Thank you.
Madam Chair, my name is Peter Gajdics. I'm here to make recommendations for Bill C-6 based on my lived experience. I went through six years of conversion therapy with a licensed psychiatrist when I was a legal adult between 1989 and 1995. I was 24 years old when I met this doctor, 31 years old when it ended.
I'm the author of the book The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir about my years in this therapy and my road to recovery. For the past 23 years I have spoken out about conversion therapy. In 2018 I helped initiate the first Canadian municipal ban on conversion therapy in Vancouver, my home city.
I had already come out as gay before I met this psychiatrist. After starting counselling with him, he told me that my history of childhood sexual abuse had created a false homosexual identity and so my therapy's goal would be to heal old trauma in order, as he said, to correct the error of my sexual orientation and revert to my innate heterosexuality.
His methods then included prolonged sessions of primal scream therapy, multiple psychiatric medications to suppress my homosexual desires, injections of ketamine hydrochloride followed by re-parenting sessions to heal my broken masculinity, and when none of his methods worked, aversion therapy.
At their highest dosages he was prescribing near-fatal levels of these medications and I overdosed. I still consider it a miracle I didn't die. I left these six years shell-shocked. It was not so much that I wanted to kill myself as I thought I was already dead.
I later sued the doctor for medical malpractice. He denied treating me in order to change my sexual orientation. He claimed I had consented to his treatment. He said he had treated me for depression.
I imagine some will view my experiences as extreme, that it couldn't happen again today, except these are the exact words I've heard for over 20 years. As I write in my book, the horror of it all provokes disbelief. Though the facts of my treatment will differ from others', I believe the basic principles about fraudulent practice combined with a client's vulnerability, trust and lack of informed consent, will always apply to all, even today.
Currently there are no federal laws that would prohibit what happened to me with another legal adult, or even that could hold a similar practitioner accountable for his actions.
These are my recommendations for Bill C-6. The ban must be for all ages.
Banning conversion therapy is about ending a fraudulent practice that causes harm. This applies to all.
The ban should not include the word “will” or any suggestion of coercion. Suggesting coercion or the idea of forced conversion therapy, or even mentioning the will of the client, makes it sound as if conversion therapy could be anything other than coercive. It deflects attention away from the fraudulence and harm of these practices and to the actions of the client, their supposed willingness or consent to participate.
All forms of conversion therapy are inherently coercive and exist solely as a form of oppression over LGBT people. To imply otherwise is to invalidate the experience of survivors. Proper informed consent is not possible in these circumstances because all of these treatments are based on the false premise, the lie, that a person is broken by virtue of being gay or trans and that they can and ought to be changed. To suggest that a person could consent to such a thing is to say that they choose to do to themselves what has been done to them from the start. It is illogical and defeats the purpose of the bill.
Please ban conversion therapy for all, including adults.
Thank you.