and nonbinary Americans to obtain identification that matched their identity and now requires passports to reflect sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity. At the beginning of March, Kansas issued a ban on transgender people having accurate drivers licenses. Instantly, thousands of Kansans could not drive or vote. Kansas joins five other states, including Indiana and Oklahoma, that have banned accurate gender markers on trans people’s drivers licenses.
Other states have gone even further. In Tennessee, the state legislature passed a bill that would create a public registry of all transgender people in the state. In Texas, the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who is also running for the Senate, has issued an opinion advising agencies not to recognize court orders changing sex markers on identification documents. That guidance raises the possibility that identities already legally recognized could be undone. These policies move beyond preventing future recognition. They threaten to reverse recognition that already exists and put a target on the backs of transgender people who refuse to go back into the shadows. They put a target on the backs of transgender people who refuse to go back into the shadows. These laws and rulings build on conversion therapy’s denial of transgender existence by seeking to cut off transgender people from essential liberties such as freedom of movement and access. As awful as Tuesday’s ruling was, it wasn’t the first time the Supreme Court has validated this approach. Last year, in a bewildering contradiction that can only be understood in the frame of just being generally anti-transgender, the court upheld a state’s authority to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors. What we are watching is a coordinated shift in how governments regulate gender — moving from controlling participation to controlling recognition itself. But at its core, these policies all come back to the fundamental idea: that transgender people are disordered and can be and should be changed. These are the principles of conversion therapy. These are the principles of erasure. And these are the policies that eight Supreme Court Justices upheld. The ruling served to highlight why Transgender Day of Visibility is so important. Visibility is not only about celebration. It is about refusing erasure. It is about asserting that transgender people exist and belong in the civic life of this country. When governments affirm that LGBTQ+ identities can be changed, and attempt to erase people from documents, public spaces and legal recognition, visibility is an assertion that we exist.
Imara Jones is CEO of TransLash Media, and host of the award-winning podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine. Her reporting examines how media, politics, and disinformation shape anti-trans legislation and public discourse. 
