Who needs healing here?

The opening prayer is followed by a flag parade. 32 people march through the rows of chairs with national banners, carrying the US, English, Slovakian, Norwegian, Hungarian, Polish and German flags. They fly on behalf of all the countries represented at the event. A children's choir sounds from the loudspeakers. A march like at the Olympics. Except that it's not an international elite sport that meets here, but the ideological leaders in the fight against homosexuality.
It is Friday, October 27, shortly after 6 p.m., in a windowless hall in a hotel on the outskirts of Warsaw. 200 people have taken their seats on red upholstered chairs and are applauding the flag bearers. They are Christians, evangelicals and Catholics from all over the world. What
unites them is their fight against sexual and bodily self-determination. They despise marriage for all and the Pride Parade. They have come to Warsaw because they want to learn how homosexuality, trans and non-binary identities can be “cured” or changed.
The event is the ninth annual conference of the International Foundation for Therapeutic and Counseling Choice. The IFTCC is a Christian advocacy organization based in London. It is backed by the Core Issues Trust, an organization with charitable status in Northern Ireland.
Officially, the IFTCC presents itself as an aid organization. Its stated aim is to support people who want to leave the “LGBT lifestyle”. Anyone who takes a closer look at the IFTCC realizes that it is not about support. It's about re-education. The IFTCC is working harder than any other evangelical organization to bring its methods in the fight against queer people to a European audience. It meets politicians in the UK, organizes online campaigns and hosts international conferences.

Three-day ticket for 145 euros

The motto of the conference in Warsaw is: “Turning the tide: Cross-disciplinary approaches to sexuality and gender.” Polish psychologists, British educators, Slovakian nuns, Norwegian opponents of pornography and German doctors will be meeting here. There will be 23 speakers and guests from 32 countries. A three-day ticket for the conference costs 145 euros and 200 euros for overnight accommodation in a hotel. “We stand together against progressive ideology,” says the foreword to the conference program.
Janine F., a 39-year-old hairdresser from Berlin, is responsible for ensuring that all the flag bearers march in the correct order. The 39-year-old hairdresser from Berlin is part of the organizational team behind the scenes. But Janine F. is also important in front of the scenes. On Instagram and YouTube, she presents herself as an “ex-gay” - as someone who has broken with her life as a married lesbian woman. God allegedly healed her. The team of helpers at the conference in Warsaw consists of several “ex-gays”. They are wearing black T-shirts with the words “once gay - not anymore” on the back, in rainbow colors.
They are the hip face of the otherwise grey-haired organization: young, fashion-conscious and social media-savvy. They are seemingly living proof that it is not only possible but also liberating to suppress one's own sexual orientation or gender. The IFTCC presents itself professionally online. Its website states that the organization is committed to “freedom of therapy”. What this means is revealed by a petition it has published, which is directed against bans on so-called conversion treatments. Conversion treatments are practices that aim to change a person's sexual orientation or gender. Their advocates claim that they can “cure” people of homosexuality or trans identity. There is no scientific basis for believing that this is possible. Conversion treatments are banned in more and more countries, in Germany for certain groups of people.

Compassion and destruction annihilation

Officially, the IFTCC wants nothing to do with therapeutic conversion treatments. But if you ask around among its members and allies, you quickly come across a broad spectrum of rejection of queer lives. It ranges from pity to fantasies of annihilation. If you want to understand what makes this organization's supporters tick, you have to go behind the professional facade. The event in Warsaw is not advertised publicly in advance - you only find out where and when on request. The newsletter asks people not to share information about the conference on social media. Journalists are not welcome. So we hide our journalistic interest. We register as normal guests, with slightly different names.
At the conference, we are a concerned educator, a social worker and a prospective PhD student who wants to do research on “therapeutic freedom”. We are often asked how we know about the event. Our answers are convincing as soon as the typical scene keywords come up: from a demonstration against abortion, from a colleague in a Christian family center, because of our own experiences with “unwanted same-sex attraction”. This opens up access to this “protected framework”, as one participant calls it on-site. The three days are tightly scheduled, with one lecture following the next. The speakers speak freely, and people know and trust each other. A pastor talks about a “faith-based journey out of LGBT”. A man who describes himself as a sex addiction therapist talks about “homosexuality as a symptom of sexualized attachment”.

Ways out of homosexuality

The audience follows spellbound. They stand up when it's time for prayer and laugh when a speaker makes trans-hostile jokes. Questions are not allowed after most of the speeches. Some of the things on stage are bizarre: an American counselor talks about methods for “recovery” from “same-sex attraction”. A therapist says she treats homosexual patients in the same way as people with eating disorders. The wife of a British pastor says in conversation that there is an urgent need for research into the causes of homosexuality. She also says why: “These LGBT freaks - do we have them castrated? What do we do? We need to know.”
But despite all the familiarity among those present, there is also a sense of caution in Warsaw. The speakers talk openly about ways out of  homosexuality - as they call it - “unwanted nonheterosexuality”. But the word “conversion therapy” is not mentioned. An American family
therapist advocates “breaking down the walls of same-sex attraction”. However, she warns against the use of the “C-word”. She knows how bad its reputation is.

The risk of suicide can increase

After the conference in Warsaw, the taz officially asked the IFTCC about its position on conversion treatments. The organization did not answer any of the questions, instead referring to the text on its website in which it speaks out against bans on conversion treatments. Last summer, the EU Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs commissioned an investigation into conversion practices in the EU. These include psychotherapeutic, medical and religiously motivated conversion attempts. The researchers warn of the “discriminatory, degrading, harmful and fraudulent nature” of such practices. They could result in mental and physical illnesses and increase the risk of suicide among those affected.
Human rights organizations describe conversion practices as torture. They are therefore banned in more and more countries. In Germany, the “Law on Protection against Conversion Treatments” has been in force since 2020. According to this law, anyone who performs conversion on minors and people whose consent has been coerced is liable to prosecution.
Shortly before the law came into force, “Wüstenstrom”, the best-known German association to date, which was accused of conversion treatments, moved its headquarters to Switzerland. They felt “discriminated against” by the law in Germany. However, an inquiry by taz to 16 public prosecutor's offices across Germany revealed that no criminal proceedings based on the law are known to date. Does this mean that no more conversion treatments have taken place since then? Or is no one reporting them? There are no reliable figures on this. But Klemens Ketelhut has collected evidence. Ketelhut works for Mosaik Deutschland, an association for political education in Heidelberg. He carried out a study on conversion treatments on behalf of the Ministry of Health. He and his team asked almost 3,500 queer people about their experiences.

Disguised under legality

One result: 20 percent of respondents who were asked to change or hide their sexual orientation had this experience in religious contexts, for example in church. Almost a third of respondents who were asked to change or suppress their gender identity had this experience in psychotherapy.
For Ketelhut, these results are alarming. He says that people who are in the early stages of coming out and are under a lot of pressure from their social environment are particularly at risk of falling for conversion attempts. “People are particularly susceptible when the demands are extensive, such as in evangelical sects or neo-Nazi cliques, which determine their entire lives,” says Ketelhut in an interview with taz. In addition, the offers for conversion treatments are becoming increasingly professional. “Today, there are well-orchestrated programs that are built in such a way that they retain their legality,” says Ketelhut.
Ketelhut recognizes this professionalism in the activities of the Core Issues Trust and the IFTCC. On the one hand, the international networking of the organizations enables a flexible approach to restrictions, says the researcher: “If legal bans are issued in one country, the activities can be quickly and quietly relocated to other places.” In the UK, where the IFTCC is based, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak dropped the long-debated plan to enact a law to protect against conversion treatments at the end of October. In addition, Ketelhut says that the IFTCC has optimized how it reaches different target groups in different ways, from social media to meetings such as the conference.

Havens of the religious right

It is no coincidence that the IFTCC is holding this year's conference in Warsaw. What the organization spreads could be considered a criminal offence elsewhere. In Germany, advertising for conversion treatments is also prohibited and is considered an administrative offense. In Poland, however, where the right-wing conservative PiS party has severely curtailed the rights to physical and sexual self-determination in recent years, the IFTCC hardly has to fear any headwind. In previous years, the conference took place in Hungary, and before that in Bratislava: the strongholds of the Religious Right in Eastern Europe. 
According to the organization, the first meeting of the group from which the IFTCC developed took place in Germany in 2015. Nine years later, one of the participants will take to the stage in Warsaw at around 7.30 p.m. on Saturday. More than ten hours of the program lie behind the audience. Christl R. Vonholdt, a retired doctor from Hesse, is now standing in front of them. She was a member of the IFTCC Board from 2017 to 2020. During the lectures in Warsaw, she sits in the fourth row. But as the 71-year-old makes her way through the hotel lobby, she is greeted, greets back, nods and chats. “It makes me happy to see how the IFTCC is growing,” Vonholdt says into the microphone.
The doctor is a well-known voice in the German-speaking conversion scene. Vonholdt headed the German Institute for Youth and Society (DIJG), a think tank of the evangelical community Offensive Junger Christen (OJC) in Odenwald, until 2021. The OJC is part of the Evangelical Church.
Vonholdt shies away from the press, but publishes her own texts on the Internet. She writes against adoption rights for homosexual couples and warns against same-sex marriage. In one text, she attributes trans identities to “social contagion”. In an older text, she was even more explicit about conversion therapy: young people should be informed about “the possibilities of changing a homosexual inclination to heterosexuality”, she said. The text has since been deleted. Vonholdt did not respond to an official inquiry from taz about her current position on conversion treatment.

She says that God has shown her the way

Instead, she engages in a personal conversation in Warsaw - in the belief that an interested educator was standing in front of her. She hinted that she had remained unofficially active in the IFTCC and was to be given a new position in the organization. She also gives lectures and travels to meetings in Hungary. Vonholdt is also recruiting new members: “We need reinforcements in Germany.” She recommends a book. Vonholdt describes it as follows: it is about the “brutalization” behind lesbian desire. And that the reason for this could be “developmentally disadvantageous childhood experiences”. Amazon does not sell this book. It is “excellent”, says Vonholdt.
What comes together in Warsaw under the guise of science has its ideological source in the USA. The psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, who has been promoting the “cure” of homosexuality with his so-called reparative therapy since the 1990s, is considered the father of conversion treatment. Health organizations warned that his theory had no scientific basis. Former patients and students of Nicolosi later came forward and reported on the damage the treatment had caused them.
Following Nicolosi's medical discrediting, his son Joseph Nicolosi Jr. founded the Reintegrative Therapy Association in California in 2018. Patients are encouraged to discuss key sexual fantasies that allegedly arise from childhood trauma. This allegedly creates an “aha” moment that triggers “spontaneous” heterosexuality, as an unintended side effect of trauma therapy, so to speak.
Nicolosi Jr. refers to scientific studies. The taz asked some of the scientists he refers to whether they agree with Nicolosi's interpretation of their studies. Psychology professor Ritch Savin-Williams from Cornell University in the state of New York refuses to do so. It is “unbelievable”, he writes, that “the right-wingers” are distorting his studies as evidence for conversion attempts. “In fact, I think conversion therapy is not only misguided, but also an expression of evil intent,” says Savin-Williams. His research shows that sexuality does move on a spectrum. From his point of view, however, it is innate.

God's influencers

Nicolosi Jr. is still welcome at the IFTCC. On its website, the IFTCC offers courses on Nicolosi's theses for 9.99 euros per video. Nicolosi Jr. was on stage at last year's conference. It is not enough for conversion lobbyists to meet in remote hotels. They use social networks to increase their reach. The Core Issues Trust, the IFTCC's supporting organization, runs the “XOut-Loud” campaign on Instagram. Janine F. from Berlin, who is coordinating the flag march in Warsaw, is part of the campaign. She and other “ex-LGBT” people document how it is supposedly possible to suppress one's own sexuality. For example in a video uploaded in September. Janine F. is sitting on a couch, the light is dim. Janine F. says that God has shown her the way out of her lesbian relationship.
She attributes her feelings towards her ex-wife to injuries in her childhood. Her father was absent, her mother did not fulfill the traditional role, and she was “exposed” to pornography. In her story, she strings together the same buzzwords that were used at the conference in Warsaw. The video has been viewed 4,000 times on YouTube.
The IFTCC needs Janine F. and the other “ex-LGBTs”. What would the theory be without the healed? They post group photos of trips, meetings and protests on Instagram. Two years ago, they published a book in which 44 people tell how they “left” their queer identities. They want to show: We are loud, we are many. But if you take a closer look, you realize that there are barely more than a dozen activists.

They even draw Holocaust comparisons

The non-profit US organization GAPHE (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism) has investigated the digital  spokespeople of conversion therapies, including the “X-Out-Loud” campaign. Its protagonists are tactical, the report states: “XOL appropriates and twists the language of the LGBTQ+ movement for its own purposes.” The report emphasizes how “extremely harmful” these practices are for those affected and warns tech companies against distributing this content.
In some cases, social media companies have taken notice of the campaigns. Instagram recently blocked a profile picture with the campaign logo, while Facebook deleted the Core Issues Trust profile two years ago. Criminal proceedings are currently underway in Malta against a member of the XOL campaign. The accusation: advertising for conversion treatments.
However, the personal accounts of XOL members are still active on Instagram. There they not only promote the “ex-LGBT lifestyle”. One 20-year-old member writes in a post about the supposed danger of “cultural Marxism”. He also posts a photo of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp memorial and the hashtag #endwokeism: End woke ideology. The post is probably intended to suggest that demands for an equal society and the Holocaust can be linked. It is the vocabulary and a comparison that the self-proclaimed New Right also likes to use.
The IFTCC has also made similar arguments to prevent laws protecting against conversion treatment. This language is also used at the conference in Warsaw. It is written on presentations on the wall and barked from the stage. A US speaker diagnoses LGBTIQ, Black Lives Matter and Antifa with “the same problem”: their “Marxist hearts”.

They warn of a culture war that they themselves are fueling

A Polish psychologist explains why the LGBTIQ “agenda” resembles a communist revolution. In addition to queer people, the media, the state and the left are declared opponents. Those present then murmur. They obviously know who is meant when the speakers say: “these people”, “our opponents”. They are warning of a culture war that they themselves are fueling.
Some take this fight so seriously that they call on the audience to take it to the streets. One British lawyer spoke of an “ideological tsunami” and laid out a “long-term strategy against LGBT ideology” in front of the audience: Those present should conduct research, get involved in politics, and publicly defend their positions, even in court if necessary. They should be active on social media and join ethics committees. She then compares abortions with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The lawyer says it more or less clearly: if it were up to her, homosexuality should be banned. Because she is a strategist and a Christian and thinks in terms of decades rather than the quick steps of earthly life, she also says when that time will come: in around 60 years. Her presentation shows a timeline of the years in which anti-discrimination laws were passed in the UK. She presents them as a series of misfortunes.