Free Speech: Parents Have The Right To Speak To A Counselor Who May Say Their Kid Is Fine

Imagine you’re a parent with a teenage daughter who has been struggling with her identity. Like many teens today, she’s being told that it’s good to try to be the opposite sex. You sit down with her to discuss what to do next. High on everyone’s list is going to a professional counselor to help her talk through tough issues to live a healthy life. But then you start looking for a counselor. To your dismay, you can’t find any counselor who can commit to a level-headed approach to speak with your child. What do you do next?

Families across America have asked themselves that question as they navigate common sense and gender identity. But the lack of available counselors to helpfully address this topic is a government-created problem. And it is a problem created by design.

Over 20 states and the District of Columbia now have laws that prohibit certain private counseling conversations between counselors and minor clients about gender identity. These laws only operate in one direction. They allow counselors to encourage children to think they are the opposite sex or seek irreversible surgeries to look like the opposite sex. But they prohibit counselors from encouraging minors to accept their bodies.

The prohibitions apply even when clients desire counseling to help them align their identity with their religious beliefs, and even when the counseling involves nothing but voluntary discussions between counselor and client. Counselors who would be willing to have these conversations must avoid them or risk significant penalties.

By outlawing private, consensual conversations like this, the laws violate a fundamental First Amendment principle: The government cannot silence private speech it dislikes while it amplifies speech it prefers. The government has no business picking ideological winners and losers. Those choices are left to individuals. And in the case of conversational counseling, the choice should be up to parents and their kids. Counseling works best when the counselor and the client feel free to speak openly.

This freedom from the government’s weighted scale is especially important when controversial subjects like gender identity are being measured.

To justify these bans, governments sometimes rely on statements from a few medical organizations. But those statements don’t empower the government to suppress speech. After all, medical organizations can be wrong and make decisions that conflict with good science. 

Consider the history of peanut allergies. More Americans have peanut allergies now than ever before. Why? Bad medical advice. In 2000, there was an uptick in children affected with allergic reactions to peanuts. The American Academy of Pediatrics responded by recommending that children under three years old avoid peanuts altogether. That was the prevailing advice for over a decade. But the ungrounded advice made things worse.

As John Hopkins medical expert Marty Makary, M.D., explains in his book “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health,” avoiding early exposure to peanuts triggered widespread peanut intolerance, leading to more (and more severe) allergic reactions. The AAP later about-faced. Now the AAP recommends early introduction of peanut protein for infants.

So too in the field of gender identity. The heartbreaking stories of “de-transitioners” who have come to accept their biological sex – but only after pursuing irreversible hormones and surgeries – demonstrate the harmful and irreversible consequences of rushing young people struggling with gender dysphoria toward life-altering procedures. Now, multiple European countries are reversing course and severely restricting these procedures, in a tacit admission that the headlong plunge into gender ideology wasn’t based on sound science.

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One study shows that many young people — especially girls — are steered toward identifying as boys without adequate psychological evaluation and counseling. And Dr. Hilary Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in England, recently found in a nationwide, independent review commissioned by the British government that the science related to using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and permanent surgeries on children struggling with gender dysphoria is an area of study with “remarkably weak evidence” with “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes.”

In this context, it is particularly egregious for governments to interrupt counseling sessions and dictate what is said. Worse, because the counseling bans only stifle speech that would help children talk through their struggles related to gender identity, the bans have the effect of pushing kids towards experimental drugs and surgeries as the only available response. But even more so than with peanuts, this push has dangerous consequences.

The better approach is what the First Amendment demands. Give parents, children, and their chosen counselors the freedom to speak honestly about the clients’ goals related to gender identity. This freedom helps ensure that families can avoid the heartbreak of looking for help and finding none. And it helps ensure families can flourish by giving them control over the care they seek.

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Bryan Neihart serves as senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.