The legal group that demanded Wisconsin rescind a professional standard for therapists that bars attempts to change sexual orientation or gender identity is now suing Gov. Tony Evers and the counselors’ professional board to kill the standard.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty filed the lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Milwaukee on behalf of two licensed therapists, charging that the standard is unconstitutional because it prescribes “what views [the therapists] may express.”

In April 2024 the examining board for licensed counselors and therapists added to its definitions of unprofessional conduct “sexual orientation change efforts,” commonly referred to as conversion therapy.

Conversion therapy has included electric shock, physical violence and “personal degradation and humiliation,” according to a 2015 statement opposing  the practice from the American Academy of Nursing.

The Wisconsin board standard barring conversion therapy includes “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.”

The board’s guidance document calls such practices “harmful, ineffective, non-evidence based, and not in line with current standards of professional practice.”

In March, the U.S. Supreme Court sent a lawsuit against a Colorado law banning conversion therapy back to lower courts. The high court said that applying the Colorado law to talk therapy required “strict scrutiny” for impinging on the First Amendment right of free speech.

Two weeks later, WILL and Wisconsin Family Action wrote to Gov. Tony Evers, demanding that the state repeal the professional standard barring conversion therapy.

The demand letter asserted that the court “struck down the law,” a claim WILL has repeated in publicizing its lawsuit.

Evers rejected the demand and stated in his letter to WILL that the organizations were “misreading” the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Colorado case. Rather than striking down the Colorado law, the high court sent a lawsuit back to lower courts, directing them to apply “strict scrutiny” on First Amendment grounds to how the law is applied to talk therapy.

The lawsuit WILL filed against Wisconsin’s standard names as defendants Evers; Dan Hereth, secretary of the state Department of Safety and Professional Services, which administers the licensing boards for a wide range of professional disciplines; and all the members of the Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board.

WILL argues that the therapists it represents practice only talk therapy, conducting their counseling practice as “an exercise of their faith,” and that clients have voluntarily sought their “faith-based counseling, including obtaining advice on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

The professional standard “prevents Plaintiffs from providing verbal advice in accordance with their sincerely-held religious beliefs in helping these patients specifically seeking to align their gender identity with their biological sex or to make changes relating to their sexual orientation or expression,” the lawsuit states.

A DSPS spokesperson said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation. A spokesperson for Evers referred to the letter Evers wrote rejecting WILL’s demand.

“I do not believe this lawsuit will succeed,” said Marc Herstand, executive director for the National Association of Social Workers Wisconsin chapter. “Wisconsin law clearly gives professions the authority to set their own Conduct Codes.”

The conversion therapy ban’s adoption in 2024 marked the third attempt by the professional board to bar the practice. Previous efforts were blocked by the Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules. In 2025, the state Supreme Court ruled that state statutes giving the committee the power to block rules indefinitely were unconstitutional.

WILL since its founding has pursued legal actions against measures and policies respecting LGBTQ+ people, programs aimed at redressing systemic racial discrimination, and local election administration practices intended to increase voter access to the ballot box.

The organization has sued to block public health measures that were taken during the COVID-19 pandemic; argued that government efforts to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace are unconstitutional; and defended laws such as Wisconsin’s 2011 Act 10, which stripped most public employees of most union rights.

Wisconsin Family Action has opposed LGBTQ+ rights and has lobbied against the inclusion of gender identity in civil rights protections under Wisconsin law.

Three weeks after two right-wing groups demanded the repeal of a professional licensing board’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ clients of social workers and other therapists, Gov. Tony Evers sent a sharply worded reply.

In a Tuesday letter to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Wisconsin Family Action, Evers declared, “my administration has no intention of repealing Wisconsin’s conversion therapy ban.”

Evers asserted that the April 14 demand letter from the two groups was based on “a significant misreading” of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that threw parts of a Colorado ban on conversion therapy into question. 

Evers wrote that it was “disappointing” that the organizations support “a long-disavowed and outdated practice” that extensive research has shown to be ineffective and responsible for harms including depression, suicide, substance misuse, posttraumatic stress and anxiety.

“On the other hand, this should come as no surprise,” Evers wrote. “After all, bullying LGBTQ kids and Wisconsinites seems to be an important goal for Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Wisconsin Family Action.”

Purported to dissuade people from same-sex attractions and from gender dysphoria — which the American Psychiatric Association has defined as  “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity” — conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy, has been widely discredited.

Conversion therapy is not limited to talk therapy. “Aversive techniques used in reparative therapies have included electric shock, physical violence, administration of emetics, and personal degradation and humiliation,” the American Academy of Nursing wrote in a 2015 statement opposing the practice.

The Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board published an updated professional code in April 2024 that declared “any intervention or method” used or promoted to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity to be “unprofessional conduct” that could subject a practitioner to professional discipline.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a March 31 ruling, sent a lawsuit challenging a Colorado law against conversion therapy back to lower federal courts. The ruling instructed the lower courts to apply “strict scrutiny” on First Amendment grounds to the Colorado law because it seeks to “regulate speech based on viewpoint.”

In their demand letter, WILL and Wisconsin Family Action called on the Evers administration to repeal the ban in the Wisconsin therapists’ code. The letter declared that it was similar to the Colorado law and claimed that “the Supreme Court held that Colorado’s substantively identical statute was unconstitutional.”

Evers wrote that the demand “relies on a significant misreading of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision” and had “erroneously” characterized its findings. 

“First, the Court intentionally — and specifically — stopped short of striking down any applications of Colorado’s law,” Evers wrote. The high court instead remanded the case to the lower court to apply a “more searching scrutiny” to the law, he added. “Repeal before that occurs would be premature.”

Evers also wrote that the ruling “expressly held that heightened scrutiny applies only to certain applications of Colorado’s law, not the entire provision. Specifically, the case concerned only Colorado’s conversion therapy prohibition as it applied to talk therapy — not to other treatment, such as physical or medication interventions.”

Quoting the Court’s ruling, Evers wrote that the Colorado plaintiff, therapist Kaley Chiles, stated that “the statute has many valid applications. Indeed, [she] did not take issue with Colorado’s effort to ban what she herself calls ‘long-abandoned, aversive’ physical interventions. Instead, Ms. Chiles objected to Colorado’s law only as it applies to her talk therapy, therapy that involves no physical interventions or medications, only the spoken word.”

Wisconsin’s professional rule also covers more than talk therapy, Evers wrote, and the therapy, counseling and social work board “will maintain the rule and continue to enforce its valid applications, in order to protect Wisconsinites from harmful and offensive practices by Board licensees.”

WILL’s initial response Thursday to a request for comment was a two-word email message from WILL Deputy Counsel Rebecca Furdek: “Lawsuit incoming.”

In a follow up statement, Furdek said that Evers was “resorting to personal, baseless attacks on WILL and its mission.” Contrary to the distinctions Evers made about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the statement reiterated WILL’s characterization that the Court found Colorado’s “substantively identical law amounted to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.”

Making no reference to other conversion therapy tactics, the statement concluded: “Government shouldn’t be deciding which viewpoints are ‘acceptable’ for Christian counselors to express when providing talk therapy to the individuals who voluntarily seek out faith-based counseling.”

In his letter, Evers wrote that because the Colorado case remains active in lower federal courts, the Department of Safety and Professional Services will attach a note to the conversion therapy rule stating that “certain instances of the unprofessional conduct” it refers to “are the subject of ongoing litigation.”

Wisconsin’s conversion therapy ban was enacted after several previous attempts were blocked by the Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules. A Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in July 2025 found that state laws the committee’s Republican majority used to review and suspend administrative rules were unconstitutional and encroached on the examining board’s legal authority.

Marc Herstand, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers Wisconsin chapter, praised Evers’ letter Thursday. The association was among the groups that urged the counseling board to add conversion therapy to practices considered unprofessional conduct. 

Wisconsin state law “clearly gives professions the authority to establish their own Conduct Code as the social work profession, along with the marriage and family therapy and professional counseling professions,  have done in classifying Conversion Therapy as unprofessional conduct,” Herstand said in an email message. 

“I applaud Governor Evers for his recognition of the severe harm that Conversion Therapy inflicts on LGBTQ children and his commitment to retain the ban on Conversion Therapy [in the professional code] to the maximum extent possible.”

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.