Another legislative session, another attack on parental rights — and another violation of the U.S. Constitution. 

Fresh off a historic 8-1 shellacking by the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices ruled for the third time that Colorado violated the First Amendment, the legislature seems primed to pass another anti-free speech law. 

Will the General Assembly ever learn? 

The Democrat-run legislature is advancing House Bill 26-1322 to allow civil legal actions against “certain individuals engaging in conversion therapy efforts,” with no statute of limitations. 

The bill concerns alleged “sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts” by a licensed mental health professional to, in part, “direct a patient toward a predetermined… outcome, including efforts to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” 

“Certain individuals” is misleading. It also covers anyone who supervised or exercised authority over the professional and failed to stop them, and anyone who “negligently” hired or retained such a professional — potentially reaching parents who sought such therapy for their child. 

The bill allows claims filed years or even decades later, and it retroactively revives pre-existing claims if the statute of limitations hadn’t expired by the bill’s effective date of July 1, 2026. Defendants may be liable for economic, non-economic, and exemplary damages. 

The senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom — which represented licensed counselor Kaley Chiles and defeated Colorado in all three Supreme Court cases — testified that HB 1322 amends the existing definition of conversion therapy, which the Supreme Court already “invalidated as applied to talk therapy in Chiles v. Salazar” just last month. 

Baylor warned the legislature HB 1322 similarly “discriminates on the basis of content and viewpoint and is thus unconstitutional.” Colorado’s expert materials even admitted they “could not prove that talk therapy causes harm,” he said. Yet, that’s the basis for this bill. 

This time, rather than a direct ban, the bill’s most consequential change is in rewriting malpractice law. As Baylor said, it “significantly alters the rules governing medical malpractice claims” to advance the same viewpoint restriction. 

Medical malpractice cases traditionally require the plaintiff to prove that “but for” the provider’s negligence, the alleged injury would never have happened. HB 1322 turns that standard on its head, providing that the court “may infer specific causation from evidence.” 

“May infer?” What happened to prove? 

The sole exception is if “the defendant establishes, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the plaintiff’s psychological injury or illness was caused solely by other factors” unrelated to the provider’s alleged treatment. This shifts the burden of proof onto the defendant to disprove “specific causation.” 

“Most tragically, the bill’s primary consequence will be to chill and punish the sort of much-needed help counselors like Kaylee Chiles provide to hurting children and adults,” Baylor warned — pushing patients “toward medical interventions that the evidence increasingly shows don’t help but actually harm patients.” 

The bill gives the impression of neutrality by specifying that these “change efforts” are prohibited “regardless of the sexual orientation or gender identity the patient is directed towards.” But the very first exclusion eradicates the neutrality entirely: “Counseling or therapy that assists a patient in exploring or aligning their gender identity.” 

That effectively permits only gender-affirming care by another name — helping a patient move toward identifying as transgender — and Colorado’s attempt to mandate exactly that was struck down in Chiles. 

Colorado detransitioner Antoinette De La Cruz began physically transitioning at age 21 and spent nearly two decades realizing her mistake before de-transitioning. Her harm should fall within the bill’s eliminated statute of limitations, but her experience isn’t covered by HB1322 at all. 

De La Cruz’s own provider sped up her transition without proper vetting, including whether she’d undergone required therapy. (She didn’t.) 

“Therapy is really the way to go — helping a person reconnect with themselves and not further dissociate from their body,” she told me on KOA radio. “Children cannot consent to this sort of thing. This is not true care. This is not real science and is not going to help these kiddos who are going through this sort of thing.” 

Colorado law already chills therapists from taking complex cases of gender dysphoria in minors or asking hard questions about their underlying conditions, even when the child and their parents agree. 

“From my experience, this is like a third rail,” one veteran psychiatrist told me, requesting anonymity. “Nobody wants to get canceled, be fired, be targeted — and the activists around this issue are about the most aggressive I’ve ever seen.” 

If 1322 passes, parents seeking therapists who explore root causes of their children’s gender dysphoria rather than simply affirming gender transition will face the threat of lawsuits, now or many years in the future. 

Many gender dysphoria patients present with underlying or accompanying issues like autism, PTSD, bipolar disorder, depression or anxiety. A recent Finnish study found that gender-referred adolescents had significantly more “psychiatric morbidity,” and the need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment “increased considerably” among those who underwent medical gender reassignment. 

The psychiatrist compared treating gender dysphoria patients to a patient showing up to the ER with a fever. “You start looking for the reason why. If free to do so, I would approach gender dysphoria the same way.” 

HB 1322 defies the U.S. Supreme Court, warps malpractice law and chills the very therapeutic care children need most. 

The General Assembly has been here before. They know how this story ends. 

Jimmy Sengenberger is an investigative journalist, public speaker, and longtime local talk-radio host. Reach Jimmy online at Jimmysengenberger.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @SengCenter.