Peter Gajdics
Memoirist and gay conversion therapy survivor
Peter Gajdics lived through years of abusive psychiatric treatment aimed at erasing his homosexuality — and then spent years fighting for laws to prevent the same from happening to others. His Beyond Gender conversation is a rare first-person account of how a well-intentioned movement can drift dangerously from its founding purpose.
Peter Gajdics is a Canadian author best known for his memoir The Inheritance of Shame (2017), a searing account of years spent under the care of a psychiatrist who subjected him to experimental drug therapy and sustained psychological pressure designed to convert him from homosexual to heterosexual. The book brought unflinching attention to a form of abuse that had operated inside clinical settings and helped galvanise the push for legislative protection against conversion practices in Canada and beyond.
That advocacy work eventually brought Gajdics to a position he could not have anticipated: questioning the very laws he had helped champion. In the Beyond Gender episode He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It (August 2026), he joins Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman to trace how bans drafted specifically to shield gay and lesbian people from the harm he experienced came to include language that critics argue protects gender transition treatments from equivalent therapeutic scrutiny. For Gajdics, that shift is not a minor technicality — it represents a betrayal of the legislation's original protective intent.
What sets the conversation apart is its refusal to be recruited by either side of a culture war. Gajdics is not a polemicist. He is a man who was genuinely harmed, who campaigned hard for change, and who found himself disturbed by where that campaign arrived. Stella, Mia and Bret give him the room to work through a position that resists easy labelling — one that takes conversion therapy abuse seriously without treating sweeping legislative definitions as automatically benign.
His willingness to hold two uncomfortable truths simultaneously — that coercive conversion practices cause real damage, and that poorly scoped bans carry real unintended consequences — is precisely the kind of testimony the Beyond Gender podcast exists to platform.
