SKIP ADVERTISEMENTLiveUpdated Oct. 7, 2025, 9:31 a.m. ETColorado and over 20 other states have banned the practice aimed at changing the sexual orientation or gender identity of young people.ImageThe federal government may be shut down, but the Supreme Court is open.Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times PinnedUpdated Oct. 7, 2025, 9:19 a.m. ETThe Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear a challenge to Colorado’s ban on mental health professionals providing conversion therapy to children, a practice that aims to change a client’s sexual orientation or gender identity.More than 20 other states have similar laws affecting licensed providers. Colorado lawmakers passed the restrictions in 2019, after major medical associations found conversion therapy ineffective and potentially harmful for young people.Here’s what else to know:First Amendment: An important question for the justices is whether Colorado’s law is an unconstitutional infringement on free speech or a legal regulation on professional conduct. The case has split the lower courts.Conversion therapy: The practice uses a range of techniques in an attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. It surged in popularity among evangelical Christian communities in the 1980s and 1990s.Therapist: The therapist challenging the law, Kaley Chiles, is an evangelical Christian and says she is not trying to “cure” clients of same-sex attractions or “change” their sexual orientation.Care for minors: The court is taking up this case just a few months after upholding a ban in Tennessee prohibiting certain gender-transition care for young people. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the thorny questions that case posed should be resolved by “the people, their elected representatives and the democratic process.”Oct. 7, 2025, 9:31 a.m. ETThe Supreme Court in Washington.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York TimesWhile the federal government enters its second week of a shutdown, the Supreme Court’s doors are open Tuesday morning and the court is in session.The nation’s highest court “will continue to conduct its normal operations,” a spokeswoman said, explaining that it “will rely on permanent funds not subject to annual approval, as it has in the past, to maintain operations through the duration of short-term lapses of annual appropriations.”Oct. 7, 2025, 9:18 a.m. ETKaley Chiles at her office in Colorado Springs, Colo.Credit...Rachel Woolf for The New York TimesThe Colorado therapist challenging the state’s law banning conversion therapy is Kaley Chiles, who has counseled clients struggling with trauma and addiction for the last decade. An evangelical Christian, she sometimes gets referrals through churches for patients seeking faith-based counseling.Mrs. Chiles, 35, practices in a two-person office in a bungalow in downtown Colorado Springs. She says in court papers that she is not trying to “cure” clients of same-sex attractions or “change” their sexual orientation. But she says Colorado’s law is censoring her speech because she is prohibited from helping patients under 18 who voluntarily seek to eliminate same-sex attractions or align their gender identity with their birth sex.Mrs. Chiles says she previously worked with young people struggling with gender dysphoria and unwanted sexual desires, but it is not clear from court papers and an interview if she engaged in practices that would violate the state’s law.“I’ll just have to let everyone else decide what that is as a label,” Mrs. Chiles said of her work before she filed the lawsuit.Oct. 7, 2025, 9:08 a.m. ETThe Supreme Court will hear a challenge on Tuesday to Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy, with implications for more than 20 states with similar laws.Credit...Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesAs a teenager, Julie Rodgers attended Tuesday night group therapy sessions in which young people confessed their same-sex transgressions: anal sex, fondling, masturbation, reaching out to an ex or watching “The L Word,” a television show about lesbians.What followed was a kind of psychological analysis, in which participants looked for reasons for their lapses. Maybe they had slipped because of a painful conversation with a parent, or a failure at school or work. Understanding those circuits, the group leader told them, would allow them to reprogram their brains and live as heterosexuals.Ms. Rodgers’s support group promoted conversion therapy, a practice that uses a range of techniques in an attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The practice surged in popularity among evangelical Christian communities in the 1980s and 1990s. It typically involves talk therapy and cognitive behavioral approaches, which seek to reshape habitual thought patterns.“I felt like I had to tell Ricky everything, every sexual attraction or feeling or crush that I might have,” Ms. Rodgers, now an out lesbian, told the producers of “Pray Away,” a documentary from 2021. “I felt the need to report if I had a lesbian boss or lesbian customers that came in at the restaurant where I worked. Let’s say I had acted out sexually with someone — I would definitely have to confess that.”A 2019 study by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law estimated that roughly 698,000 adults in the United States had received some kind of conversion therapy, around half of them as adolescents. In the late 1990s, medical organizations began to speak out against the practice, citing a growing body of research that showed it was ineffective and potentially harmful. A number of states went on to ban the practice, beginning with California in 2012.The Supreme Court will hear a challenge on Tuesday to Colorado’s ban, with implications for more than 20 states with similar laws.There is some evidence that the practice continues despite the bans. In 2023, researchers for the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization focused on suicide prevention among young L.G.B.T.Q. people, identified 1,320 counselors whose professional profiles showed they offered conversion therapy, sometimes using language like “sexual addiction.” About half of them held professional licenses, while the other half were ministers or pastors.“Unfortunately, there is rarely any evidence to indicate that these providers have recanted their belief in the ability to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, or are no longer willing to try,” the report said.In earlier decades, psychiatrists tested so-called aversive therapies, such as delivering electric shocks or nausea-inducing drugs to people experiencing sexual arousal, in an effort to train them to avoid thoughts of same-sex attraction. But medical organizations had largely rejected those harsher approaches by 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association declared that it would no longer consider homosexuality itself a mental disorder.Oct. 7, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ETA central question for the justices is whether Colorado’s law is a permissible regulation of professional conduct or an unconstitutional infringement on free speech.Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York TimesThe Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear a challenge to a Colorado law that prohibits licensed mental health professionals from trying to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of clients who are under 18.Kaley Chiles, a therapist and evangelical Christian, says the law violates her free speech rights because it prevents her from working with patients who want to live a life “consistent with their faith.”State lawmakers passed the restrictions in 2019, in response to the findings of major medical associations that conversion therapy is ineffective and potentially harmful for young people. The outcome of the case has implications for Colorado and more than 20 other states with similar laws.A central question for the justices is whether Colorado’s law is a permissible regulation of professional conduct or an unconstitutional infringement on free speech.Colorado’s statute prohibits “any practice or treatment” that tries to change a minor’s “gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”Colorado officials have never enforced the measure, which includes fines up to $5,000 for each violation and possible suspension or revocation of a counselor’s license. The law includes a religious exemption for those “engaged in the practice of religious ministry.”Colorado’s Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, says states have long regulated medical practices, including treatments carried out through speech, to protect patients from substandard care. The law, he says, is about professional conduct, not speech.The Supreme Court has in recent years issued a series of decisions in favor of religious people, notably conservative Christians. In 2023, the court sided with a web designer in Colorado who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. In 2022, the court said a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.The conversion therapy case is being heard a few months after the court’s conservative majority upheld a Tennessee law barring certain medical treatments for transgender youth that the state deemed unsafe. Later this term, the justices will also hear challenges to state laws prohibiting transgender athletes from participating in girls and women’s sports.In the Colorado case, the Trump administration and Mrs. Chiles’s legal team say the law should be subject to a demanding standard of judicial scrutiny that would require the state to show that its law advances a compelling government interest and is narrowly designed to do so. If the law were subject to that higher standard, the challengers say, courts would find that it surely violates the Constitution.Colorado officials argue that the law should not be subject to strict scrutiny, but say it should survive even if the justices disagree.Mrs. Chiles takes issue with the views of groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, that say that trying to change minors’ sexual orientation or gender identity puts them at increased risk of depression, anxiety and suicide. The organizations, Mrs. Chiles said, have not specifically examined the type of voluntary talk therapy she wants to provide. Mrs. Chiles said she did not practice “aversive techniques,” which can include electric shock or chemically induced nausea.In general, the First Amendment prevents the government from restricting speech because it dislikes the content or message. But the Supreme Court has said certain restrictions aimed at governing a person’s conduct are permissible even if they incidentally burden speech.The issue has split the lower courts. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit upheld Colorado’s law.The justices are likely to discuss a 2018 case in which Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, invalidated a California law that required pregnancy crisis centers to post notices that free or low-cost abortions were available to low-income women through public programs.“Speech is not unprotected merely because it is uttered by ‘professionals,’” Justice Thomas wrote in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra.See more on: U.S. Supreme CourtRelated ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT