Oh Behave! Podcast: Naming the Sidestep in the Conversion Therapy Debate

On March 31, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Chiles v. Salazar. The headlines said the Court sided with a therapist's free speech over Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for minors. This episode is about the quieter story underneath that headline, and the move almost everyone missed.

The Court answered a narrow question: can the state regulate what a licensed therapist says? It never had to answer the question that actually matters: what does conversion therapy do to the rights of the child it's performed on? That shift, from a question about the child to a question about the adult's speech, is the sidestep this episode is named for. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Working from a behavior-analytic lens, we walk through what the Court actually decided and the four things it pointedly did not. We take the 8-1 majority seriously, including the principled free-speech reasoning that a thoughtful person could land on without any animus toward LGBTQ kids. We look at the licensing argument that was available but never made. And we build the case for keeping the child, the actual rights holder, at the center of the frame where they belonged the whole time.

Then we do the harder thing. We look at the evidence honestly, and we apply the same scrutiny to the research that supports our position as to the research that doesn't. We name the real limitations in the conversion-therapy harm data. We correct a myth that's convenient for our own side. And we land on the one distinction that survives all the methodological mess: the difference between an intervention measured by whether it helps the person receiving it, and one measured by whether it makes the people around them more comfortable.

The argument we end on doesn't depend on winning the evidence debate. It holds even if you set every study aside. Because a child is not raw material. A child is not a problem to be fixed. A child is a person, first and always.

Whether you're a behavior analyst, a clinician, a caregiver, or someone who followed the headlines and felt like something was off but couldn't name it, this one is for you.

This episode is a companion to our relaunch episode, "Human First, Human Always," but it stands entirely on its own.

A note on content: This episode discusses conversion therapy, harm to children, and suicide. Please take care of yourself as you listen. If you need support, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 (call or text 988). The Trevor Project supports LGBTQ youth at 1-866-488-7386 or by texting START to 678-678.

Full sources, a plain-language glossary, and further reading are in the show notes. Truth matters, which means you should be able to check the work.

Human first. Human always.

Show Notes are published to Substack

The Oh Behave! Podcast is back; and this episode explains why it took as long as it did.

This is not an apology for the hiatus. It's something more honest than that: an account of doing the actual work of examining beliefs, sitting with discomfort, and changing course rather than just knowing you should. That process takes time. It took the time it took.

This episode is about being wrong. Specifically, it's about why being wrong feels the way it feels, what the science says about that, and why the ability to be genuinely wrong without it costing you your sense of self might be one of the most important things a human being can develop.

We start with a concept from behavioral science called cognitive fusion; the experience of a belief feeling less like something you're thinking and more like something you are. When a belief fuses with your identity, a challenge to the belief stops feeling like a correction and starts feeling like an attack. That's not weakness or stubbornness; it's a description of how human cognition works, grounded in a framework called Relational Frame Theory (RFT).

From there, we look at history. How being wrong feels is not a matter of personality or intelligence; it's a learning history. If being wrong was dangerous in the environments where you learned who you were, your nervous system learned to treat it as a threat. It may still be responding to a danger that is long gone.

Then we get practical. The goal is not to stop feeling the sting of being wrong; it's to feel it fully and still be able to move. The episode introduces flexible engagement as a name for that capacity; the ability to stay in honest contact with your experience, including the parts that challenge what you believe, without fusing so tightly that thoughtful response becomes impossible. We walk through what that looks like in practice and what it feels like from the inside.

Finally, we look at the verbal behavior itself. Understanding that you're wrong and saying "I was wrong" out loud are two completely different behaviors with two completely different histories. The words live in a social world; and that social world shapes whether honesty becomes more or less likely over time. Intellectual honesty is not only an individual practice. It is a relational one.

The episode closes where it began: the scientific method is not a departure from human nature. It is human nature formalized. From the day we are born, we are collecting data, running experiments, seeking to understand. Being a scientist is being human.

Human first. Human always.

Jane Logvinova of ABADesk is my guest. We talk about the 6 attitudes and philosophical assumptions of science (5th Edition Task List A-2).

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