We Shall All Be Healed (part two)
A series on Catholic Charities v. Whitmer
Part One
Part Two (you are here)
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
I have been in talk therapy for eleven years, [yells unbelievably loudly] IN CASE YOU COULDN’T TELL. We don’t need to go into the details of my various mental illnesses, which I don’t like discussing, but I want to briefly talk about how I got started in therapy. I started seeing a psychiatrist as I began to have serious issues with my mental health. He referred me to a therapist he knew based on the symptoms I described. I eventually called her, showed up for an intake appointment, described the issues I was having, and she said “okay, well I think we should start therapy right away”.
At my first real therapy session, I got a lot of paperwork. I had to fill out my contact information, read stuff about how billing and insurance worked, do a little worksheet to set goals for what I wanted to accomplish in therapy, that sort of thing. And, on my informed consent paperwork, my therapist explained her credentials: she had her master’s degree, she had done years of clinic work before starting her own practice, she had been licensed by the state and had kept all of her necessary credentials up to date. There were rules and regulations that came with her job, she took those very seriously, and she expected me to as well. She shared her approach to therapy and how she worked with clients - an approach that had come from her extensive experience as a continuously licensed mental health professional - to make sure it was an approach I wanted to work through before I got started. This was not about just seeing someone who was easy to talk to and having them say “and how does that make you feel?”. Therapy was a real thing, with science and research behind it, and she was going to work hard, and I was expected to work hard, and we were both going to take this seriously, because it was a serious solution that would probably help me with a serious mental health issue that had been causing all aspects of my life and work to deteriorate. All of this, I think, is common for people who are starting therapy.
This is all to say that being a therapist is not just a job for people who are good listeners, who each just get out there and try out different stuff. It is a professional practice where practitioners need to keep up, in an ever-evolving field, in order to do the job well. If you were having legal problems and saw a lawyer for the first time, the lawyer would probably tell you about her approach to make sure you were aligned, and then assure you that this approach was in line with the current standards of the practice of law. She wouldn’t say “there’s some new case law that’s relevant to this topic, but I personally don’t care for it so we’re not going to acknowledge it in our approach to this case”. That would, in fact, be a very bad thing for your lawyer to say! The state that gave that lawyer her bar license would, perhaps, have an interest in her not acting like that, in order to make sure that the law was being practiced properly in the state!
Emily McJones is a real therapist. In no way am I questioning her skill and experience, and in no way am I suggesting that she is some sort of religion-addled quack. She has been doing the work of therapy, for real, for years. According to her own bio on her practice’s website, she has practiced therapy in all sorts of settings: in-home and outpatient, nonprofit and public. Before hanging out her own shingle in 2020, she was a Child and Adolescent Crisis Services therapist at CMH, the network of county-run clinics and mental health services around Lansing, and I cannot imagine that that was in any way an easy job. The legal complaint, in describing McJones’ background, notes that “Emily spent 3 years helping persistently suicidal youth, including transgender youth.” McJones eventually left to start her own practice because, in her telling:
“As the culture of the counseling community has changed over the years, it became clear that I could not remain in a secular environment, and in 2020 I left to start Little Flower Counseling. Little Flower Counseling was born out of a desire to practice psychology in such a way that clients are treated as whole people. I firmly believe that, while psychology can be very helpful on its own, any approach that ignores the spiritual can never truly reach the core of a client's issues.”
From here, taking another look at the legal complaint, we get more details on how Emily views her practice:
“Emily’s Catholic faith informs her counseling practices. She believes that there is a tendency in counseling to err in one of two directions: therapists are either so focused on providing evidence-based treatment that they neglect the impact of spiritual matters in a client’s mental and emotional health, or they are so focused on the spiritual that they neglect the good, sound interventions which have come from decades of psychological research…Some clients seek Emily’s help in part because they desire a counselor who shares and so will understand and respect their religious beliefs. Often, Emily’s clients express the belief that alignment between their actions and feelings on the one hand, and their religious convictions on the other, will be important to help them pursue their personal goals.”
I really don’t like the order of events here. McJones works as a therapist in various settings, eventually landing in the public sector around 2017 as a crisis counselor for suicidal youth, including transgender youth. Also in 2017, she converts to Catholicism, according to her bio. Eventually, she decides she can’t work in the public sector counseling suicidal youth anymore, because she feels it’s a bad fit for her culturally. I don’t know what part of the culture, specifically, was a bad fit for her, but she does say that “therapists are…so focused on providing evidence-based treatment that they neglect the impact of spiritual matters in a client’s mental and emotional health,” and she does start (and still maintains) her own faith-based practice, where she is, I think she’s implying, a little less focused on evidence-based treatment? Which strikes me as bad when treating “persistently suicidal youth”? Especially if the alternative is an approach which, as we looked at yesterday, increases the likelihood of suicide for queer youth, and has been consistently opposed by multiple relevant medical and mental health professional organizations? What is the purpose of this practice?
The other plaintiff - Catholic Charities of Jackson, Lenawee, and Hillsdale Counties - is described similarly to McJones in the “factual allegations” portion of the complaint, which basically just exists to establish who the plaintiffs are and why this is important to them. And once both of the plaintiffs are described, we get more detail on what it is they’re trying to do in their respective practices:
“Some clients, including children and teenagers, have sought Plaintiffs’ counseling on issues related to gender identity or sexual orientation. Sometimes clients have sought out Plaintiffs specifically for help with these issues. For example, clients may seek to become more comfortable with their biological sex and thus decrease the dissonance between their gender identity and biological. sex. Clients may also seek to reduce sexual activity with members of the same sex or align their sexual orientation identity with their religious beliefs…Plaintiffs believe that that when a client comes to them and seeks to change her gender identity or gender expression to align with her biological sex, or seeks to change her behavior to refrain from acting on same-sex attraction, it is their ethical and religious duty to help that client live the life she desires to live.”
And that practicing of ethical and religious duty is under threat from Michigan’s HB 4616, according to the complaint, which states that the ban on conversion therapy “threatens with destruction Plaintiffs’ business”. There is, according to the complaint, a real demand for conversion therapy from these plaintiffs, so the state is irreparably harming them by banning the practice, right? This is about helping children who experience distress over their biological sex, right? This is what they do, this is what people come to them for, right? Well, not really.
There is nothing anywhere in the public-facing marketing materials for Catholic Charities of Jackson/Lenawee/Hillsdale (CCJLH) that could reasonably suggest that they are specialists or even familiar with treatment for gender dysphoria or “seek[ing] to change her gender identity or gender expression to align with her biological sex, or seek[ing] to change her behavior to refrain from acting on same-sex attraction”. The complete list of CCJLH therapist specialities, as listed on their site, are below:
Trauma-informed therapies
Play therapy
Domestic violence
Abuse and neglect issues
Treatment of ADHD
Conduct and other behavioral issues
Depression
Anxiety
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
Personality disorders
Grief and loss issues
Relationship issues
Substance use disorder
There is additional information specific to child trauma and PTSD treatment, substance use disorder services, and grief counseling; only the first of these could even conceivably be spun into a skill set useful to the practice of conversion therapy, but even then, CCJLH doesn’t make that connection to any prospective clients. CCJLH is suing their state government because it is so critical to them and their work to lift the ban on a super-specific type of therapy that they’re currently making no effort to communicate that they actually do; gender identity and sexual orientation are even explicitly listed as protected characteristics in their non-discrimination policy. Little Flower Counseling also does not market itself as a reliable place to go for conversion therapy, and to even get there, you have to make a lot of cognitive leaps. Okay, she’s worked with children experiencing trauma, she’s Catholic, her specialities as listed on a Catholic Therapists online directory are “Sexual Abuse Victims, Depressive Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder/Scrupulosity, Chronic Suicidality & Non-Suicidal Self-Injurious Behavior (e.g. cutting)”. Are we meant to infer from that information alone that McJones is the person to go to for gender dysphoria treatment, or when you feel conflicted about your sexuality? And if we can’t infer that, does that undercut her legal argument that HB 4616 threatens to destroy her business?
Conversion therapy is still legal in Michigan as long as the client is an adult; there’s nothing stopping McJones or CCJLH from saying “are you gay or trans and don’t want to be gay or trans anymore? We can help with that!” In fact, if it’s so central to their business that they have to go to court over it, you’d kind of expect them to at least mention it once. But they don’t. They say “come to us for all of this other unrelated stuff”. It sure seems like CCJLH and Little Flower both come to their profession with broad experience and currently engage with a wide range of clients who have a wide range of needs, and that multiple specialties are a larger part of each business than conversion therapy. Does being unable to practice one specific type of therapy that has been dismissed as ineffective by the professional literature, consistently, for at least a decade, threaten to destroy both of these businesses entirely?
It’s a key pillar of the plaintiffs’ legal argument, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. The other part of the legal argument that doesn’t make any sense to me is “basically all of the rest of it”. We’ll go there next.