Peter Gajdics
Author and conversion therapy law reformer
Peter Gajdics survived genuine psychiatric abuse in 1990s Canada — a therapist covertly working to erase his homosexuality. He went on to campaign for conversion therapy bans, only to conclude that the legislation he helped shape carried a hidden risk. For Ireland, navigating its own ban, his warning that broad legal language can silence legitimate therapy for gender-questioning young people is urgent.
Peter Gajdics is a Canadian writer best known for his memoir The Inheritance of Shame (2017), which recounts years of covert conversion therapy inflicted by a psychiatrist in 1990s Canada. The abuse — designed to eliminate his homosexuality through experimental, unsanctioned methods — left him psychologically devastated and shaped the next chapter of his life: becoming an outspoken advocate for legal protections against conversion practices.
That advocacy brought him close to the legislative process in Canada, where conversion therapy bans were eventually enacted. Yet in the Beyond Gender episode He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It (August 2026), Gajdics describes a troubling realisation: that the laws he helped champion were written so broadly that they risk conflating genuine abuse with legitimate, exploratory psychotherapy. Language ostensibly aimed at protecting gay and lesbian young people, he argues, has been shaped in ways that could prevent gender-questioning adolescents from accessing the kind of open-ended therapeutic conversations that might genuinely help them.
For Ireland, the resonance is immediate. As Irish legislators and professional bodies navigate their own conversion therapy legislation, the definitional questions Gajdics raises are pressing: where does harmful coercion end and careful, non-directive clinical exploration begin? Irish psychotherapists, including Stella O'Malley — who interviewed Gajdics alongside Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman — have raised concerns that vague statutory language could chill exactly the kind of reflective clinical work that most helps young people in distress.
Gajdics's position is not a retreat from his original convictions. He remains clear that what was done to him was abuse. His regret is narrower and more precise: that well-intentioned legislation, drafted without adequate clinical nuance, may end up harming the very vulnerable people it set out to protect — a cautionary lesson Ireland's policymakers and professional bodies would do well to heed.
