Two right-wing organizations are taking aim at the ban on conversion therapy in Wisconsin’s professional code for social workers, citing a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

But the head of a group that fought for the ban says professional standards are the central issue — and aren’t subject to free speech claims. 

In a joint letter Wisconsin Family Action and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty are demanding that Wisconsin repeal the ban. Conversion therapy is a widely discredited practice purporting to change sexual orientation or gender identity.

The Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board included the ban in its updated professional code published in April 2024.

The code declares that it is “unprofessional conduct” for practitioners to use or promote “any intervention or method that has the purpose of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including attempting to change behaviors or expressions of self or to reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender.”

WILL has been at the center of many conflicts over trans-inclusive policies and gender identity. Wisconsin Family Action has also lobbied against including gender identity in state civil rights protections.

Their letter seeking the conversion therapy ban’s repeal cites a U.S. Supreme Court ruling March 31 in a lawsuit that challenges Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy on First Amendment grounds.

The high court ruling didn’t throw out the Colorado law directly. Instead, it instructed the federal court hearing the Colorado lawsuit to subject that law to “strict scrutiny” on First Amendment grounds because it seeks to “regulate speech based on viewpoint.”

The WILL-Wisconsin Family Action letter, first reported by Wisconsin Health News, was sent April 14 to Gov. Tony Evers, the Department of Safety and Professional Services and the chair of the social work examining board. 

The letter demands that the board stop enforcing the ban and start the process of repealing it. WILL represents a Christian counselor in a pending federal lawsuit to block a La Crosse city ordinance that bans conversion therapy.

Marc Herstand, executive director for the National Association of Social Workers’ Wisconsin chapter, said the U.S. Supreme Court ruling isn’t relevant to the Wisconsin rule.

“I don’t think it applies because we have a rule, and according to state statute, professional boards can create their own ethical standards,” Herstand told the Wisconsin Examiner. That is supported by both the general law that applies to the state’s licensing boards as well as specific provisions authorizing the social worker board, he said.

Herstand said rules against conversion therapy are to prevent harm. He compared the practice to an electrician’s bad advice that leads to a homeowner’s fatal electric shock or a health provider whose bad advice leads a patient with diabetes to lose a limb to nerve damage or the loss of circulation.

“That’s not free speech — that’s unprofessional conduct,” Herstand said. The electrician or health professional “would be held accountable by the [relevant professional] board. Conversion therapy is exactly the same thing.”

Republican lawmakers repeatedly blocked several previous attempts to update Wisconsin’s social work standards. In April 2024, after the Legislature’s session ended, the social work examining board updated its professional standards to restore the conversion therapy ban.

Then, in a landmark state Supreme Court ruling in July 2025, Chief Justice Jill Karofsky wrote that the statutes that state legislators had used to review and suspend administrative rules violated the Wisconsin Constitution. The examining board “exercised its statutory authority” when it revised its rules to ban conversion therapy, Karofsky wrote in the 4-3 decision.