Alternative sex and gender

NBC News - The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a challenge to a law in Colorado that bans “conversion therapy” aimed at young people questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The justices took up an appeal brought by Kaley Chiles, a Christian therapist, who argued that the restriction violates her free speech rights under the Constitution’s First Amendment.

Favored by some religious conservatives, the practice is aimed at encouraging gay or lesbian minors to change their sexual orientations and transgender children to identify as the gender identities assigned to them at birth. More than 20 states have bans on therapy aimed at minors.

Chiles often has clients who are Christians, some of whom have questions about their sexual orientation and gender identity amid concerns that they are unable to live their lives in accordance with their faith, according to court papers. As such, they seek counseling to suppress unwanted sexual attractions or to resolve conflicts about their gender identity.

"These clients believe their lives will be more fulfilling if aligned with the teachings of their faith, and they want to achieve freedom from what they see as harmful self-perceptions and sexual behaviors," Chiles' lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian advocacy group, wrote in their court filing.

They cite in part the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling that struck down on free speech grounds a California law that required anti-abortion pregnancy clinics to notify clients about abortion access.

The lawyers argue that the bans have “devastating real world consequences” including on rare cases of “detransitioners” — the small proportion of transgender people who change course and wish to identity as the gender they were assigned at birth.

 Roll Call - Four months ago, Tara McKay, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, received an award from the National Institutes of Health recognizing her contributions to the field of LGBTQ+ health research.  After President Donald Trump was inaugurated, the office that gave her that award — the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office — was closed.  

And over the last week, grants that McKay and other researchers had through the NIH to study LGBTQ+ health have been canceled, with researchers told via email that their work’s inclusion of trans people conflicted with “agency priorities.”  The dramatic shift reflects how quickly the world’s largest funder of biomedical research went from supporting and even trying to increase research into LGBTQ+ health to canceling funding for it based on the change of presidential administration.