Conversion therapy in DFW area, 41 "therapists." continuing investigations.
There is likely much more going on. Will need time to dig into this. Will need your help.
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Before Starting this.
I read the scientific press and have since the 1960s. In the beginning I could just handle the Scientific American and during college I became educated enough to read Science of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Nature magazine.
The articles are challenging to read, but the short news items are something the general educated reader can comprehend.
The scientific press discusses bogus studies, retracted studies, and predatory journals.
I am also a published historian by university presses. Two books.
So one thing I am fairly familiar with is the long history of the follies of the field of psychology. These follies have been driven by social forces needing “scientific” justification for something or another.
As a scientist, historian, I don’t play favorites.
The Trevor Study of Convention Therapy and 18 possible practioners in the DFW area.
I one time did a spot check of some Trevor Project articles that were in their news feed as being academically publisshed. All four were with journals with Author Publishing Charges, you pay to get published, and one was considered by many to be a predatory journal.
If the previous paragraph upsets you, I don’t want to hear it.
So this study and map needs to be viewed provisionally. That is, I can’t be confident that it is correct, or their study didn’t have flaws, but I am not going to reject it either. We don’t have any other starting point.
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/conversion-therapy-report/
The full report is here:
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/FINAL_Its-Still-Happening-Report.pdf
They have this map. Note, the data is dated 2023. This is after the scandal about Living Hope Ministries was revealed. There are 18 in the Dallas Fort Worth Area, but the number increases as you zoom in. Not sure why. The dots are colored and over a map. Sometimes they obscure the city underneath theme.
So reading the map to the best of my ability I come up with the following.
Dallas: 11
Fort Worth: 1
Arlington: 12
Carrollton?: 1
Garland?: 1
Grapevine?:4
Plano: 6
Flower Mound?: 1
Burleson?: 1
Three practicions I couldn’t figure out where they are since the name of the place wasn’t on the map or the dots obscured the name.
TOTAL: 41 in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
And it is unknown who they are.
The “?” is because there isn’t a definitive location assigned to the dots. It is a poor map.
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/ISH-Heatmap.html
There is no information provided on the map when you click on a dot, and I didn’t find a listing either.
How the Trevor project found them is explained here:
Researchers performed extensive searches through search engines, social media platforms, and directories maintained by pro-conversion therapy organizations and associations. Terms commonly utilized within the conversion therapy industry — including phrases like “reparative therapy,” “ex-gay,” “unwanted same-sex attraction,” “sexuality issues,” “gender identity issues,” “gender confusion,” and “sexual brokenness” — were queried to identify leads for further research and review.
This is really useful giving information on what search terms we can use in tracking down conversion “therapists” in the Dallas area.
Page 11 in the report went in depth as how they did and did not classify these therapists. There is no listing of individuals and the information which led them to conclude that they were likely to be conversion therapists.
So we have potentiall 41 or more conversion therapists operating in the DFW area and we don’t know who they are or have a plan to deal with this.
Before you classify someone or institution as supporting or doing conversion therapy you need to have evidence and use caution.
There are persons who have given up conversion therapy and regret ever having done it. So you need to make sure the person is currently doing conversion therapy. Note the date of the webpage if you can.
For starters, every webpage that you are using as evidence you need to save at the Internet Archive. If the page disappears, you will need to be able to find it.
You might consider saving the webpage as a PDF. There is a url and a date-time on the pages.
I am not a lawyer, this isn’t legal advice, but I share here what I do.
If it hasn’t been announced in a news publication and it is going to be a conclusion made by myself, then I avoid saying definitively anything.
I would not say, “Dr. ABCD is a conversion therapist.”
I would say, “I found out this, that, and the other thing about Dr. ABCD, which makes me be concerned, speculate, wonder, if, he is doing conversion therapy.”
Your mental states and activities, “concerned,” “speculate,” “wonder,” are about yourself and your own mental activities. The word “if” emphasizes you aren’t stating a definitive fact. I would contact the doctor to get a statement. I then have made a good faith effort to check. If the doctor denied it, I could follow up and ask for evidence that he isn’t doing it. But I would include the doctors denial in my report.
Again, I am not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice, it is just my practice to avoid being charged with libel.
If you are the type of person that gets excited and jumps to conclusions, I would not do research at all.
This is a story about some excitable person spreading rumors that what she thought was a Confederate flags, but was a Norwegian flag. They don’t look alike at all.
https://apnews.com/article/ed0d469d2b6d81f7f468a27ce429f74f
This has happened twice. She wanted to be the most important social justice warrior in the neighborhood and so spread a lot of nonsense online. Again, they don’t look alike at all.
https://time.com/5171239/woman-assumes-norwegian-flag-is-confederate/
If you are the type of person that gets excited and jumps to conclusions, I would not do research at all.
Also, I don’t want my time wasted on wild goose chases. I do want tips and leads to investigate, but I don’t want to be chasing after nothing.
What next?
I am going to have a post where information will be collected as we discover it.
There is an institutions which I have concerns about.
I am going to do some Googling to see what I can find out.
I am going to solicit the public to ask victims to come forward and share with me what information they might have.
I want to find out what other groups in Texas are working on this and inform readers of the newsletter of their actions.
This is likely going to be an involved project taking years.
How you can help?
I would like to have a team to help with research and perhaps have tables at Pride Events. Other things that can be done.
Share with others that this project is underway.
Share our posts on conversion therapy.
Be alert to what you might find and share it with us.
Conclusion
This is an abominable practice and we need to do everything we can, within the law, to stop it.
Campaign to ban so-called conversion therapy in the City of Dallas and Dallas County.
Time to fight back.
The butterfly is an LGBT person that has fallen into the web of conversion therapists.
