He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It
Peter Gajdics endured genuine psychiatric abuse in 1990s Canada — a therapist covertly trying to eliminate his homosexuality. His subsequent campaign for conversion therapy bans seemed a logical response. But the legislation he helped champion contained a trojan horse: language broad enough to threaten legitimate, exploratory psychotherapy for gender-questioning young people. For Ireland, which has enacted its own conversion therapy law, his hard-won regret is an urgent warning.
Peter Gajdics is a Canadian writer who, in 1989, sought psychological help and found himself in the care of a psychiatrist who had trained under Arthur Janov, the creator of Primal Therapy. The psychiatrist, later exposed as notoriously abusive, was running sessions with a hidden purpose: he was attempting to eliminate Gajdics's homosexuality. The experience was damaging in the way only sustained, trusted professional betrayal can be, and when Gajdics eventually left and pursued justice, his testimony contributed to a long-overdue reckoning. His next chapter took him into advocacy. He became a prominent voice for conversion therapy bans, supporting legislation in Vancouver and eventually at the Canadian federal level. For someone with his history, that commitment was entirely understandable. He had been harmed in a way the law had failed to prevent, and he wanted to help close that gap. But the legislation that followed — including the federal bills C-6 and then Bill C4 — carried what Gajdics now recognises as a trojan horse. The language was drawn so broadly that it moved well beyond protecting gay and lesbian people from reparative psychiatry. It reached into territory that would restrict any therapist from working in an exploratory, non-affirming way with a gender-questioning young person. A law with a legitimate founding grievance was constructed in a manner that could silence a very different kind of therapy altogether. This is not a distant Canadian concern for Irish listeners. Ireland has enacted its own conversion therapy legislation, and the definitional tensions Gajdics identifies in the Canadian bills are present in how these laws are framed wherever they appear. A psychotherapist working with an anxious teenager who is uncertain about her identity — offering the open-ended, unhurried, curious engagement that Stella O'Malley advocates for in her clinical work — could find that approach newly vulnerable to legal challenge. The chilling effect on therapists who would otherwise hold space for complexity is real, and it falls hardest on the young people who most need nuanced care. Gajdics's account carries particular weight because of where it comes from. He is not arriving at scepticism about these laws from the outside. He is a gay man who suffered genuine abuse, who campaigned to have it prohibited, and who now sees that the legislation he helped bring about may obstruct the kind of thoughtful, questioning therapy that could have served him well. His regret is not a repudiation of the need to protect gay teenagers from harm. It is a precise and hard-won observation that the law, as written, overreaches — and that overreach has consequences for vulnerable young people in Ireland as much as in Canada.
