He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It
Peter Gajdics endured years of abusive psychiatry in 1990s Canada, at the hands of a practitioner determined to extinguish his homosexuality. Seeking justice, he later campaigned for conversion therapy bans — only to conclude the legislation he helped pass was far broader than he intended. His warning lands directly in Britain, where Parliament has been debating its own conversion practices law. The episode forces a question that matters enormously for NHS therapists and parents of gender-questioning children: who, exactly, do these laws protect?
In the late 1980s, Peter Gajdics, a young gay Canadian man, sought help for psychological distress and ended up in the care of a psychiatrist whose methods were rooted in the techniques of Arthur Janov and driven by an agenda to change his sexual orientation. The treatment lasted years. It was coercive, psychologically devastating, and — by any reasonable definition — a textbook case of conversion abuse in its worst form. Gajdics eventually broke free, pursued legal recourse, and wrote about the experience in a memoir that brought real and brutal clarity to a practice many people still struggled to name. It was a natural step from survivor to advocate. He threw his weight behind efforts to ban conversion therapy in British Columbia and, in time, at the federal level across Canada. He believed he was helping to build a barrier against the kind of suffering he had known. The cause felt urgent and the case seemed clear. But in this episode, Gajdics describes a growing unease as the legislative drafts evolved. What had begun as targeted protection against coercive, orientation-change practices gradually expanded in scope. Canada's federal Bill C4, which passed in 2021, criminalised conduct so broadly defined that many clinicians and civil liberties advocates concluded it placed ordinary, open-ended therapeutic conversations about gender identity in legal jeopardy. Gajdics came to see the legislation he had championed as a trojan horse: something that appeared to protect the vulnerable while simultaneously dismantling the space for genuine, patient-led clinical exploration. Britain is navigating precisely this terrain. The Cass Review, published after years of scrutiny of NHS gender services including the now-closed Tavistock GIDS, placed significant weight on the need for skilled, unhurried, exploratory psychotherapy for children and young people experiencing gender distress. Yet conversion practices legislation debated in Westminster and Holyrood risks being written in ways that would make exactly that careful work legally hazardous for any therapist who does not affirm a transgender identity from the outset. Canadian experience now provides a working test case for where that logic leads in practice. What gives Gajdics's testimony its unusual weight is that he is not arriving from the political right with an axe to grind. He is a gay man who was genuinely harmed by a genuinely abusive practitioner, who wanted genuine legal protection, and who now says the instruments he helped create went too far. That combination of personal authority and intellectual honesty makes this episode essential listening for British clinicians, NHS commissioners, and parliamentarians still shaping conversion therapy legislation. The lesson is uncomfortable but clear: laws written without careful distinctions between abuse and therapy do not protect young people. They reduce their options, chill the professionals willing to sit with complexity, and leave the most vulnerable with less help than before.
