Senator Scott Wiener posted a victory lap on Instagram last week. “We just scored a big win for LGBTQ kids,” he wrote, telling followers his bill to “strengthen” California’s ban on conversion therapy had just passed the Legislature, and vowing to fight off what he cast as a MAGA attack on those kids.

He should not be celebrating. What actually happened is that his own bill scared California’s county governments into admitting something out loud: they are worried they could get sued for how they steer confused kids toward transgender identities. That fear is what gutted his bill, not the political right, and not persuasion. The people who actually stripped his bill’s teeth were not MAGA. They were the associations that insure and represent California’s own city and county governments.

Wiener (D-San Francisco) wrote Senate Bill 934 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar that talk therapy between a willing client and a licensed counselor is protected speech, not conduct the state can simply ban. That ruling put California’s 2012 law against sexual orientation change counseling for minors, SB 1172, on shaky legal ground.

Wiener could not out-argue the Supreme Court, so he tried a different approach. Rather than defend the ban in court, SB 934 would have let people sue counselors and the counselor’s employer for counseling reaching back to January 1, 2009. The deadline to sue was extended so minors could wait 22 years after turning 18, adults could wait 10 years from their last session, or anyone at all could sue within five years of whenever they claimed to have “discovered” the harm, with no outer limit on that discovery window. A counselor who last saw a client in 2009 could still be sued today, nearly two decades later, if the former client simply said they only just realized the counseling hurt them. A plaintiff would not have needed a diagnosis. Courts could infer the counseling caused harm simply because counseling happened and distress came later, unless the counselor proved otherwise. Announcing the bill back in March, Wiener called such counseling “psychological torture.”

That is not a modest change. That is a mechanism built to make offering this type of counseling too financially risky for anyone to try, even when the client insisted on it.

Senator Wiener wrote SB 934’s counseling ban in supposedly neutral language in an attempt to satisfy the US Supreme Court by targeting any effort by a licensed provider to direct a patient toward a predetermined sexual orientation or gender identity outcome, in either direction. That wording was the whole undoing.

County mental health departments realized the same “predetermined outcome” language Wiener meant to use against Christian counselors would just as easily apply to their own social workers and counselors who routinely direct gender-confused kids toward transgenderism. In a July 16, 2026, report to the Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles County’s own Legislative Affairs office laid it out in writing. The county’s Department of Mental Health (DMH) warned that SB 934 could expose the county to liability “beyond the author’s intent,” reaching even counseling that fully complied with national clinical standards. DMH specifically flagged the risk, stating it was “concerned that individuals who later detransition could bring claims related to earlier treatment, even when that care was consistent with accepted standards at the time.”

That warning was not an isolated objection. The California State Association of Counties, the California Association of Joint Powers Authorities, the California Association of School Business Officials, Public Risk Innovation Solutions and Management, the Rural County Representatives of California, the Schools Excess Liability Fund, and Urban Counties of California all told the Legislature they would oppose SB 934 unless the liability was removed. These are not conservative groups. These organizations insure California’s local governments, and they told Sacramento that Wiener’s bill would come back to bite them.

On August 13, the Assembly Appropriations Committee listened. It stripped out the entire civil lawsuit structure, the extended statute of limitations, the damages, the attorney’s fees, all of it, and passed a much smaller bill 11 to 4. The Assembly floor passed that stripped-down version 58 to 18 on August 19. The Senate concurred in those changes 27 to 9 on August 20, and the bill now heads to Governor Newsom’s desk.

What is left is not the bill Wiener announced. It amends the definition of “sexual orientation change efforts” in the Business and Professions Code to also cover gender identity, defined as directing a minor patient toward a predetermined sexual orientation or gender identity outcome. Violating it is what it always was under SB 1172: unprofessional conduct, subject to discipline by the provider’s own licensing board. No lawsuits. No damages. No 22-year lookback. The entire enforcement mechanism Wiener built his announcement around is gone.

That is not a footnote. Wiener’s own press release was titled around giving survivors the ability to seek justice and compensation in court through malpractice claims. That tool does not exist in the bill that passed. He got a modest expansion of an existing licensing rule for minors, the same rule California has had since 2012, and lost the actual weapon he built the bill to create. Calling that a “big win” is spin. Calling it a strengthened ban, when the only teeth the bill ever had got pulled by his own side, is something closer to damage control….

From California Family Council