On March 31—Trans Day of Visibility—the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy in Chiles vs. Salazar. Kaley Chiles, a talk therapist, argued that practising conversion therapy was her right under the first amendment despite the overwhelming evidence that conversion therapy is both ineffective and a form of abuse. The court ruled in Chiles’s favour, determining that restrictions on anti-LGBTQ2S+-viewpoint-based speech in talk therapy could infringe on first-amendment rights, and sent the case back to the lower courts, where many legal experts believe the bill’s likely failure could jeopardize existing protections in 23 states.
The ruling’s sole dissenter, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that a regulation on professional medical conduct was not the same as an impingement on free speech. A doctor would be held liable if they performed or professionally recommended a procedure that had no medical backing, as should mental health professionals. While the case is still up in the air, survivors of the for-profit youth psychiatric and “troubled teen industry” argue that conversion therapy isn’t a practice that has died and reemerged—it’s a violence that has persisted as an open secret in the industry for years.
The troubled teen industry, a multi-billion-dollar network of unaccredited institutions claims to be able to reform teens with behavioural issues, though the reality of this unregulated practice is long-lasting trauma and emotional distress. Numerous reports of preventable deaths at the hands of these programs have brought increased public scrutiny, but have failed to bring about meaningful regulations to the industry.
“The mirage these programs present is starkly different from the reality,” says Joshua Stout, a professor of criminology at Illinois State University and a survivor of Sagewalk Wilderness, 7 Arrows Academy and Eagle Ranch Academy. “The way that these programs talk is, ‘We’re going to give the kid this warm, healthy environment, we’re going to teach them all these moralistic goals of the American Dream.’ But in reality, none of that’s occurring—there are well-documented instances of abuse. It’s abuse through medical neglect, malnourishment, psychological torture and physical abuse.”
@xtramagazine The United States Supreme Court has ruled against Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy in a landmark decision with massive repercussions on not only LGBTQ2S+ rights but medical care in America as a whole. Notably the court ruled 8-1, meaning two liberal justices—Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor—joined the conservatives in opposing the conversion therapy ban. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter, and in her dissent argued that the fallout from this ruling could be “catastrophic” for American healthcare. “So, to put it bluntly, the Court could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers,” she wrote. The case, Chiles v. Salazar, challenged Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy—in this case, referring to talk therapy aimed at changing a young person’s gender or identity. The law was introduced in 2019, and prohibits licensed counsellors from engaging in conversion therapy with minors in Colorado. Any Coloradan who thinks a licensed counsellor is engaging in conversion therapy could file a complaint with a regulatory board, which could then trigger a disciplinary review process that can yield a fine for the therapist in question. The plaintiff in this case, Kaley Chiles, is a religious talk therapist who basically argued that the law restricts her free speech rights by forbidding her from saying anything that attempts to change a client’s orientation or gender identity. She was represented by the right-wing legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which has claimed responsibility for a host of anti-LGBTQ2S+ laws across America. We break down what you need to know. #lgbtqnews #scotus #colorado #news #unitedstates ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine
Stout warns that troubled teen institutions often use coded language such as “sexualization” or “sex addiction” as a way to exercise tenets of conversion therapy. “There’s a lot of covert stuff that’s happening,” Stout says, and the recent Supreme Court ruling is “just going to give programs license to be so much more ‘out’ about their methods and goals, and it’s going to be increasingly more devastating.”
Prominent funders behind anti-LGBTQ2S+ political campaigns and the troubled teen industry are one and the same.
The troubled teen industry dates back to the 1960s, with origins stemming from the “tough love” drug rehabilitation cult Synanon. Modern funding for these programs can be traced back to the Church of Latter-day Saints and other anti-queer religious institutions, although many programs intentionally obscure these connections. Republican leadership, including George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, have also been shown to have ties to the troubled teen industry’s funding.
“I think I cried all day that day,” Cadilina DeVille, a trans survivor of Spring Creek Lodge in 1990, says of the Supreme Court’s March 31 decision. “Looking at the legislation that’s being passed constantly around trans people, a lot of trans youth are going to feel that they’re going to have to mask their feelings so they are not judged or they’re not in danger.” She recalls the way her program was falsely advertised as open-minded to her parents: “No matter what your troubled teen’s issue was, they were ‘experts’ on it. And so if your kid had low self-esteem, they were experts on it. If your kid was queer, you know they were going to tell you they were experts on it regardless of the matter. They mentioned nothing about religion. And when I got there, I really instantly realized that it was a Mormon-based situation.”
DeVille says that on her two-hour car ride to the program, the program director was “oddly obsessed” with her being from San Francisco due to its liberal political climate. “He pretended to be my friend, and I was young. I told him I had a lot of queer friends and you know, I’m questioning. But when I got there, he did an intake with me that he didn’t do with anyone else. He brought me in front of the entire campus and told them I was from ‘gay Bay.’ He was baiting everyone to attack me.”
Troubled teen programs rely on the “emotional growth model” for their therapeutic endeavours, an unfounded form of attack therapy adapted from Synanon that encourages breaking peers down through criticism and humiliation to get to the root of their emotional problem. In DeVille’s case, she says, “[My queerness] became such an attack point. They used it against me all the time and said I was going to die of AIDS, that I’d be on the street.” With the re-legalization of conversion therapy looming, Deville says she’s “wildly afraid that most of these places are going to do that, especially the ones that are openly religious.”
“It’s heartbreaking, it’s so heartbreaking to think about,” DeVille says. “I went in there really open … I did come out homophobic, and I did hate myself for having those thoughts or for being queer.”
Shea Vassar, a queer filmmaker and comedian who attended the Christian Fundamentalist troubled teen program Lakeland Teen Challenge between the years of 2010 and 2012, similarly recalls the way adults in her program pathologized queerness, telling her that “being gay was wrong and caused by the devil.”
“There were a couple of girls that were there specifically because they were caught with other girls,” Vassar says, and that “being caught with other girls would lead to time added in the program, which was a big, big deal. You don’t want to get locked up even another month at that place.” While Vassar says the program she attended wasn’t overtly labelled as conversion therapy, “as someone who spent a total of 22 months in an in-patient religious program, I would say it was basically conversion therapy, because that’s what we were taught. Whether or not we were gay or not, any kind of talk of it they would talk about in this idea of sin.”
Kaitlyn J. Selman, a professor of criminology at Illinois State University, argues that the troubled teen industry seeks to manage and reproduce the American Dream—which is by default heterosexual. In her in-progress research alongside Joshua Stout, she’s found that “The American Dream is one of white middle-class Western Christianity. Whether a program is religiously affiliated or not, by trying to enforce and coerce this type of normality, it’s all about that conformity into this definition of morality.
“You can have a program that says, ‘No, we are not religiously affiliated. We are for everybody’ and then they will have very gendered tasks,” she adds. “Say if you were a girl and you were wearing pants, that can get time added. So there are these ways where even if they’re not religiously affiliated, they’re still working to uphold this white middle-class Western Christian standard of morality.”
Conversion therapy as a business relies on the assumptions that queer and transness are sins or illnesses that are reversible through either psychiatric or religious intervention; “troubles” that youth can overcome. The practice’s methods have been long discredited by accredited psychology organizations due to their pseudo-scientific backing and lack of evidence-based treatment, and survivors are at an increased risk of substance misuse, PTSD and suicide.
The pathologization of queer and transness in the United States has drastically increased in the last few years, with 669 active anti-LGBTQ2S+ bills in 2026 alone. In this legal climate, conversion therapy has seen a resurgence: A 2024 study by The Trevor Project reports that 5 percent of LGBTQ2S+ youth were subjected to conversion therapy and 8 percent were threatened with being sent to conversion-therapy programs.
Cavar, a trans writer, youth psychiatric abuse survivor and professor of Mad Studies at UC Davis, argues that for the troubled teen and privately funded youth psychiatric industries, “first and foremost, the purpose is profit.” Private equity investment in the expanding troubled teen industry has increased in recent years, with venture capitalists profiting from cost-cutting and institutionalized child abuse.
Cavar says that based on their research, as well as their personal experience at Walden Behavioral Care in Massachusetts for an eating disorder, the “secondary purpose of these institutions is to attempt to fulfill the promise of re-normalizing deviant young women.” In these institutions, queer and transness is a type of deviance that needs to be corrected, though this correction is often an implicit result of the industry’s ideal subject being a straight cis person who can reproduce heteronormativity. The “trouble” a “troubled teen” faces, whether this be LGBTQ2S+ identity, or neurodivergence that impacts social dynamics or schoolwork, is seen as an external disruption. The teen is seen as someone who can bounce back to neurotypical,straight cis identity, redeemed from their delinquency through early corrective measures.
LGBTQ2S+ youth are overrepresented in the troubled teen, psychiatric and youth corrections industries, making up 20 percent of incarcerated youth despite comprising only 4-6 percent of the youth population. Parental rejection is often cited as a driver of this, along with societal punishment as opposed to support for mental health. Parents of queer and trans kids often feel unsure of what to do when their kids experience serious mental health issues and opt to send them away because of their own fears and overwhelm. This often does more harm than good.
DeVille recalls the way staff at the program she attended isolated her due to her unwillingness to buy into their closed-minded ideology. “They pretty much put me in an isolation unit so that I wouldn’t ‘infect the rest of the peers.’ I had a friend that was constantly in the unit next to me. We were able to talk through the walls and communicate.” Ten years later, after seeing posts from survivors of the troubled teen industry, Deville spent months trying to find her friend. “When I did, all I found was an obituary.”
According to The Trevor Project’s 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People, 81 percent of LGBTQ2S+ youth say people in their life can best support them by “standing up for me,” and 88 percent saying “trusting that I know who I am.” The survey also reports that LGBTQ2S+ youth who had access to safe and gender-affirming spaces reported lower rates of suicide. If these billions of dollars were redirected to what LGBTQ2S+ youth actually need rather than non-evidence based behaviour-modification programs, perhaps we’d see an improvement in collective youth mental health. When looking for who benefits most from the ruling on Chiles vs. Salazar, just follow the money. Prominent funders behind anti-LGBTQ2S+ political campaigns and the troubled teen industry are one and the same.
More than 1,300 reported practitioners of conversion therapy are active across the United States, according to The Trevor Project. This number is a vast underestimate, however, and does not include the 5,000+ troubled teen industry programs that frame LGBTQ2S+ identity as a type of “acting out” that needs correction. The fight against conversion therapy must include the troubled teen industry as a whole. One cannot be abolished without the other.
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