He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy. Now He Regrets It
13 August 2026
With Peter Gajdics
North America
Peter Gajdics suffered genuine psychiatric abuse in 1990s Canada — a therapist's attempt to eliminate his homosexuality through discredited methods. He later campaigned for conversion therapy bans, then grew alarmed at how the legislation was drafted. His account raises questions directly relevant to Ireland, where similar laws have been enacted and where therapists now face uncertainty about what constitutes legitimate exploratory practice.
Peter Gajdics is a Canadian writer whose memoir documents one of the more disturbing psychiatric cases to emerge from the 1990s. As a young gay man seeking help in 1989, he entered treatment with a Vancouver psychiatrist who had trained under Arthur Janov, the American psychologist who developed primal therapy. What unfolded over years of intensive sessions was not mental health care but a systematic attempt to change his sexual orientation. The treatment caused serious harm, and the psychiatrist was eventually subject to professional and legal consequences. Gajdics later became an advocate for banning conversion therapy, speaking publicly and supporting legislative efforts first in British Columbia and then at the federal level. His experience gave him moral authority in those debates, and he used it. The harm he suffered was real, the practitioner's conduct was indefensible, and the cause seemed straightforward. What changed his view was not the goal but the mechanism. When he examined the actual text of conversion therapy legislation — including Canada's federal Bill C-4, which came into force in 2022 — he found definitions broad enough to capture forms of exploratory psychotherapy that bear no resemblance to what was done to him. The concern is not abstract: therapists working with people experiencing gender dysphoria have questioned whether open-ended therapeutic exploration of a patient's feelings could be characterised as a prohibited attempt to suppress or change gender identity. Critics of broadly written laws argue that the definitions conflate deliberate coercive harm with ordinary clinical curiosity. This matters in an Irish context because Ireland has enacted its own legislation in this area, and the same definitional questions arise here. What constitutes a conversion practice in law? Does a psychotherapist who spends sessions exploring whether a young person's gender distress might have other roots — family dynamics, neurodevelopmental factors, trauma, internalised homophobia — risk sanction under that legislation? Irish clinicians and professional bodies have raised precisely these questions, and they remain only partially answered. The HSE and Ireland's regulatory frameworks for counselling and psychotherapy do not yet offer clear published guidance on where lawful exploratory work ends and prohibited practice begins. Gajdics's position is not that such laws should never have been passed. It is that the laws as written go further than his experience, or any reasonable account of genuine conversion abuse, would justify. He describes encountering what he calls a trojan horse: real survivor testimony deployed to pass legislation whose operative clauses extend well beyond the harm that testimony describes. That is a structural critique, and it is one that legislators and health regulators anywhere enacting such laws should be required to answer with specificity rather than reassurance. For Irish clinicians, parents and patients navigating gender-related distress, his account is significant precisely because it comes from inside the advocacy process — from someone with standing who is not arguing against protection from abuse, but for precision in how that protection is defined in law.
