He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It
13 August 2026
With Peter Gajdics
conversion-therapy-laws
Peter Gajdics survived brutal psychiatric abuse in the 1990s — inflicted by a therapist intent on eliminating his homosexuality. His pursuit of justice led him to champion Canada's conversion therapy legislation. But as he later came to understand, the same laws were being quietly reshaped to prevent therapists from openly exploring gender identity with patients. What began as protection for gay men became a vehicle for ideological enforcement in clinical settings. His story reveals how genuine suffering can be instrumentalised, and how institutions capture the language of harm prevention to foreclose legitimate care.
Peter Gajdics is a Canadian writer whose experience in psychiatric care during the late 1980s and 1990s stands as a case study in professional abuse, institutional failure, and the unexpected consequences of the laws that followed. In 1989, seeking help for psychological distress, he entered treatment with a psychiatrist who had trained under Arthur Janov, the originator of primal therapy. What Gajdics came to understand, slowly and with mounting dread, was that the treatment had an ulterior goal: the psychiatrist was systematically attempting to eliminate his homosexuality. The harm was not incidental. It was the point. His account, later documented in his memoir The Inheritance of Shame, exposes something about how institutional abuses survive. They do not emerge from nowhere. They require professional legitimacy as cover, the silence of peers, and regulatory frameworks that fail to protect the people they claim to serve. The episode also touches on childhood gender confusion in Gajdics's own history — a layer of complexity that the broader culture tends to flatten into tidy categories, and which the therapeutic relationship he endured was singularly ill-equipped to handle honestly. After leaving that treatment and pursuing some measure of justice, Gajdics became a public voice in the campaign to ban conversion therapy. By 2015 he was actively involved in efforts to legislate against such practices, first in Vancouver and eventually at the federal level in Canada. It seemed a natural evolution: the desire to ensure no one else would endure what he had. What he describes as a trojan horse emerged in the legislative process itself. As the bills — ultimately C6 and C4 — were drafted and debated, the scope of prohibited conversion therapy was expanded beyond attempts to change sexual orientation to include gender identity. A therapist who explored, questioned or declined to immediately affirm a patient's stated gender identity could find themselves grouped, under the law, with the psychiatrist who had subjected Gajdics to years of coercive treatment. The moral weight of genuine abuse was being used to shield a different kind of practice — gender-identity affirmation — from clinical scrutiny. This is the pattern that makes the episode significant beyond its individual story. Legislation can be shaped by those who recognise the political momentum created by real injustice and redirect it toward other ends. In this case, the effect is to make cautious, exploratory, non-affirming therapy legally precarious — precisely the kind of careful psychological engagement that many clinicians argue is most appropriate for gender-questioning individuals, particularly the young. Gajdics does not retreat from the original case against coercive practices targeting homosexuality. He sharpens a different question: when the definition of harm is drawn broadly enough to criminalise honest therapeutic conversation, who is the law actually protecting?
