With Kansas City suffering national embarrassment Sunday night in its Super Bowl three-peat contender Chiefs' blowout loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, the City of Fountains may suffer further indignity in court as it tries to defend censoring mental health professionals who make children feel better about their bodies.

Licensed professional counselors Wyatt Bury and Pamela Eisenreich sued Missouri's Kansas City and Jackson County on Friday for banning their talk therapy to alleviate gender confusion and reduce unwanted same-sex attraction in children while expressly encouraging "counselors who assist children in achieving the opposite goals," such as removal of healthy breasts.

They are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is also representing counselor Kaley Chiles in her First Amendment challenge to Colorado's similar law. 

A split 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled against Chiles last fall, claiming the law only "incidentally involves speech" and teeing up possible Supreme Court review of whether its 2018 precedent against California's compelled speech for pro-life pregnancy centers also invalidates Colorado's "Minor Conversion Therapy Law."

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is also a plaintiff with Bury and Eisenreich to protect state residents from the city and county rules, especially minors deprived of "speech that would rectify the problems caused by these previous interventions" of social and medical gender transition, from preferred pronouns to hormonal and surgical procedures. 

He said "social circumstances" play at least some role in youth transgender identity, and that "there is substantial reason to believe that social transition and pharmacological interventions cause" such confusion in minors, citing the 400-page Cass report commissioned by the U.K. National Health Service that prompted its youth gender clinic's demise.

Several European countries more progressive than the U.S. have heavily restricted medicalized gender transitions in recent years even as their historic antipathy to free speech continues.

The U.K. indefinitely banned new prescriptions for transition-focused puberty blockers in December, Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer continued his predecessor's emergency ban on private clinics prescribing them, and the prior Tory government discouraged social transitions in school due to potentially "significant psychological effects," citing the Cass report.

Australia's state of Queensland imposed an "immediate pause" on both blockers and cross-sex hormones for patients under 18 in its public health system last month pending its own review, citing tightened restrictions in Denmark, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden.

Gender-critical organization Genspect shared an open letter from a Queensland pediatrician scrutinizing the government's external evaluation last year that found "no concerns" about its youth gender services' practices. 

"As a profession we have been asleep at the wheel on this issue," Dylan Wilson wrote. "The rest of the world is waking up."

Europe's newfound wariness of affirming gender confusion in minors hasn't made it any friendlier to peaceful speech or even thoughtful silence in public, with the U.K. clashing again with a pro-life activist twice arrested for praying in her head near an abortion clinic.

Isabel Spruce-Vaughn records her interactions with police who interrogate her about her prayers, even reminding them of her prior exoneration, to no avail. New footage shows a West Midlands officer telling Spruce-Vaughn that because she's known for pro-life views, her "mere presence" may violate the so-called buffer zone law as "harassment, alarm and distress."

Both ADF and Bailey's office announced their litigation against Kansas City and Jackson County on Monday for what Bailey calls their "dangerous overreach, forcing children and counselors to conform to a radical transgender agenda" under the 2019 city and 2023 county laws. 

"Now more than ever, families and children need counselors free to speak truth about the harms of gender ideology," ADF senior counsel Bryan Neihart said.

No one spoke at public hearings for either law who claimed they were "harmed by voluntary talk therapy … as opposed to other forms of involuntary, aversive, and physically intrusive techniques," while several praised talk therapy for changing their gender identity or sexual orientation "to allow them to lead more fulfilling lives," the suit reads.

Both ordinances violate the First Amendment rights of Bury and Eisenreich by prohibiting them from helping a minor with a "self-selected goal" at odds with the view of the city and county, that of realigning gender identity with sex or attraction to the opposite sex, the suit also states.

A third ordinance, Kansas City's public accommodations law, "both compels and restricts speech on gender identity and sexual orientation" by forcing counselors to provide services to "adults and children who wish to affirm views about sex and gender" at odds with their religious beliefs, while censoring their rationale for only doing counseling in line with their beliefs. 

A counselor would incur not only $1,500 fines per session helping a minor "with his or her goal of following a particular sexual ethic" between the city and county ordinances, but risk damages, attorney's fees and even six months in jail under the public accommodations law, the suit says.

Eisenreich faces the most immediate threat because she "currently" counsels minors seeking outcomes at odds with those of the two governments. Sometimes she "steers clear of critical conversations to avoid violating" the laws, and both counselors "repeatedly chill their own speech" and operate "under constant threat of punishment."

Bury offers "integrated Christian counseling" and currently sees minors for "anxiety, trauma, and other mental-health issues" but is intentionally not expanding his practice for minors because of the counseling laws, according to the suit.

"As even pro-transition activists like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health have acknowledged," talk therapy "can help to resolve gender dysphoria" short of "surgeries or pharmacological interventions," Bailey's section says. 

A state judge that upheld Missouri's medical transition ban for youth in November cited the same WPATH document, and the organization for the first time in its most recent "standards of care" acknowledged "social influence" as a factor in transition.

The city and county laws undercut Missouri's ban and its "sovereign interest" in its own laws, including professional licensing, "favoring private conversations with professionals that can help minors experiencing gender dysphoria" through identity-sex alignment, Bailey's office says.

It estimated the laws ensnare tens of thousands of Missouri psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, therapists, "behavior[al] analysts," physicians and licensed professionals in related fields, beyond roughly 2,100 counselors and provisional counselors, with additional or contrary rules to those of the state's.