ast week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to 26 state laws at least partly based on studies claiming “conversion therapy” increases LGBT Americans’ suicide risks. Yet every existing study that makes this claim is seriously scientifically unsound, several research reviews recently found.
Not only do all these studies depend on unscientific methods, but the data from one highly cited such study actually shows the opposite of what its authors claim, says a sociologist who reran the study’s data with standard scientific controls the authors omitted.
“The evidence shows that SOCE [sexual orientation change efforts] is fairly effective at preventing suicide attempts,” said Paul Sullins, a research professor at Catholic University and senior researcher for the Ruth Institute, in a press conference released Friday.
These majorly flawed studies have boosted efforts to ban therapists from helping distressed people across the United States and the world. According to Sullins, some 20 states and the District of Columbia ban therapists from helping people struggling to resolve homosexual desires or gender dysphoria. Six states partially ban such therapy. That means in those states, therapists may only nudge children toward, rather than help prevent, transgender mutilation.
Last week, Republican-appointed Justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch joined the court’s leftists in refusing to resolve a circuit-court split over whether states can punish therapists who talk to willing clients about unwanted sexual attractions and gender dysphoria. Barrett also voted to let stand a lower-court decision striking laws against children attending transvestite shows.
Every study published since 2009 on therapy for people struggling with sexual orientation distress used the same major scientific flaw Sullins identified in a 2020 paper, Christopher Rosik, a psychologist at Fresno Pacific University, found in 2022 with a research review. All failed to control for suicidal thoughts and actions LGBT people expressed before they went to “conversion therapy.”
The studies claim “conversion therapy” caused the LGBT study participants to have more suicidal thoughts and attempts, but not one separated the suicidal thoughts and attempts that occurred before starting therapy. It’s not only logically impossible but scientifically invalid to say something that came after a first thing caused the first thing. But that’s what every single one of these studies did.
Failing to control for preexisting suicidal distress among LGBT people before they went to therapy led to the false but widely publicized claim that “conversion therapy causes suicide.”
When he reran the numbers with proper controls, Sullins found two-thirds of the LGBT participants’ suicidal thoughts and attempts in the 2020 study happened before they went to therapy for help with their sexual orientation. That means therapy couldn’t have caused the majority of LGBT people’s suicidal thoughts or attempts because most happened before therapy.
In fact, when Sullins controlled for pre-therapy suicidal behavior, he found “conversion therapy” actually reduced suicide attempts and intentions by up to 80 percent.
Read it all at The Federalist
