We Shall All Be Healed (part one)
A series on Catholic Charities v. Whitmer
Part One (you are here)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
“This is a lawsuit about helping children who experience distress over their biological sex.” That is the first line of a lawsuit filed in federal court for the Western District of Michigan last month, and - I want you to sit down for this next part - the lawsuit does not appear to be about helping children who experience distress over their biological sex. There are two plaintiffs: one is a psychotherapist in Lansing named Emily McJones, the other is the local chapter of Catholic Charities. And McJones, as it turns out, isn't just any therapist; she runs a Catholic therapy practice under the name Little Flower Counseling, taken from the famous nickname of Saint Therese of Liseux. Both plaintiffs, explicitly Catholic, are seeking to strike down Michigan's HB 4616, a 2023 state law banning the treatment of minors via conversion therapy1, defined in a separate Michigan law as “any practice or treatment by a mental health professional that seeks to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including, but not limited to, efforts to change behavior or gender expression or to reduce or eliminate sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward an individual of the same gender.”
A reader sent me the Catholic Charities v. Whitmer2 case and warned me that there was a lot going on in here. And there is a lot going on in here, certainly more than I can cover in a normal G.O.T.H.S. essay; even with my new plan to cover it in five essays over five days, I'm not going to be able to explore everything about the issues in the case and the people connected to it. It involves an entire specialized profession in which I don't work, and complicated legal regulations, and Catholic organizations both big and small. As you have determined from the opening line of the legal complaint, this is also a case involving issues of “gender ideology”, which the Catholic church has consistently condemned ever since they first pulled that term out of their ass like two weeks ago.
So I can't look at all of this case, but I am going to look at a lot of this case, because I want to understand it better, and because I want to be able to articulate, if to nobody else other than myself, whether this is the sort of thing Catholic institutions and organizations (and individual Catholics) should be pursuing, and why it is or isn’t that sort of thing, if there is a ‘why’ beyond “I don't like it”. And through all of this, I have to keep that first sentence of the case in front of me. Is this really a case about helping children? What would “helping children” actually look like, based on all of the information and research available to us? And if this case isn't about helping children, what is it really about?
Before we get into the legal arguments, let's start with something a little simpler: how would you actually act if you were into “helping children who experience distress over their biological sex”? Like, if you wanted to look up and research how to help children in that situation, what would you find? It sounds intimidating, because you would think, especially if you follow Catholic media, that this is all uncharted territory, this is the wild west, nobody knows the proper treatment or interventions for gender dysphoria, and these cowboy doctors and therapists are just trying anything and everything they can and seeing what works. Maybe gender-affirming care is best for youths, maybe trying to change their sexual orientation or gender expression is best for youths, there’s no way to know for sure which path we're supposed to take, this early, in this new field in medicine.
You could think that, but you’d be wrong. “Debates over conversion therapy versus affirming care” is not a new area in medicine. There are well-established and researched standards of care. If you ask ten different people “what is the right way to respond to a child experiencing distress over their biological sex?”, you would get ten different answers, unless you asked a specific group of people: physicians and mental health professionals. If you did that, you would only really get one answer.
The American Psychiatric Association is not still weighing whether conversion therapy is good for queer patients. They were able to navigate this new and weird and controversial and previously-unheard-of medical question…back in 1998, when they originally took the position that “opposed any psychiatric treatment, such as "reparative" or conversion therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or that a patient should change his/her homosexual orientation.” In 2018 - which sounds very recent but is in fact four full Charli xcx albums ago - they updated the language of their position paper to make explicit that this opposition also extended to conversion therapies that sought to change a patient’s gender identity. The position paper ends, explicitly, with “APA encourages psychotherapies which affirm individuals’ sexual orientations and gender identities. APA encourages legislation which would prohibit the practice of “reparative” or conversion therapies that are based on the a priori assumption that diverse sexual orientations and gender identities are mentally ill.”
But what does the APA know, they’re just people who all went to medical school and are licensed to practice medicine and cited, if I’m counting correctly, thirty-eight different pieces of peer-reviewed research in their statement. Let’s leave those woke psychiatrists and turn to the American Academy of Pediatrics, who recommended in 2018 that “family-based therapy and support be available to recognize and respond to the emotional and mental health needs of parents, caregivers, and siblings of youth who identify as [transgender and gender-diverse],” after a wide review of dozens of entries in the medical literature. The American Psychological Association and National Association of School Psychologists similarly went through all of their research and confirmed their support for “affirmative interventions with transgender and gender diverse children and adolescents that encourage self-exploration and self-acceptance rather than trying to shift gender identity and gender expression in any specific direction.” They originally did this back in 2015, long before widespread book bans and state-level healthcare bans, long before people started ranting about wokeness. This was not a shot in a culture war meant to get likes and retweets, this was actual research to answer an actual medical question, which it did, unambiguously.
And this goes the other way, too; it’s not just that conversion therapy is not preferred as an intervention, but that it’s actually harmful. The American Journal of Public Health published a peer-reviewed 2018 UCLA study “to explore associations between undergoing sexual orientation or gender identity conversion efforts (SOGICE) and suicidality among young LGBTQ individuals”; to put this in the bluntest terms possible, they studied whether undergoing conversion therapy makes you more likely to kill yourself, and it turns out that it does. Compared to a control group, children and young adults who were subjected to conversion therapy were over twice as likely to have attempted suicide. Conversion therapy kills people. We looked it up, we studied it, and we wrote it down.
So, if Catholic Charities v. Whitmer is really “about helping children who experience distress over their biological sex,” we know what helps them. We have known it for a while. When the plaintiffs argue that “there is no sound evidence that such [gender- or orientation-affirming] medical interventions provide any long-term benefits. And there is mounting evidence that they impose lasting harms,” they are saying something that contradicts the easily available evidence found in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, pediatrics, and public health. They are either lying or being willfully obtuse, and I don’t really care which one it is. More importantly for understanding their whole thing, they’re being, very explicitly, not Catholic.
See, the Catholic church has a position on what we should do with thorough scientific research, and it isn’t “ignore it and sue the state so you can still get licensed as a clinician”. If you want to market yourself as a Catholic therapist, I suppose you can, but your selling point can’t be “we kind of do our own thing since our faith is more important than the research,” since that approach is explicitly opposed by the church. Here’s paragraph 36 of Gaudium et Spes, which also gets quoted in paragraph 159 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
“...if methodical investigation within every branch of learning is carried out in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, it never truly conflicts with faith, for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God. Indeed whoever labors to penetrate the secrets of reality with a humble and steady mind, even though he is unaware of the fact, is nevertheless being led by the hand of God, who holds all things in existence, and gives them their identity. Consequently, we cannot but deplore certain habits of mind, which are sometimes found too among Christians, which do not sufficiently attend to the rightful independence of science and which, from the arguments and controversies they spark, lead many minds to conclude that faith and science are mutually opposed.”
So we’ve got methodical investigation within multiple branches of learning, carried out - independently and at different times - in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, and we’ve had it, on this specific issue, for years. The most famous research in this area that opposes affirming care practices has very often turned out to be bullshit; “rapid onset gender dysphoria”, a condition cited in one of the amicus briefs for this case that we’ll look at later, is not a real disease but a made-up thing from a blog entry, and the 2024 NHS/Cass Review, cited in the original complaint as well as in that same amicus brief, was ripped apart by Yale and so egregious in its methodological flaws that a coalition of British people even said “hey we can’t do this to trans youth”.
You have to understand that when I get angry about Catholic people and organizations and institutions trying to overturn a ban on conversion therapy, I’m not doing that just to be a pissy little iconoclast, and I’m not wrestling with my conscience and saying “my church teaches one thing, but I feel another thing in my heart, so I’m going to have to really grit my teeth and navigate this one”. No! This one is not difficult! We looked into it and figured out what the right thing was to do! You’re allowed to look into it and accept that research! There isn’t a real disagreement on the best method on treatment! One works, one doesn’t! You’re picking the wrong one! If this is about helping children who experience distress over their biological sex, we can't do conversion therapy! It doesn't help them! It has a chance of killing them!
Perhaps there is a possibility that these medical and professional associations have been colluding with each other to produce doctored and misleading health studies and move them through peer review and publication at staggered times throughout the past 25 years in order to advance a “pro-trans” agenda for sex reasons, but I feel comfortable calling that possibility “remote”, and I would also note that “a vast decades-long conspiracy for sex reasons” is more famously associated with the Catholic church than the totality of the medical profession.
But I’m not an attorney and I’m not a judge; that is just my Dumb Guy Moral Argument, although I think it's a good one. Catholic Charities and McJones, however, are not Dumb Guy Moralists (I assume). They are Catholic therapists, who are making legal arguments. And we can’t even get to those legal arguments yet because we still have to answer the question: what the hell is a Catholic therapist?
Other terms for the practice described in this sentence include “reparative therapy” or “sexual orientation and gender identity change effort (SOGICE)”. I will use the term conversion therapy throughout given that it’s the language used in the legislative text, but know that you might see those other terms in the wild.
Numerous officials from the Michigan state government are named as defendants in the case, starting with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, author of a political biography with perhaps the worst title for a political biography that I can possibly imagine.