Peter Gajdics
Author and conversion therapy survivor turned campaigner
Peter Gajdics survived years of coercive, psychiatrist-led treatment in 1990s Canada designed to extinguish his homosexuality — then spent years campaigning for conversion therapy bans. He has since concluded the legislation he helped shape was far broader than he intended. His warning lands in Britain at the exact moment Parliament is debating its own conversion practices law.
Peter Gajdics's story begins in 1990s Vancouver, where he entered the care of a psychiatrist who subjected him to prolonged, coercive treatment aimed at eliminating his homosexuality. He later documented the experience in his 2017 memoir The Inheritance of Shame. The abuses he suffered — sustained psychological pressure, dependency-inducing medications, deliberate isolation — have no precise British equivalent, but the underlying logic should be recognisable to anyone who has followed the Tavistock controversy: a clinician pathologising a patient's identity and systematically attempting to alter it.
In the years that followed his ordeal, Gajdics became a prominent advocate for legislative bans on conversion therapy, working to ensure that what happened to him could not legally happen again. Yet when he appeared on He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It alongside hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, he arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: the laws he helped advance had been drawn so broadly that they risk capturing practices he never set out to prohibit — including open, exploratory therapeutic conversations with young people who are uncertain about their gender identity.
His caution strikes at the precise fault line in Britain's own debate. Parliament has spent years wrestling with a Conversion Practices Protection Bill, and the drafting question that haunts Gajdics — where does harmful coercion end and legitimate clinical inquiry begin? — is exactly the question British practitioners, parents and legislators are failing to resolve. Hilary Cass's review explicitly recommended that clinicians retain the freedom to explore gender dysphoria with young patients rather than defaulting to immediate affirmation; an overbroad law could place that exploration in legal jeopardy.
What makes Gajdics an unusually compelling witness is that he speaks from inside the very harm the legislation was designed to address. He is not a critic who doubts the reality of conversion therapy abuse — he lived it. His argument is for precision, not permissiveness: that any law Parliament passes must be scalpel-sharp enough to protect gay and bisexual people without silencing the therapeutic conversations that vulnerable young people and their families may urgently need.
