I often contemplate the notion of “liberation.” Several years ago, I thought about its major components, and I came up with this phrasing: “A chief tenet of liberation is the freedom to define oneself.”

I understand that in my attempt at brevity, I have whittled down a complex and complicated notion to its barest of parts. Now, in light of many recent Supreme Court decisions, I have included an auxiliary to my initial wording: “A chief tenet of liberation is the freedom to define oneself while being accorded the rights and privileges established and guaranteed under law and social standing.”

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It is true that individuals and members of social groups can attain personal liberation regardless of social approval. To live one’s life in liberatory consciousness, however, feeling safe to carry oneself into all contexts with integrity and without fear of social condemnation, censure, or worse, reflects another of liberation’s chief tenets.

The conservative majority of the Supreme Court appears not to allow a liberatory framework for members of LGBTQ+ communities.

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In its latest stunning rebuke of young people’s rights and abilities to live with dignity in the gender and sexual identity most integral to them, in March 2026, the Court voted 8-1 in the case of Chiles v. Salazar granting a conservative Christian counselor the right to attempt to convert LGBTQ+ youth heterosexual and cisgender through talk therapy, even after the expressed opposition of the young people themselves.

The case stemmed from a challenge to Colorado state law banning the often-draconian practice of so-called “conversion therapy.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch, a first-term Trump appointee, asserted: “The First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

As the only justice to dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson argued that the Court was interfering with states’ rights to regulate medical care and said that the majority’s opinion “could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers.”

One test of the validity and reliability of any court decision on whether a social group meets the criteria for protected status is to substitute the group involved in the case for another socially marginalized group.

So, let us switch the LGBTQ+ youth group with a religious group, for example, Muslim youth who, against their will, must attend religious “conversion therapy” conducted by a staunchly conservative Christian nationalist counselor.

In this instance, let’s say that the Muslim youth had been adopted as a teenager by conservative Christian parents who sent the young person to this Christian counselor for the purpose of converting to Christianity. All this is done in a state that outlawed such practices. Now consider how the Supreme Court might rule if it had been allowed to hear the case.

In the current context whereby the United States, under Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican majorities in the Congress and among his Supreme Court appointees, plus the three conservative to ultra-conservative justices previously sitting on the Court before the Trump era, there is actually some likelihood that they would have ruled in favor of the plaintiff and against the state as they did in the Christian gender and sexuality conversion case.

The message sent to all young people, regardless of sexual and gender identities, in the Chiles v. Salazar decision is that your voice does not matter, and that you have no agency in determining who you are or what you will become until you reach some magical number of years on the calendar that has been determined by adults.

Essentially, you are the property of your parents, and the counselor whose intention is to “convert” you has that right under the U.S. Constitution’s “free speech” clause of the First Amendment.

While a rose by any other name still smells as sweet, according to the Bard, abuse by any other name, like “conversion therapy,” is still abuse!

Agency as Capacity for Independent Actions and Making Choices Freely

At age 14, Lyn Duff came out to her parents as a lesbian. Not being able to accept the revelation, Lyn’s mother whisked her immediately and involuntarily to Rivendell Psychiatric Center in West Jordan, Utah, where she was forced to undergo so-called “conversion therapy” to cure her from what doctors at the facility termed “gender identity disorder” and “clinical depression.”

Though Rivendell was not officially aligned with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Lyn remembers that on numerous occasions throughout her six-month incarceration, Mormon missionaries visited her, and her “therapy” was highly religious in tone.

This so-called “conversion therapy” really amounted to “aversion” techniques, including watching women same-sex pornography while being forced to smell ammonia, being subjected to hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, and solitary confinement.

The staff also imposed so-called “behavior modification,” requiring Lyn to wear dresses and making her undergo punishments, such as cutting the lawn with a small pair of scissors and scrubbing floors with a toothbrush. After being locked up for 168 days, Lyn somehow escaped Rivendell and traveled to San Francisco, where she lived on the streets and in safe houses.

She eventually connected with a local journalist, an attorney at Legal Services for Children, and the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, and she won legal emancipation from her mother. A lesbian couple adopted her when she was 15, and today Lyn Duff serves as a successful activist and journalist for the Pacific News Service and for KPFA radio’s Flashpoints.

Assigned male at birth in Ohio and given the name Joshua Ryan Alcorn, at the age of 14, Leelah Alcorn came out as a trans girl. Rather than sending her to a transition specialist, her conservative Christian parents, who would not accept her gender identity, shipped her instead to Christian-based conversion therapy.

After feeling misunderstood, alone, and alienated from family, peers, religion, and counselors, Leelah took her life at age 16 by walking into speeding traffic on Interstate Highway 71. She concluded her suicide note with a plea: “My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say, ‘that’s f**ked up’ and fix it. Fix society. Please.”

Jacob Rudolph, Lyn Duff, Leelah Alcorn, and many other young people have cut to the very heart of the issue by showing us all that the problem does not reside within those of us whose sexuality and gender identity and expression differs from the majority, but rather, rests within our society, including a (hopefully) shrinking minority of religious denominations that adhere to a circumscribed view of human diversity.

While his state legislature was holding hearings on the issue of whether to ban conversion therapy, a young man testified in front of the New Jersey Senate Health Committee on March 18, 2013: “My name is Jacob Rudolph. I am an LGBT teen. I am not broken. I am not confused. I do not need to be fixed.”

The reality is that, no matter how the Supreme Court rules or the wishes of parents or guardians, young people are the social change-makers and always have been. They have a voice, then have agency, which the more powerful individuals and institutions would do well to heed, or they will be left in the dust tracks of history.

The freedom of speech of one must never trump the agency of another. For when it does, the liberation of all suffers a moral and often literal death.  

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