Peter Gajdics – He Helped Ban Conversion Therapy, Now He Regrets It

Peter Gajdics  00:00 

It’s a long time coming to say this to anyone. It’s nerve-wracking and a little scary because obviously these conversations still go against the agreed narrative. Elavil was one of these tricyclic antidepressants that caused many fatalities in the ’90s. What I found out later is 250 milligrams would be considered the highest dose for somebody institutionalized. He had me on 600 milligrams, having me smell it whenever I felt sort of drawn to men. It’s like the house at the end of the street, you know, that type of horror movie because we had a primal screen workroom that we built in our basement, padded walls-you know the whole thing. Adults who go to seek help by a mental health professional are already vulnerable, traumatized. I recognized years later in the gender world why kids end up going to ask for help, how they were now being ensnared. How they believed what they were being told. The indoctrination, the cultic mentality. Gender affirmative care is the new euphemism for conversion therapy. 

Mia Hughes  01:17 

Welcome, Peter Gajdics, to Beyond Gender. 

Peter Gajdics  01:20 

Thank you so much for inviting me. 

Mia Hughes  01:23 

Now I’ve been very, very excited to have this conversation, and I think it’s going to be extremely informative, but kind of a difficult conversation. I think most of our viewers will never have heard of you, so could you first of all, I want to say you, you know you were arguably at the forefront of the campaign to ban conversion therapy in Canada, and you have since realized that what you supported was not what you thought you were campaigning for. So, could you give the viewers just that realization? What you thought it was, what it is now, what you now realize it is, in a nutshell, and then give us a little bit of your history. 

Peter Gajdics  02:12 

Sure, thank you, and thank you, Stella and Mia, of course, for inviting me here. Can I say just quickly, though? I, it’s a long time coming to say this to anyone. It’s nerve wracking, I feel, and a little scary because obviously these conversations still go against the agreed narrative. And in my own world, you know, I’ve been published, and the publishing world is extremely leftist, you could say, and there’s always a risk, you know, when you speak out about these things, that you could just suddenly, you know, lose publication and be blacklisted. In effect, it’s it’s horrifying. So, yes, so I’m 61. Have to think? 61, and I went through my treatment in my 30s with a psychiatrist, and I can come back to that. But I spent the next decades trying what I thought was to speak out against treatments of sexual orientation, you know, I lived through it. Six-year treatment. I initiated the first Canadian municipal ban in Vancouver, British Columbia. Then I joined forces with others for the national ban, which came into effect 2022. My goal all along was simply to end treatments. Period. All treatments. Period. Whether it was for people who were gay, lesbian, or at the time-and these definitions have changed over the years-but at the time, for even people who you know called themselves trans, whatever, I didn’t really care. I saw the treatments for them similar to how the treatments occurred for me because part of my treatment involved sort of these terms didn’t exist at the time, but sort of gender expression, you know, masculinity, femininity, and so my psychiatrist sort of attacked that in me as well. In addition to other things he did, so you know my goal was to just end treatments. I thought, okay, as long as all treatments can end, we are good. You know, just let people develop naturally, explore naturally, find themselves naturally, get the support they need to do all of that in a healthy, productive way, and just have treatments ended. That’s what I thought conversion therapy would bans on conversion therapy would do. They would end all treatments. So I included the T trans when the T. Started to appear, which wasn’t you know didn’t always form part of that acronym. It started to appear for me. I noticed it like in 2006, 2007, and that conflation made me very uncomfortable at the time because I knew then. I mean, it even though these things have evolved over the years. I even knew then. You know, we’re talking about two different types of developmental processes. You know, sexual orientation, gender, whatever that meant. Sort of, as I say, masculinity, femininity, butch girls, effeminate boys, androgynous. You know, that made me uncomfortable. The conflation and those types of warning signs occurred over the years. But I just moved forward when the ban came into effect. Well, actually, in 2020, everything sort of exploded for me, as I’m sure they did for everyone globally with COVID outbreak, and I don’t know if this was all planned in some way, but the whole narrative around gender seemed to change, shift in 2020, or at least I became aware of things that I wasn’t aware of up till then. The whole quote ideology of gender, I became aware of, and there was an ideology because I suddenly learned about this term gender affirmative care. I’d heard of it, but I always thought it just meant, you know, supporting the existence of people who were gay, supporting the existence of people who said they were trans, period. Just you know, not  making them invisible, just acknowledging that they existed. And I thought, okay, well, you know, that’s that sounds good. Gender affirmative care. I didn’t understand that it actually meant, you know, immediate, no gatekeeping access to puberty blockers, sex hormones, surgeries in some cases. So I started to understand that I understood all these terms, these euphemisms. Top surgery, bottom surgery. I mean, like I never really knew. Okay, well, top surgery. Okay, mastectomies. Up till 2020, I understood that if there were treatments for people who had previously called themselves trans, i.e. transsexuals, we were talking about adults. I never claimed to always understand what that experience would be like for those people, although I had experienced significant gender quote gender dysphoria in my childhood. I didn’t claim to understand it, but it was for adults. Okay, it became clear very quickly in 2020 that these processes, these medicalized treatments, were for minors, 

Stella Omalley  08:02 

and Peter. 

Peter Gajdics  08:04 

Yes. 

Stella Omalley  08:04 

Could I ask you before we get further into that? Because I hear where you’re going. Could we go back to one? You had gender dysphoria in childhood, and two. I’m very keen to hear about what you experienced in your 30s and how that panned out. 

Mia Hughes  08:18 

Just because it’s such a long and complicated story, so yes, there’s no short answer. I don’t think for 

Peter Gajdics  08:24 

sure, and I can I can hit all the all the bells in terms of what happened to me. I don’t like these, this concept of trigger warnings in today’s world. It just feels overly you know coddling, but I suppose I can say that it’s pretty distressing to hear for some people, I’m sure, and it’s not something I like talk about a lot anymore. The details of it. So I went to the psychiatrist when I was 24. I’d come out as gay, come out as gay. Didn’t go well. Rejection from family. I fled to a new city. I went to this psychiatrist for psychotherapy to reconcile my sexuality. As a child, I had experienced childhood sexual molestation. This was the ’70s, so extreme confusion growing up around my sexuality, not just being same-sex attracted, but the object of my attraction was the same sex as my abuser, and that for survivors is extremely confusing because the desire is always linked to abuse. So I was very confused. Went to the psychiatrist. Within a short time, he put me on medication, sedative, antidepressants, and then I saw this man for six years. For five of those six years, he had me live isolated in a house with other patients. So there were about, five between five and six of us at all times in this house. He put me on these medications, and they quickly became a means toward suppressing my sexuality, silencing 

Stella Omalley  10:14 

1990? 

Peter Gajdics  10:18 

yeah, went to him in 1989, December, yeah, December 1989 for the consultations, and then January 1990, full on treatment started, and it was a lot very quick. So you know, two to three sessions a week, and I’ll just say quickly for those international viewers, you know, I went to a psychiatrist because in Canada, psychiatry is covered under a medical plan. So for me, as a 24-year-old, I didn’t have to pay, right, which was significant. 

Stella Omalley  10:52 

But also, there’s a presumption that he’s accredited; he’s top-notch as a psychiatrist. You know, so kind of can 

Mia Hughes  10:59 

I just inject a bit of context as well that I took from reading your story. We’re talking late 1980s, the peak of the Satanic Panic, the recovered memory movement, and your psychiatrist sounds like a, well a homophobe, obviously, but a crank of a similar genre. It’s that same mad time in psychiatry that you had the misfortune of colliding with, 

Stella Omalley  11:23 

and he had you all. You he had you all in a house together. What was going down here? 

Peter Gajdics  11:29 

Yeah, he. So the house didn’t start initially. I started treatment with him in January 90. His treatment was a form of a primal scream therapy. Yeah, and he also told me, I mean remember I’m 24 it’s 1990, so very different world, the internet did not exist to try to wrap your head around that one okay so he told me he had trained under Janov in the late 60s early 70s in LA at the Primal Institute I didn’t know, you know, any of that. I bought Janov’s book. I read a bit of it, and so the main treatment would be primal scream therapy. And he said early on it was to address sort of a trauma from childhood. Trauma from childhood. 

Mia Hughes  12:17 

Many people won’t know what that is. Can you just give in the briefest description of what primal screen therapy is, 

Peter Gajdics  12:24 

so primal screen therapy, created by Arthur Janov in the late 60s, was one of many types of you could say feeling therapies, extreme feeling treatments. There were others. This is probably the most famous, and I think it still exists. And it involved, you know, reliving childhood traumas in a very controlled environment, typically on a mattress, lying down, regressing. You know, I don’t, not talking about former lives regressing, but regressing to an infant state. And there’s procedures you do to get into that state, and then reliving the trauma, the crying, the screaming, extreme screaming, and then using a bat, a baseball bat against a punching bag to externalize rage. You know, rage against your abusers. And so he taught me how to do this process. I started it. He put me on medication, and there was no discussing, no discussion early on about you know changing sexuality. But that’s quickly where it, where it went. So the medication was increased quickly to high dosages, 

Stella Omalley  13:43 

Can I just jump in? You had asked, you had gone for therapy, but you were already out. So, what was your? Was it just to deal with your childhood sexual abuse, or was it? Did you want, because some people who are gay want to get treatment to stop themselves being gay. It’s internalized homophobia. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a thing. 

Peter Gajdics  14:04 

So, absolutely, 1989 for me at that age was very confusing. It probably, if I could ask my younger self, he probably wouldn’t even be able to answer that question. All I knew was that I was extremely distressed. I never forgot about the childhood molestation. By my late teens, I knew that I was gay, but I had a lot of difficulty reconciling that. As I say, when you’re the object of your desire, men, males, is the same sex as the person who abused you, who abused me. It was, it was fraught with turmoil. Okay, I had sex with men. I was out. It was also the age of AIDS. I came of age during that period, and sex, gay sex, was a death sentence. And I remember just feeling overwhelming fear around. My future, you know, like the sex is linked to abuse. Having sex could kill me. You know, all of this was happening at the same time. Then I came out as gay to my family. They rejected me. Like huge amount of arguments, and I fled my home city. There was also a lot of a lot of complicated intergenerational trauma. My parents had come from post World War II Europe, communist states, and they, you know, came to Canada, and there was a lot of trauma from their lives, the war, and I grew up with that. You know that was part of my life, but I could see it. I could see that this trauma wasn’t mine per se. It was my parents, but I couldn’t separate. So I went to this doctor. I mean, I was depressed. I was suicidal. I was highly anxious, Insomnia, just all of these things happening. Okay, and it was like just walking into a doctor’s office and saying, “Help me. I mean, really, it comes down to that-that simple. Help me. You know, I had eating disorders in my in my late teens, early 20s, all of these things, and I’ll just say very quickly, after 2020, and I started to understand and learn and research what was going on with trans and trans kids who were calling themselves trans. I could see that so many of them were calling themselves trans, and I was similar to them. I’d had the same upbringing and the same life. There was trauma. There was same-sex attraction. There was internalized homophobia. There was all of these things, and I could see that if I’d come of age now, I would have been medicalized, and this was horrifying to me. Okay, so this is why I started the treatment. The medications escalated rapidly, and then within one year, he told me I could not continue with treatment unless I moved into a house with other patients because it was too risky. Again, you know, I’m young and going by his advice, and he would often say, “You do as you’re told, or you, or I’m ending your treatment, and that to me was more horrifying. My medical doctor, my general practitioner, said, “You know, there’s no one else that I can refer you to. You’ll go on a wait list for two years, and I was just like, I cannot wait two years. I am like life and death. So I just continued with this man. So I moved into a house with other patients. It was literally just a house on a street. We found a house to rent. We lived together, but it was a very weird. It’s like the house at the end of the street. You know that type of horror movie because we had a workroom. You call it a primal screen workroom that we built in our basement, padded walls. You know the whole thing. So much of what happened in that house, sadly, I learned years later, was just the same thing that had happened to people in the early ’70s. You know, we had intensives where other patients would come and live with us for three weeks, and we would feed them and house them. We would have our sessions in the house. We would go to the office. All of these things, these types of, you know, cult-like therapeutic cults existed in the early 70s. I didn’t know any of that when I was 24-25, 27. That is what it’s in. 

Stella Omalley  18:38 

Yeah, but in the early 70s, yeah, I did think so. I did not know in the early 90s that that was. But I know there was all sorts going down.  

Mia Hughes  18:49 

Yeah, recover memory. This is exactly what they were doing with the multiple personalities and recover memory, isolate them, put them all together. They had the ab reactions, which is exactly like this primary scream. They had the padded room, the making them scream and thrash and flail around and relive the supposed trauma of their childhood. It’s the same thing, but just a parallel world. 

Peter Gajdics  19:10 

And so, I was the only patient of this doctor amongst you know, he saw a lot of people. I was in groups. I was in individual sessions. So I saw hundreds of people that was gay or that thought he was gay, and so my treatment changed. It was different from a lot of other people very quickly. As I say, within a year, he reframed the primal scream for me was about reverting to my innate heterosexuality. Trauma had caused my homosexuality, or the idea that I thought I was gay, and so with enough primal, with enough medication, with enough whatever he needed to do, I would, I could revert to my base heterosexuality. This was his stated goal. This is what, and I argued earlier on, I said that’s crazy, and you know it just went on and on the arguments until finally it was like do as I’m told, do as you’re told, or leave. So, the medications to put it in perspective, we’re talking one sedative, four antidepressants at one time at the same time, and then I had an overdose about a year and a half. A year and a half into treatment, he kept escalating the dosages because, at the end of the day, he was trying to stop my sexual desires, my erotic, yeah, and it wasn’t working. I mean, it was working to a degree, but I still felt drawn to males. You know, like, right? I mean, it’s at that point. So I’m being like really candid and blunt here. But at that point, you know, we’re not talking about being able to have sex. You know, he had suppressed all libido, but my attraction was still there, so he just kept escalating the dosages. What I learned years later is the one that he escalated the highest, called Elavil, was one of these tricyclic antidepressants that caused many fatalities in the ’90s. Again, I didn’t know any of this at the time, so what I found out later is 250 milligrams for Elavil would be considered the highest dose for somebody institutionalized. We’re talking about a hospital, like a psychiatric ward hospital. He had me on, yeah, he had me on 600 milligrams. 

Mia Hughes  21:42 

Wow! So other stuff too, 

Peter Gajdics  21:44 

and other stuff. There were four antidepressants concurrently, the sedative, and at this point, he had also introduced ketamine injections of ketamine hydrochloro. 

Stella Omalley  21:58 

This guy, you know, 

Peter Gajdics  21:59 

it’s just it’s like I laugh or I 

Stella Omalley  22:04 

cry. 

Peter Gajdics  22:04 

It’s not it’s not a laughter. It’s like a disbelief still for me. You know, decades have gone by, but it still leaves me with this feeling like it’s another life. It’s another person.  

Stella Omalley  22:16 

How did you get out? It must have been. It must have been really. 

Peter Gajdics  22:19 

Yeah. So I’ll try to jump to that, but I overdosed literally one day. I just-it’s like a breakdown. I mean, and he put me on antipsychotic at that point, in addition to the other drugs. And so the ketamine was introduced earlier with weekly injections of ketamine with him cuddling me to like to reparent me. Reparenting was another one of these crazy things that it started in the 70s or late 60s, and he had hired a woman to act as our surrogate mother, so there was reparenting with her as well. 

Peter Gajdics  22:54 

And then, you know, when nothing was quite working, as I was still attracted to males, he started aversion therapy, which was bottling my feces and having me smell it whenever I felt sort of drawn to men. And his rationale that he told me was, you know, I needed to associate my attraction in a negative way to redirect me back to heterosexuality. 

Mia Hughes  23:20 

Oh my God! So cruel. 

Peter Gajdics  23:22 

So you know, and then when that still didn’t work because I was still just drawn to who I was drawn to, he threatened the electrodes on my genitals. Now he didn’t ever do it, but the threat was there, and he threatened a few times, and that was just, you know, I remember still just feeling numb. I mean, I was numb from all the medications, but when he introduced the aversion therapy and the threat of the electrodes, it’s just numb. With there was no cognition anymore. You know, like I was not thinking anymore. These drugs eliminated the possibility of independent thinking, rational, you know, objective questioning of anything. So how did it end after six years? The house closed. We spiraled into like this primal state of hysteria in the house. I mean, it’s something out of Lord of the Flies, truly. And he said the house would need to end, and so we all went our own ways. And at that point, that’s literally six years almost to the day. I went to live on my own, and I started, and I lower, and the dosages of my medications were being lowered, and my independent thinking slowly returned. Literally, it was like slowly turning on the switch to my brain, and it wasn’t until I started thinking clearly that I understood I had not been thinking clearly for years, these drugs impaired the ability to think clearly. There was an internal logic to my therapy and others that was internal to its paradigm that seemed to make sense. You know, craziness makes sense to a crazy person, and you know not to make light of it. You know an ideology, a self-referential ideology, will always make sense to the person in that loop, right? These are the things I recognized years later in the gender world. All of these things. Why kids end up going to ask for help? How they were now being ensnared? How they believed what they were being told? The indoctrination, the cultic mentality. So, anyways, I left the therapy. I started to realize what had happened. Oh my God! And within two years, I filed a complaint to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. I think everywhere in the Western world we have they have these colleges, right? Yeah. So I filed a complaint letter to the one that oversaw this doctor, psychiatrists, that I was told would last like three weeks. It lasted two years. The investigation, and then ultimately an ethics committee hearing where I went to it with the doctor, and the doctor had his lawyer, and then I sued him for medical malpractice, and the medical malpractice suit was primarily for, you know, unethical treatment of my sexuality, all the drugs, all the ketamine, everything. But you know, there was a lot more going on in that world, right? There was the whole cultic environment. We lived in this house. We were isolated. We ended up doing his chores, and cooking for him, and cleaning his houses, and taking care of his pets, that truly, it was like a cult environment. It was, it really was. So the lawsuit was all of this. The lawsuit and the ethics complaint were ultimately very you know unsatisfying. He continued to practice without much of a reprimand, and the lawsuit settled up court. 

Mia Hughes  27:20 

What? 

Peter Gajdics  27:21 

Yeah, yeah.  

Mia Hughes  27:25 

So how did they just it? Sorry, how did they justify that? How is he justified in continuing?  

Peter Gajdics  27:29 

Well, he denied all allegations, of course. And you know what? Around this time of my treatment, well, during the lawsuit, the DSM, right, the psychiatric bible, the DSM changed its definition. You know, they removed homosexuality in ’73, but it didn’t really get removed. It just got reframed. So now it was still sort of a mental illness if you didn’t want to be ego distinguished sexuality.  

Mia Hughes  27:55 

 But oh, I want to. That’s one of my questions though, because I wanted to ask you what you thought of that diagnosis, because I thought that was clinically useful, as long as you’re not doing conversion therapy, you’re actually helping the person accept their sexuality. 

Peter Gajdics  28:12 

I just don’t think that’s the way it worked out, right? Because life terms, yeah, yeah, 

Mia Hughes  28:18 

right. But okay, but can I just, I just want to say though when they remove, they removed ego dystonic homosexuality in DSM three revision in 1987 because they felt that it would open the door to conversion therapy. However, the people with ego dystonic homosexuality, which is internalized homophobia, still exist, and now they’re filtered into gender dysphoria, and they get the new conversion therapy, and they get the body parts chopped off. So I think that was a better diagnosis than trends, certainly. 

Peter Gajdics  28:53 

Yeah. So that’s coming. That’s like years down the road. All of that. But for me, at that time, the way I could see it, well, not at that time, but years later, looking back, like during the lawsuit, actually even after the lawsuit, the lawsuit, I was still sort of in a numb state. You know, 2002, 2003, when it settled, the internet was basically still new. So, you know, what struck me, the irony later was, you know, you make gay people crazy by treating them to try to change them, and then suddenly you change the definition and say, oh, okay, so you’re not you’re you don’t need to change, but if you don’t like being gay, now that’s a disease. So you know we feel bad about ourselves because we’ve been told that who we are as a disease, and so now that’s being treated. The fact that we don’t like who we are-I mean, it’s just like it just goes around and around. You know, this is why when I started to write and then advocate for me, it was always about end all treatments, and just like fuck all. You know, like let these people just live their lives, right? You know, you’re damned if you do. You’re damned if you don’t. If you don’t want to be gay, you’re damned. If you if you now struggle with being gay, you’re damned, right? So it’s like there was no win situation, and so during the lawsuit, suddenly everything was reframed towards me. It was me because I didn’t like being gay, and that was why I went to see him. They turned it on you. They turned it on me, and so the questions were like, “Well, when did you first decide you wanted to be heterosexual? 

Mia Hughes  30:37 

Let’s be clear, though. You weren’t seeking conversion therapy. I suppose, is my question. 

Peter Gajdics  30:42 

The term conversion therapy didn’t exist. You know, it’s hard to talk about these things, and for people today to even understand, 

Stella Omalley  30:49 

you were distressed, and sex didn’t help be a part of it. You were just distressed and vulnerable. You just didn’t 

Mia Hughes  30:56 

help. Yeah, yeah. I mean, 

Peter Gajdics  30:58 

you know, the bulimia, 

Stella Omalley  31:01 

yeah, the anorexia. 

Peter Gajdics  31:02 

Could I get a 

Stella Omalley  31:03 

little snapshot? Sorry to jump across you. I shouldn’t. Yeah, yeah. There’s so many questions. But you said you had something like gender dysphoria as a kid. Was that pre any sort of abuse? Were you one of these feminized little boys, or what was going down there? 

Peter Gajdics  31:20 

So, this is one of many things I started to recognize post 2020. You know, like I could have been one of them, one of these trans kids. When I was like 13, I, I, when everyone was out of the house, I stole my sister’s makeup, her bra, and I, you know, locked myself in a bathroom, and I put on all this makeup in her bra because I just felt like a girl. I thought I was, I thought I should be a girl because I didn’t think in terms of gay, homosexual, but I was drawn to the boys in a way that clearly, and I can say this in retrospect, but it but I clearly at the time was causing me distress. It was distressing to me, and it’s also a very different world than today, right? I mean, like gay was barely mentioned, homosexuality was only recently, you know, taken out of psychiatric manuals and only recently decriminalized in Canada, so I mean I thought it would make sense if I was a girl drawn to boys, you know, like mommy and daddy, right?  

Stella Omalley  32:31 

Were you like that before that? Like, were you like that as a little boy, or well, the abuse happened very young? 

Peter Gajdics  32:38 

Yeah, the sexual abuse happened very young. We’re talking six, seven years old, and so you know, I’ve never claimed to say it’s a direct correlation because how can you ever know, right? I mean, I’ve only lived the life I’ve lived, but I was abused, sexually abused, and then I was clearly a type of boy today would be called trans because I was very effeminate. You know, I was kind of chubby, and I had these like they looked like breasts. You know, chubby little boy, extremely sensitive. Basically, anything that would be associated with the girls was what I liked. I liked the pink. I liked the dolls. I liked the playing, you know, Betty Crocker. I liked cooking in the kitchen with my mom. I liked the music that was more, you know, gentle. All of these things, just classic, right? So, putting on the makeup and a bra just seemed to externalize how I felt. I just felt like a little girl, but it was, it was secret, right? I mean, I knew that I couldn’t tell anyone this. And what we know now, what I know now, I mean, not just now. I mean, I’ve known for years is these types of kids typically grow up to be gay, right? Yeah. As I did, if just left alone, and maybe supported and encouraged, and not you know shamed. So that was what was happening to me. And then as I moved more into my puberty, post puberty, the body hatred, you know, the chubbiness, the shame in my body, I started a form of cutting very early, yeah. So and all of these, yeah, and all of these things just became even more heightened in the treatment. When I was going through this treatment with the psychiatrist, I started cutting again secretly. When he found out, he just exploded in a rage, which obviously just made it all worse. And so, you know, all of these things were happening.  

Stella Omalley  34:52 

And you mentioned cross dressing, kind of a form of cross dressing. Yeah, quietly and secretly was when you were trying to figure out. You know where you were going. Did that maintain? Did that continue? 

Peter Gajdics  35:04 

No, no. You know I remember that once, doing it once, but the feeling never went away. And the feeling was I was just more like the girls than the boys. I just didn’t, and I didn’t have boy friends. You know I had, all the girls loved me. I loved all the girls. I played with the girls. The few boys I played with were probably like me. You know, like we were sort of kind of girly boys. And so I didn’t have any way to understand it. And also, I just want to comment on your term of the conversion therapy. Remember now, in the ’90s and even in the early 2000s, these terms didn’t exist. So it definitely didn’t exist when I was in treatment with this doctor. I never thought terms like conversion therapy, reparative therapy, sexual orientation, change efforts-you know-these things did not exist. So when I came out of the treatment, I still had no way to quite articulate what had happened, and this was one of the most distressing things post treatment. Is I couldn’t put it into words, I couldn’t encapsulate what had happened, and literally the first two years I was just shell shocked. I remember walking around the city in a state of just shell shock, and I kept thinking, why, why does no one notice this hole in my gut? I mean, I still remember that feeling, and so I filed the complaints, the lawsuit, and then I started to write. I thought, okay, I will use the writing. I mean, I’d been a writer, I had started my university degree in creative writing. Had to drop out because of the therapy. So writing was, you know, something that I was drawn to. So I thought, you know, I can write about it, and that could help stop this from happening to others. And so I slowly got some publishing, you know, some articles published, and then I was working on a book, and the book took me ultimately 20 years to write. A lot was happening at that time in the world, you know. The T got added to the LGB. There was a 2015 article in the New York Times where a young person who, and it’s mentioned in the essay Mia that you read, the young person who identified as a trans girl you could say so born boy, born a boy, killed themselves after yeah Leela yeah, and it was a, it was a significant moment I think in the history of 

Stella Omalley  37:41 

for those that don’t know, look it up. Leelah Alcorn, like just a huge moment in kind of middle America. 

Peter Gajdics  37:51 

Yes 

Stella Omalley  37:51 

Coming across and well everywhere.  

Mia Hughes  37:54 

Yeah, and I would just say if you read like when you read that New York Times article, which I did read because you linked it, the opening paragraph. I can’t even believe that it’s still there. They break every single rule about reporting on suicides. Just bearing in mind,  

Stella Omalley  38:10 

yeah, dreadful case, a dreadful complex case, and the reporting of it was an absolute disaster. Totally, really, but it’s worth studying the entire thing because it’s awful, and it was a pivotal point in this whole  

Peter Gajdics  38:24 

yeah, pivotal point in the sort of the movement of conversion therapy, bans on conversion therapy. President Obama publicly said post this suicide that he condemned these treatments, and they were conflated. So treatments, conversion treatments of gays and for gender identity, just all in one. And it reinforced for me this merging of the two. And this is how it was presented: the Human Rights Campaign, in the same article, provided the definition of conversion therapy, and there was no attempt, or maybe it didn’t even exist at the time that the ultimate end definition of quote trans conversion therapy maybe didn’t even exist at the time. But they didn’t do anything to help sort of extrapolate it. They just merged it into one. So it was treatments of sexual orientation and gender in one. 

Mia Hughes  39:24 

And you saw that happen. This is, this is where it gets. I mean, what I’d like to understand is you saw, you credit Obama with merging the two, and I had never put that together, but that makes complete sense. He merged the two, gender identity and gay conversion therapy, in the public consciousness with that statement after Leelah Alcorn tragedy. But you saw that happen. What did you think of that? Did you think gender identity? What what does this even mean? 

Peter Gajdics  39:57 

So. As I say, toward the end of my treatment, when the drugs, the primal, the aversion, the threats, and when none of it worked, he basically just went after my overt femininity, and during session after session, and you know what can you do about that? You know what? How can you attack somebody’s femininity, masculinity. So it was. It’s like okay, you need to join. What are they called? Outbound, outbound for men. You need to go hiking with men. I mean, it’s so absurd, right? But I mean, this is, that’s the world. You need to stop baking at the house. You need to stop looking at flowers. I want you to stop writing poetry,  

Mia Hughes  40:42 

Yeah, it’s like forcing the kid, the little boy, to stop playing with dolls. You’re talking like that’s what it was in your mind. Yeah, that makes complete sense. 

Peter Gajdics  40:50 

But in today’s world, what that was in my mind also like the conversion therapy for gender, right? Trying to change their expression of masculinity and femininity, trying to make the boy more masculine, the girl more feminine. You know, for the girls, you know, you know, put them in dresses, wear the lipstick. You know, all of this. So when the 2015 article came out, it wasn’t for me at that moment a flag. I mean, the merging was, I thought, a mistake, because again, two trajectories. I knew enough based on my treatment, my life, and you know what I’d learned. Sexual desire was completely separate from this femininity, masculinity. I mean, some gays or some gay boys are masculine. Some are feminine. I mean, like you can’t quite say all gay boys are going to be overtly feminine, right? So, but I knew that they were still separate. I thought it was a mistake to conflate. But at the same time, I thought, okay, as long as all quote conversion therapy ends, we’re good, and if it does nothing but that, okay, great. Just let’s end all treatments. 

Mia Hughes  42:05 

And so this is 2015, and then you adopt. You want to bring this to Canada. Am I correct? This fired something in you. You want to bring this type of ban to Canada. 

Peter Gajdics  42:15 

So, so I hadn’t thought that. I mean, a lot happened very quickly, but in 2015, I was still like writing articles. I was still working on my book. Conversion therapy, the term, and reparative therapy were you know fairly recent, and so I started using those terms. And I think I only mentioned them once in my book at the very end. So really, my book describes what happened to me without reducing them to these, you know, reductive labels, which is part of the huge problem today, because the labels get expanded and inverted and changed using the same terms, but suddenly we’re talking about something else entirely. So in 2015, I didn’t quite see all of that. My book got published in 2017, and for me at that point, it was like full on emailing politicians, emailing you know our new prime minister Justin Trudeau, emailing his special advisor on LGBTQ to whatever. Plus, I didn’t care. I didn’t like the acronyms, but I thought, okay, just end all treatments. Talk to the politicians. Try to you know, get them to speak out. I didn’t see anyone talking about this, and for me, for years, that was part of my world. I didn’t see anyone else talking about this, and it had happened to me when I was trying to get my book published. Editors were saying this doesn’t happen anymore. Conversion therapy doesn’t happen anymore, and I’m like, well, you know, hello, I’m here, and it happened. The problem is people think in terms of the label, and they don’t sort of break it out in terms of what happened in your treatments. There are treatments that happen that go fly under the radar because nobody calls them conversion therapy. 

Mia Hughes  44:00 

I have a. Can I just interject? I have a confession to make, and you may have heard me say this publicly. That I have. I had that opinion, though, of these conversion therapy bans, and I’ve said it in many public interviews that it was a Trojan horse. They banned something that wasn’t happening, gay conversion therapy, in order to slip in gender identity. And can 

Stella Omalley  44:22 

I yeah can I come in though on that point because you know I’ve said the same. However, your guy Peter and I don’t know where he is now, but this was an extremely unethical crank in the very not mainstream. 

Mia Hughes  44:37 

Yeah, 

Stella Omalley  44:38 

yeah. Well, well, well. I would say way beyond mainstream, like Primal Scream in 1990 in a house, and everything he did was so profoundly unethical. It was like you said; it was like cult-like.  

Peter Gajdics  44:52 

It was, yeah, but you know what? One thing it taught me is that if it could happen to me, it could happen to someone else. Yeah. And I kept getting met by disbelief after disbelief. There’s a line in my book where something like the disbelief, the horror of it causes disbelief. Some something like that, and that’s the thing. When I would tell people my story, the horror of it would immediately result. But it is. But that couldn’t happen.  

Stella Omalley  45:21 

Yeah, but it is the question? Because I’ve heard some dreadful reports, and I really do think psychiatry is the issue here, and madcap psychiatrists having too much control over patients and too much freedom. And this guy was conversion therapy for you. I would have no doubt that other people who came to him, it was other things he was doing to be very cruel and conversive. He wasn’t just banging out conversion therapy. He was a crap boss. 

Peter Gajdics  45:51 

So I just want to make a leap also for the viewers so they can connect the dots. You know, for me with my history, we’re talking trauma, body dysmorphia. That you know, the feeling I was more like a girl than a boy. Hatred of my body, same-sex desire emerging. I end up in what ultimately is a form of conversion therapy. Today, I see the same thing. I see kids who have the trauma, the same sex. There’s autism as well, which wasn’t my history, but so we have all of this. We have girls who want out of their bodies. Okay, they just want out of, and they end up in quote gender affirmative care. For me, gender affirmative care is the new euphemism for conversion therapy. This is the thing, Joyce Helen Joyce. When I read her book in 2021, 2022. So I started to read all these books, and I got to the line in her book where she said, “Conversion therapy, gender affirmative care is the postmodern gay conversion therapy of the 21st century. It was like neon coming through the page. Thank you, somebody had said it, 

Mia Hughes  47:01 

yeah, 

Peter Gajdics  47:02 

and that was the first time I heard somebody say it, 

Mia Hughes  47:04 

yeah. 

Peter Gajdics  47:05 

And I’m starting to hear more people say it, but that was it, and that is what it is. 

Mia Hughes  47:12 

Yeah, you collided with a homophobe doing wacky, crazy conversion therapy with this type of primal scream therapy. These kids today collide with a gender ideologue who’s doing another conversion therapy that involves body part amputation, 

Peter Gajdics  47:26 

and so there’s a trajectory to conversion therapy as horrific and extreme. Granted that what happened to me, to what happens to kids. If you could, if you could go on the spectrum of of treatments, and mine is like getting up there, you know the drugs, all of this. The next step is let’s start cutting off body parts, okay? I know, and so that to me, I, that’s just what I see now. It’s like once you see it, you can’t unsee it.  

Mia Hughes  47:56 

True, can you walk us through that process? Like walk, can you walk us through the Vancouver ban, the federal campaigning, and then when you write about it, it really sends chills down my spine. Like your moment, kind of realizing the monster that you helped create is the way it is in my mind. 

Peter Gajdics  48:15 

So, so after my book was published, I reached out to Vancouver City Council Committee on, here we go the acronym right the LGBTQ, whatever I didn’t like the acronym, but I  thought okay this is where I need to go, bureaucracy, I did it to to ask that a municipal ban on conversion therapy could be instituted. They invited me, I came and I spoke to the committee, they agreed we started to work on the bill. I helped them work on the bill. It went to the city council. I was at city council June. I think it’s June eight, 2018. I testified in front of council. They passed it unanimously the same day. And significant. So this was Canada’s first municipal ban. Significantly, I had wanted the ban to include all ages, because you know I was a legal adult when I went to this this man. I was not a 12 year old, and so you know people always say, “Well, you know, adults they should be able to do what they want. Well, no, because we’re talking about helping environments, helping professionals, and anyone’s vulnerability. People go to seek help in this arena, when they are typically distressed, trauma, 

Mia Hughes  49:27 

and so goodness me, the parallels here, the parallels to trends here.  

Peter Gajdics  49:31 

Yeah, it’s all there, and so you know, for me, I thought, okay, this needs to be banned for all ages. Minors were always part of these bans. I wanted it, adults included, because I had been an adult. So we’re not talking about adults in any other frame of mind. We’re talking about adults who go to seek help by a professional, like mental health professional, are already vulnerable, trauma. They do not have the ability to give informed consent. Period. From day one, and so you’re always going on the assumption that I trust you. That’s the assumption. First, do no harm. So the ban came into effect. It was approved by city council. It was Canada’s first municipal ban. I had been writing an article on the hope that it would get passed with McLean’s Canada’s news magazine. The article was published the same day. You know, I was texting the editor. It was very exciting at the time, and the article basically was a call to have a national ban. Like, here’s Vancouver’s ban. It’s a first step, but we need to ban this across Canada. It felt very exciting to me at the time.  

Mia Hughes  50:45 

Yes, can I just because I was looking into it. They did slip in gender identity, and then I watched you on Global or CTV or something at the time. You are taught they interview you, and they mentioned gender identity once, but the entire interview is about sexual orientation, and that’s what you’re there. You can see that that’s what you’re there talking about, and there’s just this teeny little mention of gender identity that barely anyone notices. 

Peter Gajdics  51:11 

So you know, I was there testifying. I watched the full city council meeting, but you know, when you’re in a moment like that, you can never quite get everything. So years later, the last three or four years, as I was working on a new piece of writing, I searched for the video because all city council meetings are typically videotaped. I found it literally buried into the archives of Vancouver City Council, and I watched it from beginning to end. I transcribed it from beginning to end. Took me weeks. There was zero discussion on gender identity, even though the ban, the municipal bill, included sexual orientation and gender identity. So, for me in 2018, gender identity was still this sort of elusive idea around masculinity, femininity, kids who were boys who were more feminine, etc. And so there was never a discussion. There was never an understanding in my mind that kids would be medicalized. Yeah. So I didn’t. I didn’t want to get caught up in the whole gender identity thing. I just thought, you know, like the ban will stop all treatments. Period. That’s where I was coming from, and I have to say, also, I was just like a dog with a bone. I for years, I was just like so focused on what had happened to me, and I’m not looking for a pity party, but I was also, you know, you know, the treatment was extremely traumatizing. It took me years to sort of get my.  

Stella Omalley  52:51 

What happened to him, Peter? Like, what happened to that guy? 

Peter Gajdics  52:55 

Oh, he went on and on practicing for years and years and years, and I think he’s retired. He’s well. I don’t like you know. I do. I do look him up occasionally. I think he’s still alive. He moved back to his birth country. He’s from Europe. I think he’s still there. He might have died. I don’t know, but he did go on to continue his private practice for decades after my treatment.  

Mia Hughes  53:19 

Yeah, can I just bring it back though, because I have something that I think is quite significant, and that is you’re saying that there was no mention of gender identity. I’ll bet there was no definition of gender identity either, because that’s another tactic that they do. They don’t define it in any of these laws, but there was no mention of it during the whole hearing debate or whatever. Now, I, in reading your long essay that is wonderful, and I hope it gets published. There’s a connection with you getting invited by Thomson Reuters to take part in an LGBT something panel. That is who published the infamous Dentons document, which is the playbook, the strategic playbook, how to get all of these unpopular gender identity laws written, enacted without anyone noticing it, and the classic tactic is tack it onto. So, if you want gender identity conversion therapy bans, you tack it to gay conversion therapy. If you want self ID for kids, you tack it on somehow to anti-abortion legislation. They’ve got this. It’s a very clear tactic that is laid out in the Dentons document, and I can’t help but feel that they just used you in this. 

Peter Gajdics  54:37 

You know, this is, this is part of my reckoning. I think the last few years, I I don’t live my life as a victim. You know, my parents came from trauma. I’ve had trauma in my life, but my way of learning from it and moving on has been very important. To me, and a large part of that has been through the writing, and it was through the advocacy for a long time. All of which to say that you see, I  almost don’t want to say it because it sounds kind of victimy, but I do feel that my story, my book, because I mean, let’s face it, in Canada, there was no other book by somebody who had lived through something like this, and I used that platform to help pass these laws. So I don’t. So I think that it was used. And at the time, I would have said, “That’s okay. Use me. Like if I can help end these treatments. That’s why I’ve written the book. That’s why that was one of the main reasons. I mean, I wrote it to understand myself first and foremost. Why did I end up with this doctor? Why did I stay? What did I learn? I mean, those were the three questions that guided me as I wrote that book, and I learned a lot about myself. And it took me years and years. So the writing took years, not just because of the effort of writing, but you know that self-realization process, unpacking my childhood, understanding what happened in the therapy. I mean, the drugs alone were so confusing. I mean, I relied on journals.  

Stella Omalley  56:19 

Yeah, this is the point. This was profoundly unethical therapy by any ethical standards. 

Peter Gajdics  56:24 

So, so in in the transcript of 2018, the city council, when I watched it and transcribed it, there was lots of discussion by city councilors on homosexualities, same-sex desire, going back to the 80s. They discussed how this has been going on in psychiatry and the removal in ’73. So where all this being discussed, no one mentioned anything about gender, even though it was part of the bill. And I think for them, trying to give maybe them a little credit, these lawmakers, I think politicians probably didn’t understand, and it’s worse that they didn’t understand because they should have understood. But they probably did. Yeah, you agree? 

Mia Hughes  57:09 

I do not believe for a moment they understood. And there’s even all of them that wrote gender identity into every human rights code, whatever. None of them understood what they were supporting. They just went along with it because they thought it made them good people. We even have. Have you seen Cheri DiNovo, who put Ontario’s human rights code? She got gender identity injected into Ontario’s human rights code in 2012. She says in her memoir, “Nobody at the time knew the dramatic effect it would have on the way the entire province did business. I’m glad no one looked too closely. No one knew what they were supporting.” She says it right now. 

Peter Gajdics  57:48 

Yeah, she was one of the. I didn’t have direct contact with her, but she was one of the people whose name sort of came through my world in all of these years of advocacy. So there’s three other people that we talked about before me, and I’ll mention them in a moment. But you know, just going to finish this in 2018, so there was no discussion in that city council. When I watched that video, it just reaffirmed for me they didn’t know what the hell they were passing. I didn’t know what we were passing. The testimony, the other people who were there providing testimony. I think I was the only one with like that sort of the breadth of my story, and definitely who had written a book, but there were I think two other people who testified, you know, testified in the sense of homophobia is terrible, and this is what leads to these treatments. Okay, so nobody understood, and then moving past that, you know, that ban was covered internationally, first Canada’s first municipal band, and I just pushed forward for the national ban, and so that was the next couple of years. 

Mia Hughes  58:48 

The momentum, huge momentum.  

Peter Gajdics  58:50 

Momentum, yeah. And I had contact with advocates in the U.S. as well. There were efforts in the U.S. more at a state by state level, and you know smaller municipalities throughout the states to get these bans passed. All of them are combining the sexual orientation and gender. Again, I didn’t understand what that could unleash. 

Stella Omalley  59:18 

We’re coming up towards the end now, sadly. Bring us up to now, because what happened, like you know, I mean, where was there a moment where you said stop, reverse the realization? 

Mia Hughes  59:30 

 It was during C6, was it not? Which you can explain. 

Peter Gajdics  59:35 

So can I just mention very quickly? So, Christopher Wells was an associate professor in Calgary who I joined at a public forum in Calgary in February 2020 because Calgary was trying to pass its own ban, and I was there with him. He took a call from private sector advocates, people who were very concerned that this type of ban would result in minors being medicalized, and I was there when he took the call, and he said bluntly, “That does not happen. It will not happen. 

Mia Hughes  1:00:16 

And he, I just for the viewers, he’s now, he was appointed to Canada’s Senate. He is a Canadian senator, and he is the one who spreads more misinformation about this medical scandal than anyone else in Canada, as far as I’m concerned. 

Peter Gajdics  1:00:29 

So you know, I was there. I heard him say it. 

Mia Hughes  1:00:32 

but, you believed him, 

Peter Gajdics  1:00:33 

I believed him. But the fact that it was being addressed, like people were asking the question, was kind of chilling to me because I would never have supported minors being medicalized. I didn’t quite know what all these surgeries entailed, but I believed him. Another red flag was oh, is it? There was three. There was him. There was Florence Ashley, who is a self-identified trans woman living back east. I think she now. You know, I have to say about pronouns. Pronouns still leave me very confused. Anyways, so I was involved in British Columbia on two bills to try to get conversion therapy passed provincially. So I did the municipal, then the two bills, and I had direct contact with Florence Ashley. Florence Ashley drafted one of these bills, and in that bill, she removed the, she changed the definition of sexual orientation to make it only same or opposite gender attracted. And I remember at the time being completely floored, completely confused, because I understood that that would basically remove sexuality from the equation, and I didn’t understand how you could have a ban on conversion therapy for gay people, gay people whose attraction is for sex, same sex, but remove sexuality from the definition. I didn’t understand that, so I removed myself from that group of people if they wanted to move forward with this, and Florence Ashley drafted that bill, I thought, okay, I’m not up to having these arguments with people. Like, if they can’t understand why removing same sex 

Stella Omalley  1:02:13 

You brought it up. 

Peter Gajdics  1:02:17 

I brought it up. I brought it up. I said, you know, like why would we remove sexual attraction from a definition of sexual orientation because you have same sex or opposite sex attraction. Gender is not sex sexuality. Gender orientation 

Mia Hughes  1:02:35 

You can’t have logical discussion with Florence Ashley through that. 

Mia Hughes  1:02:41 

I’m interested in going forward. So Florence Ashley was not 

Peter Gajdics  1:02:45 

Florence Ashley was not in the group, but she had drafted the bill, and I said to the group of people working on the bill, like when they basically said no to me, like we’re moving forward with this the way it’s worded, I said, well then I’m removing myself from the group. So that was, so that was Florence Ashley, and then when you mentioned the Thompson Reuters, there was that. But there was another panel I was on for Munk School in Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs through University of Toronto, and I was on invited to this panel to discuss c6, which was coming up toward the end of 2020. 

Mia Hughes  1:03:24 

That was our conversion therapy ban in a previous home. 

Peter Gajdics  1:03:27 

Yeah, and Florence Ashley was on that panel, so it was a virtual panel. I said my piece always, as I always had done, described what I, you know, lived through, why I wanted these treatments ended. Florence Ashley, to my shock, said she disagreed with bans on conversion therapy. She did not support them. She didn’t think they should move forward. I was completely gobsmacked. It’s like you know, why are you here then? Why are you on this panel? It took me years to sort of reflect on that moment, and the only way I can understand it is that she, and oh yeah, I remember the other person was Morgane Oger And she also opposed. I had direct contact with Morgan as well. They were opposed to these bans because they probably knew, as we didn’t, that the bans could interrupt quote gender affirmative care for minors. 

Mia Hughes  1:04:23 

See, but that doesn’t. I mean, these individuals rarely make any sense to me. But that doesn’t. It just doesn’t make any sense because they pushed for these bans so that they could remove all of the barriers, remove all of the obstacles, and make medicalization the only option, but can we go to Morgane Oger because I watched, really that you did an interview with him in 2017, but just I want to know what you thought about that because he’s, you’re in the interview you’re talking about gay conversion therapy your own experience and he keeps interjecting. Talking about conversion therapy of transgender children, and it’s all about transgender children and trans conversion therapy. And I was going through your mind, sat next to this man dressed as a woman who’s talking about trans children and conversion therapy. You must. How did you feel? What did you think? 

Peter Gajdics  1:05:20 

So you know, this is the problem that we, I, anyone will always face in today’s world. Looking at old clips, reading old articles, because you think of it in terms of today’s world, but we didn’t have those understandings at the time. That video, a friend said to me after my book came out, “Oh, I a friend who was active in politics said, you know, this person Morgane Oger, active in politics, quote trans woman. Why don’t you do like an interview with her? She has a platform. She could help, you know, push your book. I thought super, why not? So she invited me to her home. We did this interview, and what was going through my head again? The trans to me at that time. I mean, laws hadn’t been. It was just a distraction 

Stella Omalley  1:06:10 

by the look. It was just a sideshow.  

Peter Gajdics  1:06:14 

The pieces weren’t there. Okay, pieces for me were not there. The event in question around Morgane was at the Vancouver Public Library after my book came out, the one-year anniversary. We did a book event, and she interviewed me, and you know that was fine. And I read from my book, and at the end there was a Q and A from the audience, and a man stood up and he turned to her and said, you know what Peter had been through. I would never support. This is horrendous for gay people. But Morgane, kids are being medicalized. Kids are going through treatments. They’re having these surgeries. What do you say about this? This is torture. I remember in the moment thinking, 

Stella Omalley  1:06:54 

“Oh my God, 

Peter Gajdics  1:06:55 

what is what is he saying? Like, and Morgane evaded and was defensive, and didn’t make sense. And we know now these people, when they start talking, just like gibberish comes out of their mouth.  

Mia Hughes  1:07:08 

I have experience with this, 

Peter Gajdics  1:07:10 

and so he, he didn’t make sense. And the man pursued, and you know, asked again and again, and it was just just more of this gibberish. And I remember after that thinking like, like that was another red flag for me. Okay, like who are these minors that are being? I didn’t know. I didn’t research. And you know I have to say, and I’m not happy about this. I was probably willfully ignorant to some degree because I had spent decades by now writing my book, trying to make a difference, trying to stop treatments, thinking the whole time as long as all treatments end, we’re good. Just stick to the.  

Stella Omalley  1:07:49 

I can just imagine. Can I just say, I can imagine me and Mia, and we’re driving forward, and we’ve been decades at it, and we’re just about to get over the line, and this sideshow comes in, and you’re like, “What? Yeah, sorry, what? And just keep going. 

Mia Hughes  1:08:01 

Absolutely, this. One of my questions. I just I feel like you had put so much into this, invested so much of your life, and built upon your own horrible, terrible experiences, and then along comes something that doesn’t make any sense. It’s all bewildering and confusing, and you’ve just like you have to have that tunnel vision. Stay, keep your eye focused on the end point, and you therefore can’t let it in. But of course, can we get to this? Because it’s quite when you when you describe this moment and what you’ve what you now understand, it really does chill me to the bone. Can we go there? 

Peter Gajdics  1:08:42 

Yeah, it took me a long time after the bill. So I testified in December 2020. Okay, 2021 was the game changer for me because this is when I started to read Abigail Shrier’s book. I started. I read. I’m not sure if I read Helen Joyce’s book ‘21 or ‘22, but I started to read a lot of older books about you know transsexualism, the new transgender movement, and let me also say that we’re talking about an ideology that not all people who call themselves trans support either, right? It’s important because for me, it’s not about attacking individuals. Although, if people, if there are individuals who are captured by the ideology, it is still the ideology I’m referring to, and not the individual. Me too. Although some individuals have gone so far that they are fucking crazy, and you know they are causing serious harm, bodily harm, in some cases, to people because of an ideology, which is not uncommon from cult members. The cult is now your next door neighbor, right? Cults are no longer behind a barbed wire or fence. They are your doctors. They are your media personalities, and we are all being indoctrinated slowly from watching news. Period. 

So, after the testimony in 2021, and I started reading, and I started to understand. I mean, I was getting invitations at that point to do keynote addresses. You know, I was thrilled. It felt like decades of work finally coming to fruition, and then the pieces started to come together for me. And it’s not like it was obvious. I had to sort of search it out. It’s so counterintuitive. It is so you cannot see something that you don’t know exists, and I didn’t know it was happening, so I couldn’t see it. But then when I put the pieces and read the books, these bills, and especially the federal one, which is way more detailed than the municipal one, was basically conversion therapy for sexual orientation was still you know being banned. Treatments to trying to stop treatments of sexual orientation, conversion therapy for trans is like the opposite. It’s Basically, codifying into law the access to treatments. 

Yeah, so you’re ending treatments for gay people, and you’re codifying into law access because without the access for trans people, that is conversion therapy to them. Yeah. The denial of treatments, so they want the treatments, the puberty blockers for minors, the cross-sex hormones, the surgeries also sometimes for minors. So it’s the opposite in one bill. Both are happening. At some point, I came across Florence Ashley had written a book, and it was you know print published by the University of British Columbia, famous you know press, supported by the then UN expert on gender or sexual orientation, blah blah blah, and the whole book is about trans conversion practices. This book was written published in the, after the national ban came into effect, and it said basically nothing about gays and sexual orientation. It was about the horror of trans conversion practices, and she went on to explain that gender diverse is how she worded it. You know, gender nonconforming kids typically grew up to be trans. When I read that, yeah, and she mentioned me in her book. When I found the book and I saw my name mentioned, I thought, “What? What the hell? I go to read the passage that she had written and that UBC published, apparently fact-checked, and it was just flagrant lies. She basically never says I’m gay. Never. She just puts me in the same sentence with a known trans person, known publicly identified trans person, anyone reading the book would assume Peter Gajdics is a trans person, and she explains how I went through this conversion practice again. People would assume it means trans conversion practice, and she says that I had ostensibly to use her word consented. I mean that alone. I mean I had been on the panel with Florence. I had discussions with Florence. I had my whole book. I had said I never consented. You cannot.  

Mia Hughes  1:13:12 

We’re all very familiar with Florence. So you know. Can I just okay? So all of your decades of work. Right at the end, trans comes along, co-ops the entire movement, steals it from you. You’re not. No one’s talking about gay anymore. It’s all about trans. There’s one line in that essay that has yet to be published of yours that describe the moment that Bill c4, our conversion therapy ban in 2021 passed. 

Peter Gajdics  1:13:40 

Yeah. 

Mia Hughes  1:13:40 

Describe that moment. You’re home alone. How do you feel? 

Peter Gajdics  1:13:45 

So I watched it online. We’re still in lockdown from COVID, right? I mean, even the testimony was done virtually. Normally, I would have flown to Ottawa to do it, so that was virtual. So I’m alone in my apartment through all of this stuff, like doing the testimony, watching a year later as the House of Commons debates quickly passes the bill, unheard of in the history of Canada’s House of Commons, unheard of. Both parties agreeing. 

Mia Hughes  1:14:10 

It should tell you a lot. 

Peter Gajdics  1:14:11 

Yeah, I at that point. So we’re talking December 2021 when it passed, and you know I’d spent the year a lot of reading, I was numb. I watched it, just numb. You know that I’m not sure the sentence you mean, but there was. 

Mia Hughes  1:14:31 

I have it written. Can I read your sentence to you? Sure, sure. Brutal. You say you felt nothing, no excitement, no sense of victory, and that is your victory, but it’s not because they snatched it from you. Yeah, and you understand that. 

Peter Gajdics  1:14:46 

And I didn’t understand all the pieces in that moment, but I knew enough. This is bad news, and I and I also in lead up to that moment, that the year of 2021, there was nothing I could do. 

Mia Hughes  1:14:59 

Yeah, 

Peter Gajdics  1:14:59 

it was. It was late. It’s too late. This had happened.  

Mia Hughes  1:15:03 

The monster had been unleashed, and you can’t. 

Peter Gajdics  1:15:05 

The Trojan horse had been unleashed. I didn’t see all of the pieces. For instance, I didn’t know exactly that. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that gender affirmative care, okay, specifically for minors, is conversion therapy under a new name. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that. That sort of came in the months that followed, like when the bill passed and when the bill came into effect in January 2022, with very quickly all of these things. And you know, I had discussions with people, some people in the publishing world, where I would try to explain this, and they and I was met with resistance, arguments. The advocates that I’d worked with for years wouldn’t talk to me. I was now spreading hatred. I was transphobic. It was just. It was a. It was a state of you know there’s I can I think in that essay I say something about the existential horror I felt because my whole hope and work was to try to stop treatments I tried to include adults in that but all along I thought you know minors would be included, which they are and they were, but now minors were the most at risk because minors are the ones that really. I mean, I I don’t agree with the idea that an adult you know who just says wakes up or whatever and says I’m trans and now I want all these surgeries, and I can walk into female spaces because I’m a woman. I mean this is insanity. Okay, trans women are not real women. I mean, when that phrase started to pop up, I thought, okay, what am I missing? Like everybody’s saying trans women are women. No, they’re not. Like, what? What is? And I thought I was. It’s like I was back in the therapy with the doctor. 

Stella Omalley  1:16:56 

Oh yeah.  

Peter Gajdics  1:16:56 

And this is what was happening during this 2020 2021 period when I was learning and watching and reading two things, it felt like one: I’m reliving the molestation all over because if kids can ostensibly, to use Florence’s word, consent to surgeries on their sexual organs, how can how can anyone stop kids from consenting to sex with adults? You know this is going to happen. This is where we’re going. And why do people not see this? You know, like this is the movement. Okay, first you say they can consent, or they’ve consented to that, to the you know blockers, the hormones, whatever the surgeries, and then you say, “Well, they can consent. So you know, sex with adults-what’s the problem? So that was causing me so much distress, seeing that this is where it was going. And then I just felt like living through the whole treatment with the doctor again, because now the treatments with medical professionals-you know, first do no harm, but they were doing all this harm. Was happening on a global scale, and it just, you know, to largely gay and lesbian adolescents 

Mia Hughes  1:18:08 

 yes, and kids, childhood onset, destined to grow up to be gay.  

Peter Gajdics  1:18:15 

One quick thing, you know, like conversion therapy, or you know what we now call conversion therapy, but that those treatments typically, historically, had happened to adults, right? So you know they’re gay, they’re out, whatever, or not out. But you know they’re mostly adults. I shouldn’t even say that. I’m sure there were minors, but who were identified as being either gay or homosexual or whatever, and they were treating them. Now, what this gender affirmative care does is they treat them before they’re even quote  grown gay. You know, like stop it. They never have a chance. 

Mia Hughes  1:18:55 

Yeah. Can I? Okay, we really are now going to have to wrap it up. I could talk to you for hours. This is fascinating. What my last question is: the UK has is right now debating. I can’t even believe it, but they’re right now debating their own conversion therapy ban, which is appallingly worded. It’s absolute nonsense. What do you say to them? What do you say to the politicians in the UK right now who are thinking of passing this kind of law. 

Peter Gajdics  1:19:26 

You know, these laws demand confrontation with an ideology that is recklessly destroying lives, and I will grant some people that they may not have seen that originally. That, and maybe they didn’t, and maybe there are really malevolent people who saw it and they still wanted to do it. But I think some may not have seen it, and they were trying to just quote. They thought do right thing, right side of history. Okay, we know enough now. I’ve said in this essay. I hope it gets published, but you know, I say in other articles I’ve published. And combining the two, you are basically codifying into law to end treatments on gays and to reinforce treatments on minors who would have ended up as gay. In other words, the second cancels out the first. Hello, you know, you can’t have the two together and think you’re actually banning what we call conversion therapy because it cancels it itself out. 

Stella Omalley  1:20:32 

Totally, it nullifies one, nullifies the second. 

Peter Gajdics  1:20:35 

Absolutely, and if they if they do it anyways, I mean, the word evil, you know, is just like overused. But to me, what more evil is there? You know, like you are literally cutting people up. And beyond the cutting, you know, we’re talking about cutting people’s lives up. Like I can never get back the years that were stolen from me and the relationships that were impaired, and you know the trauma of the experience. When I watch these detransitioners, God love them. I’m thinking, you know, they will, they will never get back their breasts because breasts are not like a lump of tissue that doctors add to men, breasts are like an organ. They will never get back their breasts. The boys got who’ve gone through like penectomies and like had their penises inverted. Like I’ve watched many of these males who now are detransitioning. So if they said they were trans women, and it is so horrifying, I hope the lawsuits happen. But you know, the countries like the UK who are yet to push a ban like this, I would implore them to not do it. You know, to pause and to do more research on what it means when you say gender identity, what that means, I don’t think for the record that people have gender identities. I think people have personalities. You know, like we’ve always had butch girls, we’ve always had effeminate boys, and you know they were not medicalized. The history of gay advocacy, starting from the, you know, 19th century, was about not medicalizing people who were same-sex attracted, but acknowledging that you know they used I think more as metaphor, like the soul of a of a woman in the body of a man. They talk like this. Now they they’ve physicalized it, right? They’ve said, “Oh, well, that means we need to medicalize the body to match the soul in the, in the person. This is insanity 

Mia Hughes  1:22:58 

Yeah, 

Peter Gajdics  1:22:59 

you know, it really is 

Stella Omalley  1:23:00 

Thank you, Peter. Thank you very much for sharing your story, and it’s a really, really important story. And I hope it goes everywhere because it is such an important voice that you’re adding to a fraught issue. 

1:23:12 

Thank you so much.