Clinician says Minnesota law harms kids struggling with sexual orientation, gender identity – Catholic World Report

CNA Staff, Sep 20, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

In 2023, Minnesota passed a law, signed by Gov. Tim Walz, that prohibits clinical mental health counselors from practicing “conversion therapy” with minors, effectively barring them from offering any guidance that does not affirm a child’s struggles with sexual orientation or gender identity.

This ban, enacted under House File 16 and effective Aug. 1, 2023, complicates access to tailored mental health resources for minors struggling with these issues, especially when a minor seeks to change his or her identity.

David Kirby, a clinical mental health counselor in Minnesota, told CNA that the law created a new minority: young people with same-sex attraction (SSA) who do not want it.

“There are people who find their gay attraction ego dystonic,” Kirby said. “They don’t want it. Maybe some were born with a propensity to SSA, but they know it’s not how they were created to be.”

The American Psychological Association (APA) opposes conversion therapy, or what it refers to as “sexual orientation change efforts,” because it says such efforts do not meet its definition of therapy, which is a “remediation of a physical, mental, or behavioral disorder or disease.”

“Same-sex sexual and romantic attractions, feelings, and behaviors are normal and positive variations of human sexuality regardless of sexual orientation identity,” according to the APA, and “efforts to change sexual orientation are unlikely to be successful and involve risk of harm.”

Opponents of conversion therapy often cite the use of shock therapy, which was a derivative of behavioral techniques popular in the mid-20th century. The practice has not been used in the U.S. for decades, however, according to the APA. Shock therapy peaked between the 1940s and 1970s, aligning with the APA’s classification of homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance in 1952 until its declassification as a mental disorder in 1973.

The APA acknowledges that over the last several decades, however, conversion therapy in the U.S. entails only cognitive behavioral and other forms of psychotherapy.

Ban discourages therapists from addressing other issues, opponents say

Numerous studies, including those from the APA and the National Institute of Mental Health, indicate that struggles with sexual orientation and gender identity often co-occur with other mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, and borderline personality disorder.

According to the Minnesota law’s opponents, the ban on psychotherapy that does not affirm sexual orientation and gender identity can discourage therapists, fearing legal or licensing repercussions, from addressing other underlying psychological issues — such as trauma or other mental health conditions — that could contribute to someone not wanting to be gay or transgender.

Kirby said he and others who testified in the state Legislature against the bill in 2018 and again in 2023 have been “heckled,” and some faced “extreme verbal abuse.”

Kirby said the law has had a chilling effect on Christian counselors, some of whom are afraid that if they say anything in therapy sessions that is not gay- or transgender-affirming, they could face some kind of consequence.

He said he and other counselors also have a “fear that people are coming into therapy posing as clients to spy out the therapist.”

So far, however, he said he has not run into any consequences or “pseudo-clients” himself, nor has he heard of anyone else having done so.

The fear and anxiety remain, nevertheless.

“The bill was superfluous,” Kirby said.

Two of the negative consequences of the law, in Kirby’s opinion, are that it locks people with SSA or gender identity issues into thinking “I can’t change who I am” even if they might want to. It also creates a false presumption of homophobia or transphobia. The idea that “anyone who disagrees with me is afraid of me” is just not accurate, he said.

These things are “really, really deceptive and sad for” people with SSA or gender dysphoria, he said.

“What are therapists for, anyway?” he asked. “We’re here to listen to what the client wants. We’re not here to further our agenda. We all learned that in graduate school. We listen to what the client wants, and if we feel we cannot help them, we tell them so.”

The District of Columbia and 23 states have laws that prohibit mental health counselors from practicing conversion therapy, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBT think tank. Four other states and Puerto Rico restrict but do not prohibit the practice.

‘I know I am not a woman, but I definitely don’t feel like a man’

The journal of Robin Westman, the 23-year-old man who killed two children and injured at least 20 people at a Catholic school in Minneapolis in August, showed in a video on YouTube before the attack that he wrote: “I know I am not a woman but I definitely don’t feel like a man.”

“Westman wasn’t clear on who he was,” Kirby observed. “He said he regretted his ‘brainwashing,’” referring to his transgender identity.

When asked how he or other Christian counselors would have responded if Westman had come to them for help, Kirby said: “He would have found people who are nonjudgmental; people who would have loved him, met him where he was at.”

He would have received “loving attention, to hear his story; hear his confusion; walk with him,” Kirby continued.

No one would have “hoisted any agenda on him,” he said. “He would have been met by people who were full of compassion, to help him find the pain.”

“In the end, it’s not about changing our gender. It’s not the solution,” Kirby said. “It is to find the deepest pain. At the core of our identity, who we are in God’s eyes, in our own eyes. People resort to turning to gender but it’s not the solution. It’s just a distraction from the deepest pain in the heart.”