California is taking a legally creative approach to protect LGBTQ+ youth from conversion therapy after the Supreme Court basically said states can’t ban the practice outright. Instead of a direct prohibition, Senate Bill 934 would open up conversion therapy practitioners to serious malpractice lawsuits, and that could be a game-changer.

Introduced by state Senator Scott Wiener back in January, SB934 extends the statute of limitations for seeking damages from conversion therapy to 22 years for those who received the therapy before turning 18. That matches the timeline for civil damages from childhood sexual assault, which signals just how seriously California is treating this issue. For adults who underwent conversion therapy after 18, there’s a 10-year window to pursue malpractice claims.

This move came after the Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision last week essentially protected conversion therapy under the First Amendment, arguing that therapists’ opinions about gender and sexuality count as free speech. The ruling threw out Colorado’s conversion therapy ban and has serious implications for similar laws across the country. But here’s where California’s new approach gets interesting: the justices actually left a door open for states to enforce medical malpractice laws based on specific findings of harm.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the SF-based National Center for LGBTQ Rights, is cautiously optimistic. “The net effect of this decision will be to strengthen legal protections for young people who are harmed by conversion therapy”, he told the Chronicle. He points out that survivors often take years to realize the therapy itself was the problem, not personal failure. A law that extends the statute of limitations could actually be more effective than an outright ban because it gives people time to understand the harm they experienced.

Wiener’s take is blunt: “It’s quackery, it’s torture and it should be banned. And if we can’t ban it, we should at least give people the tools to seek compensation from the people who inflicted this harm on them”.

The Supreme Court’s decision was wild in other ways too. Justice Elena Kagan, usually a liberal voice, sided with the majority, arguing the Colorado law wasn’t “viewpoint-neutral”. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that protecting some people’s free speech but not others would be unconstitutional. The only dissent came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who argued that conversion therapy isn’t just speech, it’s harmful healthcare being marketed as treatment.

Here’s the thing: California’s original 2012 ban on conversion therapy is still technically on the books. It would take years of legal battles to strike it down. So while we wait for the courts to sort this out, SB934 offers a practical path forward, making conversion therapy so legally risky that practitioners might actually think twice before harming young people.