Peter Gajdics
Author and conversion therapy law critic
Peter Gajdics survived years of psychiatric abuse at the hands of a Canadian therapist who used primal therapy to try to eradicate his homosexuality. That ordeal drove him to campaign for conversion therapy bans — laws now enacted across much of Europe. In his Beyond Gender appearance he explains why the legislation he helped shape may have gone too far, with direct implications for European clinicians and patients.
In the 1990s Peter Gajdics, a young gay man in British Columbia, placed himself in the care of a psychiatrist who put him on a cocktail of psychotropic drugs and subjected him to prolonged primal-therapy sessions aimed at eliminating his homosexuality. The abuse lasted six years. His memoir "The Inheritance of Shame" (2017) documented that ordeal and brought him international recognition as a survivor of what most people understand conversion therapy to mean: coercive, identity-denying psychiatric harm inflicted without genuine consent.
That history made him a natural ally for lawmakers drafting Canada's federal conversion therapy ban, enacted in 2021. But in the Beyond Gender episode "He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It" (August 2026), Gajdics explains how the resulting legislation reached far beyond the abuse he experienced. The law's language is broad enough to potentially criminalise ordinary exploratory psychotherapy — sessions in which a client freely chooses to examine the roots of their gender distress or sexual feelings, with no therapist agenda of change. That unintended consequence, he argues, represents its own form of harm.
The parallel with Europe is direct. France criminalised conversion therapy in 2022; Germany has had restrictions in place since 2020; EU institutions have called on member states to follow suit. European laws have often used similarly expansive definitions. Gajdics's testimony is a warning from inside the campaign itself: that well-intentioned bans, drafted without precise clinical boundaries, risk chilling the therapeutic freedom that protects vulnerable patients — including gender-questioning individuals who need space to think.
For European clinicians and policymakers navigating this landscape, Gajdics occupies a rare position: a survivor who refuses to let his suffering be weaponised for legislation he considers overcorrected. His conversation with hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman is a case study in how survivor testimony and law reform can diverge — and why that divergence matters on this side of the Atlantic.
