He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It

Peter Gajdics survived genuinely abusive psychiatric treatment designed to erase his homosexuality. Years later, he became an advocate for conversion therapy bans — until he noticed something troubling buried in the legislation. In a candid conversation with Stella, Mia and Bret, he unpacks how bills meant to protect gay and lesbian people came to include clauses that critics argue protect gender ideology instead. His testimony is uncomfortable, precise and impossible to dismiss.

Peter Gajdics is a Canadian writer whose life was marked by one of the more egregious cases of psychiatric abuse documented in North America. In 1989, as a young gay man, he sought help from a psychiatrist whose methods, rooted in the primal therapy tradition of Arthur Janov, would prove ruinous. What Peter did not initially understand was that the treatment had a hidden goal: to change his sexual orientation. The experience was damaging and prolonged, and it took years before he was able to leave and begin seeking accountability. His story eventually became public — he wrote about it, spoke about it, and channelled the trauma into advocacy. When Canadian cities and then the federal government began moving toward conversion therapy bans, Peter was a natural ally of that cause. He had lived through what these laws were intended to stop. He understood the harm viscerally, in a way most legislators did not. So he campaigned, including on the push for a Vancouver ban. But somewhere in that process, something shifted. Reading the bills more carefully — particularly the federal legislation known as Bill C6, later superseded by Bill C4 — Peter began to see what he describes as a trojan horse. The definitions in the legislation extended well beyond protecting gay and lesbian people from being pressured to change their sexual orientation. They swept in provisions that, depending on interpretation, could prohibit therapists from helping a patient explore whether their gender distress had other roots, or from supporting a young person who was questioning a trans identification. The very kind of exploratory, patient-led therapy that might have helped Peter was now at risk of being classified alongside the abuse he had suffered. This is the tension at the heart of the episode, and Stella, Mia and Bret draw it out with care. The hosts bring their own professional and research backgrounds to the conversation — Stella as a psychotherapist who has worked with gender-questioning young people, Mia as a researcher who has tracked the legislative landscape, and Bret as a psychologist attentive to what good clinical practice actually looks like. Peter is not a hostile witness to the conversion therapy ban movement; he helped build it. That is precisely what gives his misgivings their weight. What emerges is a picture of well-intentioned legislation that was quietly expanded, and of advocates who did not always read the small print. Peter's account raises questions that go beyond Canada: in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, conversion therapy bans have been framed around protecting vulnerable people, but the definitions used have often been drafted with gender ideology in mind, not just historical abuses against gay and lesbian individuals. The episode does not treat this as a gotcha moment. It treats it as a serious problem, deserving a serious conversation — which is exactly what Peter, Stella, Mia and Bret deliver.

More recent episodes

REPATH LAUNCH

REPATH LAUNCH

Where Did Psychotherapy Go Wrong? | Ian Cox