He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It
Canadian writer Peter Gajdics survived genuine psychiatric abuse in the 1990s — a therapist trained in primal therapy who tried to eliminate his homosexuality. His pursuit of justice led him to campaign for conversion therapy bans in Canada. But the laws that resulted were drafted so broadly that they extend far beyond the abuse he suffered, potentially criminalising exploratory psychotherapy for gender-questioning young people. As Europe enacts its own bans — encouraged by EU institutions — his retrospective warning carries direct relevance for clinicians in Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, France and Germany.
Peter Gajdics is a Canadian writer who sought psychiatric help in 1989 and found himself in the hands of a deeply abusive practitioner. The therapist, trained under primal therapy founder Arthur Janov, used his methods not to heal but to systematically attempt to eliminate Gajdics's homosexuality. The abuse was prolonged and masked as legitimate treatment; when Gajdics eventually understood what was being done to him, he left and spent years pursuing accountability. His memoir, The Inheritance of Shame, documents that process in full. The episode also addresses Gajdics's childhood experience of gender confusion — a thread that matters for understanding why conversion therapy bans, as currently written, can reach further than the harms they were designed to prevent. For many gay and lesbian people, gender uncertainty in childhood preceded the emergence of a settled homosexual identity. The question of whether a therapist can assist a young person in exploring that territory — without prescribing a destination — sits at the heart of the current clinical and legal debate. Gajdics eventually became an advocate for conversion therapy bans in Vancouver and supported federal legislation in Canada. He brought to that campaign the moral authority of a genuine survivor, and the goal seemed clear: protect people like him from practitioners like the one who abused him. But as the bills advanced — including federal legislation known as C6 and ultimately Bill C4 — he began to see that their drafting had gone somewhere he had not intended. The laws that emerged were written broadly enough to prohibit not just attempts to change a person's sexual orientation, but also therapeutic exploration of gender identity more generally. Any therapy that does not begin from an affirmative premise — that does not treat a young person's stated gender identity as settled and beyond examination — risks falling within the scope of these prohibitions. Gajdics came to see this as a trojan horse: protection for one group of vulnerable people deployed to restrict what clinicians may offer another. For European audiences, this Canadian story has immediate local relevance. France, Germany, the Netherlands and multiple other EU member states have enacted or are actively developing conversion therapy legislation, many of them modelled on the same broad approach. EU institutions have encouraged harmonised bans across member states. Meanwhile, Sweden and Finland have already narrowed their clinical guidelines for youth gender medicine in response to systematic evidence reviews. The collision between these two policy currents — broad conversion therapy bans and more cautious, exploratory clinical practice — is one that European lawmakers have largely failed to address. Gajdics's account of what that collision looks like from the inside is a contribution to a debate that continental Europe urgently needs to have.
