He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It
13 August 2026
With Peter Gajdics
North America
Peter Gajdics is a Canadian writer who endured serious psychiatric abuse in the 1990s at the hands of a therapist attempting to eliminate his homosexuality. Years later, convinced that legislation was needed, he joined campaigns for conversion therapy bans in Canada. In this episode he explains how he eventually recognised that the bills he had championed — including Canada's Bill C-4 — had been broadened to cover gender identity in ways that risk capturing legitimate exploratory therapy. His account carries direct relevance for the UK, where Parliament has debated similar legislation and clinicians have warned of equivalent risks.
Peter Gajdics is a Canadian writer who sought psychiatric help in 1989 and fell under the influence of a practitioner trained under Arthur Janov. Over several years the treatment became increasingly abusive, and Gajdics gradually came to understand that the psychiatrist's underlying goal was to eliminate his homosexuality. The experience caused serious harm and eventually led him to seek both legal redress and public recognition of what had been done to him. Having lived through what he now understands as a textbook instance of conversion therapy — a deliberate attempt to alter sexual orientation through psychological pressure — Gajdics became a public voice calling for protective legislation. He joined the campaign that produced Vancouver's municipal ban and later engaged with the federal debate in Canada, contributing to the movement behind the bills known as C-6 and C-4 that sought to outlaw conversion practices at a national level. In this episode he describes the point at which his confidence in that campaigning work began to erode. As he examined the legislation more carefully, he recognised what he describes as a trojan horse: provisions extending the definition of conversion therapy beyond sexual orientation to encompass gender identity. The practical effect, he concluded, was to place a legal shadow over any therapeutic work that did not affirm a patient's stated gender identity — including the open, exploratory psychotherapy that the evidence increasingly favours for young people experiencing gender distress. The UK context gives Gajdics' testimony particular weight. Westminster has been debating a conversion therapy ban for several years, with successive bills stalling partly over exactly this question. Gender-critical clinicians, lawyers and advocacy organisations have consistently argued that poorly drafted legislation risks prohibiting the exploratory, non-directive therapy endorsed by the Cass Review — the independent evaluation of NHS gender services published in 2024, which found that affirmation-only approaches lacked an adequate evidence base and called for a broader psychotherapeutic response to gender distress in young people. The Cass Review's findings, and the subsequent revisions to NHS England's clinical guidance, represent precisely the kind of evidence-led recalibration that sweeping conversion therapy legislation could foreclose. If a clinician working with a gender-dysphoric young person in England is prohibited by law from exploring the roots of that distress — because non-affirmative conversation is classified as a conversion practice — the therapeutic space that Cass identified as clinically necessary would effectively be closed by statute. Gajdics' account is a reminder that the same legislative mechanism can serve very different ends. Laws drafted in direct response to the real abuse suffered by gay and lesbian individuals are being broadened, in ways that some original advocates did not anticipate, to govern how clinicians respond to children presenting with gender distress. His willingness to say so publicly — as someone with first-hand experience of the harm that coercive psychiatric practice can inflict — gives this episode a weight that purely theoretical policy arguments rarely carry.
