He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It
13 August 2026
With Peter Gajdics
North America
Peter Gajdics endured genuine psychiatric abuse in the 1990s at the hands of a psychiatrist attempting to eliminate his homosexuality. He later became a central voice in Canadian conversion therapy ban campaigns. But having helped shape landmark legislation, including federal Bill C-4, he came to recognise what he describes as a trojan horse: definitions so broad they risk criminalising any psychotherapy that does not begin from gender-identity affirmation. His retrospective account raises questions directly relevant to European legislatures currently drafting or implementing their own conversion therapy prohibitions.
Peter Gajdics is a Canadian writer whose experience of serious psychiatric mistreatment in the early 1990s became the subject of his memoir and, later, a catalyst for legislative action. In 1989, struggling with his identity, he sought professional psychiatric help and found himself under the care of a now-notorious psychiatrist who had trained under Arthur Janov, the originator of primal therapy. What followed was years of psychologically damaging treatment — and Gajdics eventually came to understand that the underlying purpose was to eliminate his homosexuality. The abuse was real, documented, and by any reasonable definition wrong. His pursuit of accountability eventually drew him into advocacy. When conversion therapy bans began moving through Canadian legislatures, Gajdics became an active voice in the campaign. He brought genuine moral authority to the cause: he had lived through the harm the legislation was designed to prevent. The Vancouver ban campaign and, later, the federal Bill C-4, which criminalised conversion therapy across Canada, were landmarks he helped push toward. But Gajdics's story did not end with legislative victory. In the years that followed, he came to see something troubling in the structure of the laws he had supported. The definitions enshrined in Bills C-6 and C-4 extended well beyond what most people would recognise as harmful conversion practice. Rather than targeting specific coercive interventions, they were written broadly enough to potentially capture any therapeutic approach that did not affirm a patient's stated gender identity. A clinician who explored the psychological roots of a young person's gender dysphoria — asking careful questions, sitting with uncertainty — could, under these definitions, face criminal liability. This is the trojan horse Gajdics describes. The legitimate and widely shared revulsion at practices designed to eliminate homosexuality was used to pass legislation whose scope extends far beyond those practices. The same legal framework intended to protect people like him from coercion could, in its current form, prevent a gender-questioning teenager from accessing exploratory, non-directive psychotherapy — precisely the kind of thoughtful clinical care that has nothing in common with what was done to Gajdics in 1989. The relevance for European audiences is immediate. Conversion therapy prohibitions have been adopted or are actively debated across the continent, and the definitional questions that Gajdics raises — what counts as conversion therapy, whether non-affirmative psychotherapy is prohibited, how clinical exploration is distinguished from coercion — remain unresolved in most European legislative texts. Several systematic reviews and national clinical guidelines have begun to grapple with these questions, but the law in many jurisdictions has moved faster than the evidence. Gajdics speaks with an authority that is difficult to dismiss. He is not arguing against protections for gay and lesbian people — he needed those protections himself. He is arguing that the legislation, as written, captured something else entirely: the right of patients and clinicians to think carefully, without a predetermined destination, about the nature of psychological distress. That argument deserves serious engagement from legislators, clinical regulators, and courts on both sides of the Atlantic.
