A federal judge issued a permanent order barring Michigan from enforcing its 2023 law that restricted counselors from offering talk therapy to children struggling with gender dysphoria, a decisive win for religious liberty advocates.
U.S. District Judge Jane Beckering handed down the order Thursday, requiring the state to stop enforcing HB4616, the law Michigan's legislature passed in 2023 to prohibit licensed counselors from using talk therapy to help minors who experience distress over their biological sex. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the counselors who challenged the statute, announced the ruling as a sweeping victory that covers every licensed therapist in the state, not just the plaintiffs who filed suit.
The order lands months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar that similar talk-therapy practices are protected speech under the First Amendment. With that precedent on the books, Michigan had no legal ground left to stand on. And the state, by all appearances, knew it.
Luke Goodrich, senior counsel at the Becket Fund and lead attorney for the counselors, said he was not surprised Michigan folded. The Supreme Court's March ruling in Chiles v. Salazar established that the First Amendment shields conversations between therapists and their clients from government censorship, a principle that cut directly against the Michigan law's core mechanism.
Goodrich put it plainly:
"The First Amendment clearly protects conversations between counselors and their clients, and Michigan had no constitutional basis for silencing them."
The court's final order appears to have been stipulated, meaning Michigan agreed to the outcome rather than fight a losing battle in front of a judge bound by Supreme Court precedent. The case, filed as Catholic Charities v. Whitmer, challenged the law on both free-speech and religious-liberty grounds. Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel's office did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
That silence is telling. Nessel's office enforced the law, defended it, and now has nothing to say about its permanent demise. The counselors who brought the case risked their licenses to fight a statute that told them what they could and could not say to a child in a private therapy session. The state that tried to silence them could not even muster a public statement when the court told it to stop.
Goodrich went further than the legal argument. He drew a direct line between Michigan's therapy ban and the medical interventions that follow when talk therapy is taken off the table. In a recent period of growing international skepticism about pediatric gender medicine, his framing carried real weight.
Goodrich stated:
"Michigan's crackdown on talk therapy pushed children with gender dysphoria toward harmful, irreversible drugs and surgeries; the harms of these procedures are so serious that 26 states and at least five European countries have banned or significantly restricted them. Thankfully, the Constitution stopped Michigan's attack on free speech, religious liberty, and children in need."
Those numbers, 26 states and at least five European nations pulling back from pediatric gender interventions, reflect a broad, bipartisan reassessment that Michigan's Democratic leadership tried to ignore. The state legislature passed HB4616 in 2023 at a moment when the political left treated any skepticism of gender-affirming care for minors as bigotry. Courts in other jurisdictions have been pressing attorneys on the scope of religious liberty protections in cases that touch on similar tensions between government mandates and conscience rights.
The law's practical effect was to strip licensed professionals of the ability to offer the least invasive option, conversation, to a child in distress. If a teenager walked into a counselor's office confused about gender and looking for help accepting his or her biological sex, Michigan law said the counselor had to stay quiet or steer the child toward affirmation. Talk therapy that explored other outcomes was off-limits.
That approach put Michigan at odds not only with the First Amendment but with the direction of medical policy across the developed world. European countries that pioneered gender-affirming care for minors have reversed course after systematic reviews found the evidence base thin and the risks serious. Michigan doubled down anyway.
One of the most significant aspects of the ruling, if Goodrich's characterization holds, is its breadth. He described the court's order as covering all licensed Michigan professionals who practice talk therapy, a statewide shield, not a narrow carve-out for the named plaintiffs.
Goodrich said:
"The court's order protects every licensed Michigan professional who practices talk therapy, not just the counselors who brought this case. It's a major victory for kids, counselors, and common sense."
The full text of the order has not been quoted in available reporting, so the precise legal scope, whether it functions as a universal injunction or a stipulated agreement binding only on state enforcement, remains an open question. But the practical result is clear: Michigan cannot punish a therapist for having an honest conversation with a child about gender.
Federal courts have been issuing a string of consequential rulings on politically charged questions this year. The Supreme Court sent major redistricting cases back to lower courts in recent months, and individual federal judges have shaped policy debates from naming rights at federal buildings to state-level political disputes. The Michigan ruling fits that pattern, a single judge enforcing constitutional limits that elected officials tried to override.
The arc of this case moved fast once the Supreme Court weighed in. Michigan passed HB4616 in 2023, riding a wave of progressive enthusiasm for codifying gender-affirming-care mandates into state law. For roughly two years, the statute stood, and counselors who wanted to offer talk therapy faced the threat of professional discipline.
Then came March of this year. The Supreme Court's ruling in Chiles v. Salazar declared that similar talk-therapy practices enjoy First Amendment protection. That decision did not name Michigan's law specifically, but it removed the constitutional foundation on which the law rested.
By Thursday, the fight was over. Judge Beckering's permanent order formalized what the Supreme Court had already made inevitable. Michigan's attorney general did not mount a last stand. The state agreed to stop enforcing the law, or at least did not contest the order, and the Becket Fund claimed total victory.
The entire sequence, from passage to permanent defeat, took roughly three years. For the counselors who challenged the law, those were three years of legal risk, professional uncertainty, and the knowledge that the state they practiced in considered their conversations with children to be a form of harm.
Attorney General Nessel's decision not to comment is worth noting on its own terms. Her office was the enforcement arm of HB4616. If a counselor violated the therapy ban, Nessel's office had the authority to act. Now that a federal court has permanently blocked that authority, the state's top law-enforcement official has offered no explanation, no defense of the law's intent, and no acknowledgment of the ruling.
That pattern, aggressive policy followed by silent retreat, has become familiar in blue-state governance. Officials push laws that satisfy activist constituencies, decline to defend them when courts push back, and move on without accountability. The counselors and families who lived under the threat of HB4616 for three years do not get those years back.
When the Constitution says the government cannot tell a therapist what to say to a child in a private session, the answer from elected officials should not be silence. It should be an explanation of why they tried in the first place.