Andrew Bailey: Kansas City, Jackson County counseling censorship hurts young people | Opinion

Disagreements are normal. And that’s a good thing. So good, in fact, that the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech — the predicate to disagreement. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said almost 100 years ago, this freedom is “indispensable to the discovery and spread of … truth.”

One area of disagreement is how to care for children whose sense of gender identity differs from their sex. Debate on this issue spans across Europe and many corners of the United States. But Jackson County and Kansas City have stacked the deck on these discussions in a critical context: counseling.

Here’s how. These local governments have adopted ordinances — which they misleadingly call conversion therapy bans — that prohibit voluntary conversations between counselors and minor clients that aim to help the client embrace his or her sex. But the ban is a one-way street. Going the opposite direction, the ordinances allow counselors to drive young people toward identifying contrary to their sex. Under this logic, counselors may encourage children to pursue irreversible surgeries and drugs to look like the opposite sex, but counselors cannot explore the truth about a child’s sex to save them from these harms.

The ordinances are broad, too. They apply to “any” counseling — including counseling that is nothing but voluntary discussions between counselor and client. They even apply when clients specifically seek out counseling to help them align their identity with their body.

These ordinances violate the First Amendment. Governments cannot dictate the content of private conversations. Nor can they deprive willing listeners of information they seek. For those reasons, two counselors and I have just filed a suit challenging these bans.

Wyatt Bury and Pamela Eisenreich are counselors affected by these ordinances. They help clients pinpoint and work toward goals that the clients set. Eisenreich counsels children on many topics, including struggles with gender identity. Bury hopes to expand his practice to offer more counseling for minors, but has refrained from doing so because of the ordinances.

Bury and Eisenreich would like to speak with minors experiencing discomfort with their sex to help them identify consistently with their sex if the clients desire those discussions. But the ordinances prohibit these voluntary conversations, thereby depriving other Missourians of information they’d like to hear.

This censorship obstructs the search for truth in an area where truth is desperately needed.

Many European countries once pioneered using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and permanent surgeries on children who identified as the opposite sex. But now, those countries have pulled back and restricted minors’ access based on safety and efficacy concerns.

Likewise, Missouri recently passed the SAFE Act, a law that protects children from harmful, unnecessary, and high-risk “transition” drugs and surgeries. A state court judge recently upheld the act after finding that there is “an almost total lack of consensus as to the medical ethics of adolescent gender dysphoria treatment.” If the state can restrict these procedures as experimental and harmful for minors, surely private counselors can help those minors and their families who want to avoid these procedures.

Unfortunately, some courts disagree with the right approach here. Other courts have rightly held that these regulations violate the First Amendment by burdening speech. That gap makes it critical for the Supreme Court to weigh in, as Alliance Defending Freedom and Missouri have recently asked the court to do in Chiles v. Salazar.

But for now, Bury, Eisenreich, and the state of Missouri are asking a federal court to reaffirm the fundamental principle that governments cannot silence speech because they disagree with its message. Such censorship ultimately hurts the most vulnerable: children looking for answers to deeply personal questions.