The Reintegrative Therapy Association and its California-based founder, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, are suing two researchers who used their so-called scientific paper to lash out at “Reintegrative Therapy,” which they claimed was a piece of the “conversion therapy” movement.
The action was filed in U.S. District Court in the southern district in California by the Thomas More Society and its supporting attorneys.
The California organization, which owns the name Reintegrative Therapy as a registered trademark, explains it is a “specific form of psychotherapy that treats traumas.”
It has been known to “trigger spontaneous sexuality changes as a byproduct,” the legal team explained, but it is “dangerous health misinformation by LGBT political activists” to characterize it as “conversion therapy.”
The action names David J. Kinitz and Travis Salway as defendants for their authorship of “The Scope and Nature of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Express Change Efforts: a Systematic Review Protocol,” which lumped Reintegrative Therapy with other “conversion” therapies.
“These political activists need to be held accountable. They are masquerading as objective scientists and deliberately misleading the public by presenting lies as scientific truth,” explained Paul Jonna, Thomas More Society special counsel and partner at LiMandri & Jonna, LLP. “By falsely misrepresenting Reintegrative Therapy® and the Reintegrative Therapy Association in an open-access medical journal, they have defamed and injured the practice of this evidence-based treatment.
“Reintegrative Therapy® clients deserve the same rights and freedoms as anyone else—to have access to accurate medical information, and to have therapists who understand them and support them in their journey,” he said.
The legal action contends Salway and Kinitz committed defamation and libel per se in their article’s “false and defamatory statements.”
“Contrary to the false claims made by Salway and Kinitz, Reintegrative Therapy® uses evidence-based interventions which treat traumatic memories,” Nicolosi said.
The legal team noted, “Newly released long-term evidence indicates this treatment is both safe and effective. The treatment methods utilized in Reintegrative Therapy® are the same regardless of whether the client is a female client with a binge eating disorder or a male client with sexually compulsive behaviors. Resolving a person’s psychological trauma through Reintegrative Therapy® has a variety of secondary impacts on the individual’s psychological dynamics, which sometimes include impacts on a person’s sexuality. Reintegrative Therapy® does not have as its treatment goal changing a person’s sexual orientation.”
Jonna noted of the “activists” who wrote the article, “Their so-called research either deliberately obscured the facts or was so sloppy as to not be submittable for publication. This is both irresponsible and reprehensible.”
The filing charges, “Reintegrative Therapy may not accurately be characterized as a Sexual Orientation Change Effort, or as a Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression Change Effort,” on which the article was focused.
“The terms SOCE, SOGIECE, and ‘conversation therapy’ are all highly generalized, stigmatized terms used by journalists, transgender activists and some in the psychological field to refer to a wide array of therapy methods, including many discredited and pseudo-scientific practices, that are united by the common express goal ‘to deny and suppress the sexual orientations, gender identities, and/or gender expressions of sexual and gender minorities.”
The organization’s standards require that a therapist “must not impose” his or her views on a client regarding homosexuality.
The article that appeared in the “Systematic Reviews” journal, however, classified “reintegrative therapy” alongside “conversion therapy” and “reparative therapy” and charged it includes “discredited practices that aim to deny and suppress the sexual orientations, gender identities, and/or gender expressions of sexual and gender minorities.”
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