What Conversion Therapy Being Legal Again Actually Means

A protester in Kansas City marches with students from Crossroads Preparatory Academy in 2022. On Thursday, City Council repealed a ban on so-called conversion therapy, a scientifically discredited practice that seeks to “convert” LGBTQ+ minors to a heterosexual lifestyle.

On March 31, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors violated the First Amendment. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissent. The ruling has since sent shockwaves through approximately two dozen states that have similar bans on the books.

The case, Chiles v. Salazar, centered on a Christian licensed counselor who argued that Colorado's law restricted her ability to counsel clients away from same-sex attraction or transgender identity. The Court agreed, holding that because the therapy in question involved speech rather than physical treatment, the state's attempt to regulate it amounted to viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment.

What does that mean in practice? It means that in states whose conversion therapy bans are materially similar to Colorado's, those bans are now in serious constitutional jeopardy. Michigan's law was already enjoined by the Sixth Circuit in December 2025. Others are watching and waiting. The Trevor Project estimates that 5 percent of LGBTQ+ youth have already been subjected to conversion therapy, with another 8 percent having been threatened with it.

The majority framed this as a free speech case. Gorsuch and the seven justices who joined him reasoned that if therapy is talk, then restricting what a therapist can say amounts to the government policing a conversation.

There is a logic to that argument, in the narrow constitutional sense. But logic is not the same as wisdom, and constitutional permission is not the same as human safety.

Colorado did not wait. On May 8, the state legislature passed HB26-1322, a revised ban that attempts to address the First Amendment concerns raised in Chiles v. Salazar by making the statute viewpoint-neutral. It also extended the statute of limitations for survivors to bring medical malpractice claims against therapists who harmed them.

Other states will need to do the same. And they will need to do it quickly, because the window between a Supreme Court ruling and the resumption of a harmful practice is not measured in years. It is measured in months.

The ruling is a reminder that constitutional rights do not exist in a vacuum. A therapist's right to speak is real. So is a teenager's right not to be told that who they are is a disorder that needs to be fixed. When the Court weighs those interests and comes down 8 to 1 on the side of the therapist, it is worth asking what framework it is using to measure harm, and whose safety it considers worth protecting.