Kaley Chiles, the counselor who prevailed at the Supreme Court against a Colorado law restricting therapy for unwanted same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria, told the Daily Signal that the medical sector bypasses the rightful course of treatment when it comes to transgender issues.
“We’re treating this issue in some special way that we don’t treat any other issues,” Chiles said in an interview Thursday.
The Supreme Court in March ruled, 8-1, that Colorado’s law aiming to ban “conversion therapy” violated the Constitution by discriminating against Chiles’ viewpoint. Colorado’s Legislature responded by passing House Bill 26-1322 to allow survivors of “conversion therapy” to sue providers. Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed the bill on June 1.
Chiles emphasized to the Daily Signal that psychotherapy is not merely about “affirming” a person’s feelings.
Moving Beyond ‘Affirmation’
Artificial intelligence “has shown us that it’s not helpful to be constantly affirmed and validated,” Chiles told the Daily Signal. “Good counseling does not simply affirm and validate.” It involves “helping us stretch our perspective.”
Speaking as a trauma therapist, she explained, “People have all kinds of beliefs that aren’t serving them. Like, ‘I’m not worthy.’ ‘Nobody cares about me.’ ‘My life is meaningless.’ ‘Why not just kill myself?’”
“If we were to affirm those things, that would feel odd,” the therapist said. “That’s not what we do.”
While therapists don’t “impose our values,” to some degree, “all counseling is philosophical,” she said.
“Ethically and existentially, we impose the value that, don’t kill yourself—and let’s help you do that. Let’s help you live a life worth living. Let’s help you find meaning. Let’s help you tolerate distress,” she explained.
“We do that with trauma, addictions, all the things—and we just don’t do it with this one singular thing,” Chiles argued.
A Contrast With ‘Gender-Affirming Care’
While many medical institutions have championed experimental medical interventions to make men appear female and vice versa—often euphemistically described as “gender-affirming care”—Chiles noted that “there is very weak—if not no—evidence that ‘gender-affirming care’ works.”
The Department of Health and Human Services conducted a peer-reviewed study finding little evidence for positive impacts from sex-rejecting procedures for minors. Studies have suggested these interventions cause harm, from increased cancer risks to a higher risk of suicidal thoughts. A jury awarded a detransitioner $2 million in a medical malpractice lawsuit in February, and psychiatrists reportedly agreed to settle another detransitioner’s medical malpractice claim in January. Hospitals have distanced themselves from the Human Rights Campaign, a major transgender activist group that rates medical entities.
Chiles warned that when doctors prescribe cross-sex hormones, “we’re playing with the entire endocrine system as though we are God, as though we have a comprehension of exactly how the endocrine system works, which is quite prideful.”
She presented therapy as the better solution to address gender dysphoria—the painful and persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite one’s sex.
“I think there’s a conflation of feelings and reality,” she said. “When someone says, ‘I feel like I am the opposite sex,’ they’re expressing a feeling, an experience. They’re not expressing a biological reality—and for us to conflate the two is naturally disastrous.”
“We treat eating disorders, addictions, even trauma—trauma treatment is essentially the process of invalidating your feelings,” the therapist explained. “Because your feelings are that ‘because I was in a car wreck, I shouldn’t drive again,’ ‘because I was molested by a male, men are bad,’ ‘because something bad happened in an enclosed space, I should never go into enclosed spaces.’”
“Over the course of therapy, what you want is actually a full invalidation in thought, in feeling, in sensation, in experience, that the trauma response is true,” she explained.
A Christian Motivation to Address Transgender Identity
When asked about her motivation to help people address gender confusion, the therapist emphasized the importance of knowing our own limits.
“My heart is to help people accept the reality that we’re living in—we all have limits,” Chiles said.
“We see in parenting, kids who have parents who set limits are less anxious,” she noted. “God is a gracious God, that he gives us parameters and boundaries and limits. We are not here to create our own meaning, we’re not here to be our own savior.”
“We don’t have to bear the weight of the questions we’re not meant to bear,” the therapist explained. “Things like, ‘What is my identity?’ or ‘What sex am I?’ Those are just questions that we don’t have to bear, because the answer is given in our own bodies.”
Chiles concluded by urging Christians to educate their children about biological sex.
“We would start at age 2 or 3, not with what sex is, but that you are a sex, that you are a boy or you are a girl, you are made in the image of God, who doesn’t make mistakes,” she explained. She urged Christians to be “more proactive,” rather than reactive to the threat of transgender ideology in the world.
“If we don’t sex educate our children, then it’s very clear that someone else will,” she warned.
