Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights

On December 8, 2020, I provided (virtual) testimony before The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, one of the Committees of Canada's House of Commons responsible for researching Bill C-6, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy). I shared the story of my six years in a form of “conversion therapy,” and I made recommendations for Bill C-6, including that I think the ban should be for all. The full text of my comments are below. All hearings can be viewed on the Committee’s website.

It may go without saying, but it was my great honour to provide testimony at such a prestigious Committee. Indeed, this has been a highlight of the previous decades: to tell federal lawmakers that I lived through “conversion therapy,” and that it was wrong, and should now be legally banned throughout Canada for all.

The entire hearing, however, was not without its discontent.

Immediately before my testimony, another “survivor,” a woman, presented an argument actually in favour of conversion therapy. She described being “gang raped” years earlier, and said that her subsequent “conversion” treatment, presumably serviced by a faith organization, had helped reduce her consequent same-sex desires, and sex and pornographic addiction. Her entire argument left me disorientated.

Assuming this woman’s story of “rape” was even true, it seemed to me that she was erroneously conflating sexual trauma (and its aftermath) with sexual orientation. It struck me that her argument in favour of what she then termed “conversion therapy” was more about a treatment to “help” in the recovery of trauma. I’m not sure if this woman’s belief in the correlation between her sexual orientation and her sexual trauma was something she believed herself or if it was presented to her as part of this faith-based “healing,” but it also seemed to me that whatever same-sex desires this woman may or may not have had, and likely still has, had absolutely nothing to do with her sexual assault, and no one, not the faith organization or anyone close to her, has helped her in the long run by conflating the two. Finally, the faith-based treatment this woman claims to have received, and she argued in favour of not banning, was absolutely not conversion therapy.

The conflation of conversion therapy with other kinds of legitimate (or even illegitimate) therapies or services causes me great concern. It’s an argument that pops up often, and I rarely see it unpacked to any great extent. I fear that this is also exactly how conversion therapy passes as valid forms of treatment today—practitioners defend the right to “help” a (vulnerable) person with past trauma, but in reality end up attempting to shame them out of their non-heterosexual orientation or gender identity. This is very dangerous. It is also how my own former psychiatrist ensnared me in his own treatment of my sexuality.

Two days after my hearing, on December 10, the Committee resumed with a “clause by clause” review of Bill C-6. Rhéal Éloi Fortin, one of the members, presented a motion to suspend such a review until after all of the roughly 300+ briefs, submitted by concerned Canadians, could be properly reviewed by the Committee. The motion was struck down, and the review of the Bill proceeded. From my cursory reading of these briefs, I have no trouble admitting that I do not share the opinion of many of these citizens; I do think, however, that each and every one of these voices should have been read and considered before the Committee proceeded with such an important piece of legislation that has the potential to touch many lives throughout Canada. What is the point of a Committee’s “research” into new legislation, and an extremely controversial piece of legislation at that, if in their research they do not even read the formal written opinions of the general public that were submitted specifically for their consideration?

During their meeting, the Committee also discussed the idea of “forced” conversion therapy. While I think all members agreed in principle to the idea of banning what they termed “coercive” forms of conversion therapy, some defended the position that the ban should only apply for adults in cases of being “forced” into treatment.

Listening to these kinds of discussions reminds me of how divergent the reality of “conversion therapy” in practice can be from what law, and a lawmaker, can and is often able to do. Even debating the possibility of consent around these “conversion” treatments completely misses the point. Let’s be real: so-called “conversion therapy” is a misnomer; in reality, there is no such thing as “conversion therapy”—these treatments are not real therapy at all but institutionalized abuse, an expression of homophobia and transphobia, that targets a minority of people based solely on their sexual orientation and gender identity. “Conversion therapy” is a violent assault on the core self of a minority of people, and all forms of these treatments are inherently coercive. It is simply illogical to describe some as coercive and others as, I guess, non-coercive. Walking of one’s own presumed “free will” into the lions den of one of these treatments—even if a person says they “consent” to such a thing—does not change the fact that these treatments exist as an expression of the homophobia and transphobia that has literally groomed these people into seeking out that treatment in the first place. Coercion has occurred, regardless.

The December 10 hearing concluded with an adoption of the amended Bill. It saddened me to read that the Committee did not adopt the recommendation of many that “conversion therapy” should be banned outright. Instead, they chose to adopt the previous language that would ban conversion therapy for minors, and allow it for “consenting” adults. To be clear: Banning conversion therapy for minors while allowing it for “consenting” adults makes about as much sense to me as banning assault for minors but allowing it for “consenting” adults. This entire argument, from where I stand, defeats the purpose of such a legal ban.

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Comments delivered before The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, December 8, 2020

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 when it ended.

I am 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.

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 to, as he said, “correct the error” of my sexual orientation and revert to my “innate heterosexuality.” His methods included prolonged sessions of primal scream therapy; multiple psychiatric medications to suppress my homosexual desires; injections of ketamine hydrochloride followed by “reparenting” 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 that these are the exact words I have 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 of a 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 today, with another legal adult, or even that could hold a similar practitioner accountable for their actions. 

These are my recommendation for Bill C-6.

This 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 for adults.

Thank you.

About the Ban in Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada)

On July 5, 2020, I sent the below email to City Council in Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada), in support of their proposed ban on conversion therapy, which was supposed to have been given its second and third readings on Monday, July 13. In the intervening days, two of their Councillors put forth a Motion to delay these readings and final vote in favour of additional public consultation and even a public hearing.

I do not live in Lethbridge; I do not even live in Alberta. I live in British Columbia, and yet even I heard about this proposed ban in Lethbridge and was able to take the time, as a member of the consulting public, to submit my own thoughts to City Council—as I’m sure any other member of the public could have done by now. The mere ideal of needing additional public consultation is a tactic to delay, plain and simple. And the suggestion that a public hearing might occur, whereby lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or any other sexual minority individual would then be subjected to yet one more debate about whether or not it is justified to torture them or their peers out of who they are is outrageous in the extreme. A recent similar two-day public hearing before City Council in Calgary, Alberta, which I watched online from my home in British Columbia, was distressing and not just because some members of the public were given free reign and a platform to express their vitriolic ignorance and hatred of the LGBT community, but because the issue of conversion therapy was once again needlessly debated in a public forum. Virtually every global health regulator has spoken out about the dangers of conversion therapy—countries all over the world have been consulted, survivors have shared their stories of abuse, voices from the graves of those who did not survive their own abuse have cried out, health and medical experts have now even written their recommendations, and The United Nations, in a final report I cite below, has urged all jurisdictions to ban conversion therapy. What more does anyone need to say to a city like Lethbridge before they take action?

I was particularly struck by the part of this Motion, near the end, that read: “WHEREAS the City of Lethbridge affirms that it has a constitutional obligation to maintain neutrality and must abstain from taking a position in order to avoid adhering to a particular belief.” This statement, perhaps more than any other, is just absurd. Governments do not take neutral positions. Governments pass laws all the time because they take positions on issues that impact their citizens. Even passing a law on parking meters is taking a position on parking. By not standing up and taking a position on the issue of conversion therapy as soon as possible—by not altogether denouncing all forms of conversion therapy and stating publicly that these practices have no place in Lethbridge—they are virtually condoning torture.

From: Peter GAJDICS
Sent: July 5, 2020 8:44 PM
To: Lethrbidge City Council
Subject: Support of ban on conversion therapy in Lethbridge

Dear Mayor Spearman, and all City Councillors,

I am writing to you all today to express my strong support for your proposed ban on conversion therapy in Lethbridge. At your City Council meeting on July 13, I urge you all to vote in favour of this new bylaw.

My name is Peter Gajdics, and I am a 55-year-old gay man, born and raised in Vancouver, BC. I am also the author of the 2017 book The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, about my six years in a form of “conversion therapy” in British Columbia, and my long road toward recovery (which continues to this day). In 2018, I helped initiate the first municipal ban on conversion therapy in Canada in my home city of Vancouver. In the over two decades that I have advocated for tougher regulations and legal bans on conversion therapy, I have also had essays about my experiences and ongoing advocacy published in Maclean’s (re the Vancouver ban), and in Huffington Post (re a proposed federal ban), among others. In all of my talks and book readings I always state that conversion therapy is an expression of homophobia and transphobia from within a “helping professional” environment, and I sincerely believe that all jurisdictions—municipal, provincial, and federal—have a role to play in passing any kind of law they can to prevent these forms of ignorance and hatred from prevailing.

My own “therapy” began in 1989, when my family physician referred me to a licensed psychiatrist for counselling. I was 24 years old. At the time of our first meeting, I told the psychiatrist I was gay but that my parents had recently rejected me because of my homosexuality. I also told him that I’d been sexually abused as a child but had never dealt with the abuse. Depressed, suicidal, highly anxious, it is no exaggeration to say that I was too emotionally distraught to articulate much of anything else, except to say that I needed help. Still at this point, it had never occurred to me to try to “change” my sexuality, and I had never heard of terms like “conversion therapy.”

I began the psychiatrist’s treatment model: primal scream therapy. One by one, over a period of months and then years, the doctor introduced various other practices into my therapy: concurrent and overlapping use of various prescription medications (sedatives, antidepressants, an antipsychotic), dosages of which he eventually increased to near fatal levels; weekly injections of ketamine hydrochloride (an animal anesthetic) combined with reparenting techniques; and aversion therapy—explaining that all of these treatments would help “correct the error” of my homosexuality. The childhood sexual abuse had caused my homosexuality, the psychiatrist told me, and only by following his direction would I be able to heal from the trauma of the childhood abuse and thereby revert to my “innate heterosexuality” (his words).

Six years after our first meeting I left that treatment shell-shocked. For the next two years it was not so much that I wanted to kill myself as I thought I was already dead. With the help of new friends and a healthier (lesbian) counsellor, slowly, I recovered. I went on to report the doctor to British Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and then I sued him for medical malpractice on the grounds that he had treated my homosexuality as a disease. At the close of that lawsuit, in 2003, I began to write my book, which as I’ve stated was published in 2017. 

Through the years I have tried my best to speak out about all forms of “change” treatments because I‘ve learned first hand that they are torture; they are not real “therapy”; and nothing ever gets “converted” or “repaired.” In a recent final report to the United Nations, conversion therapy was called “violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,” and that it amounts to “torture, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.” I would strongly suggest all City Councillors refer to this report, especially section VII on page 21, where legal bans are recommended. 

Some people might think that the kind of practice I experienced with a psychiatrist could never recur again today. I am not so sure. Conversion practices do not occur because regulations allow them; they occur despite the regulations that oppose them. Besides, no one would have ever known about my own history, had I not spent decades speaking out about it and then writing my book. I did all of that to stay alive, to resist the silencing effects of shame brought on from a system of Ignorance and intolerance that almost killed me. At one point in my treatment, the level of medications the doctor was prescribing, in order to “kill” my sex drive so I could “flip to the other side” (again, his words), resulted in an overdose. I almost died. My hope now is that similar forms of abuse will never recur again, and legal bans on conversion therapy help do just that. They prevent abuse.

The most public forms of conversion practices today often occur in faith-based organizations. Some of these organizations typically oppose legal bans on conversion therapy by stating that they would restrict their “religious freedoms,” or their “freedom of speech.” To clarify: any organization or person that practices conversion treatments tyrannizes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexual minority individuals into conformity; they prey on the vulnerability of these people, and their need to belong—belong to a family, to a faith, to a community. A need to belong turns into a need to change oneself. The locus of attention no longer remains on the ignorance or hatred of the treatment, but on the person whose sexuality or gender is now under direct attack. Bans on conversion therapy oppose tyranny, not religion. 

On July 13, please vote in favour of the bylaw to ban conversion therapy in Lethbridge. 

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Peter

Peter Gajdics

Canada’s Proposed Ban on Conversion Therapy Falls Short

On March 9, 2020, the Canadian federal government introduced Bill C-8, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy) into the House of Commons. Later that same week, most of Canada, including the House, went into lockdown or was suspended due COVID-19. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this newly proposed law—the product of years of advocacy by many people, myself included, calling on all levels of government to ban what the United Nations recently called “violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity”: conversion therapy. 

The fact that Bill C-8 exists at all is, of course, cause for celebration; if passed, Canada would become only the sixth country globally to ban conversion therapy. Especially at this crucial precipice, I think it is reasonable to examine some of the shortcomings, and problematic language, contained within this draft legislation. Most prominent of these, in my estimation, is that as it’s currently written, the law would ban conversion therapy for adults only in cases of “coercion,” or when it is used against a person’s “will.” 

Earlier this year I explained why I believe conversion therapy should be banned across Canada for everyone, including for adults. Since I was not a minor when I went through my own six years of conversion therapy with a licensed psychiatrist, I am left to wonder if this new law could have prevented my own conversion experience, or at least held my former psychiatrist accountable for his actions, had my treatment occurred more recently. For that matter, I wonder if the new law could at all help other adults who might find themselves in a situation now that is similar to mine some two decades ago. 

First, a bit of a disclaimer: though it may be obvious to most, I am not a lawyer or any kind of legal expert. I am a gay man who experienced a form of conversion therapy. Since then I’ve advocated for stronger regulations, and eventually, legal bans, surrounding conversion therapy. I started advocating for these changes long before I even knew the words “conversion therapy,” because I don’t think it matters so much what this practice is called as what it has the potential to do: kill. I’ve learned over the years that my position as a gay man and survivor may not always align with what government can, or will, do in passing legislation, but I remain committed to speaking on behalf of myself as a gay person and a survivor.

As it stands, the proposed Criminal Code amendment would define “conversion therapy” as:

“. . . a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity to cisgender, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour. For greater certainty, this definition does not include a practice, treatment or service that relates (a) to a person’s gender transition; or (b) to a person’s exploration of their identity or to its development.” 

Five offences would then be added to the Code: a) causing a person to undergo conversion therapy against their will; (b) causing a child to undergo conversion therapy; (c) doing anything for the purpose of removing a child from Canada with the intention that they would undergo conversion therapy outside Canada; (d) advertising an offer to provide conversion therapy; and (e) receiving financial or other material benefit from the provision of conversion therapy. Courts would also be authorized to order that advertisements for conversion therapy be disposed of or deleted. 

In terms of prohibiting conversion therapy for adults, the only part of the new law that would apply is the first offence, delineated under the heading “Forced conversion therapy”:

“Everyone who knowingly causes a person to undergo conversion therapy against the person’s will is (a) guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; or (b) guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.” 

During a presser also on March 9, Justice Minister David Lametti further explained:

“With respect to adults, we are criminalizing where there has been coercion, so the person is not making the decision necessarily of their own free will  . . . We felt that a competent adult could conceivably defend the right in a court to consent to this kind of activity and we felt that we couldn’t move ahead in that case scenario simply because of the Charter of Rights.” 

Generally speaking, I have grave concerns with the idea of dividing a ban on conversion therapy up by age—prohibiting it for minors, not prohibiting it explicitly for adults—since it implies that a criminal offence is warranted because of the harm conversion therapy causes to some (minors), but that there may still be something about conversion therapy that is useful or at least not as harmful to others (adults). Rather than focusing on the fact that conversion therapy is a fraudulent practice (it does not work, and any claim to the contrary is fraudulent) and causes harm for all (as agreed by virtually every valid health regulator globally), it refocuses on the issues of “choice” and “coercion”—that an adult could conceivably still “choose” one of these treatments “of their own free will.” 

Issues of choice and coercion deflect attention away from what, I believe, should be the primary concern: fraudulence and harm. 

Either conversion therapy is fraudulent and harmful, in which case it would be true for all and a ban should apply to everyone, or else conversion therapy is not fraudulent and harmful, in which case there is no need for a ban for anyone. Besides, at what point can it be said that an LGBT person is coerced into trying to “change” their sexuality or gender? Under what circumstances do they potentially “choose” a form of conversion therapy “of their own free will”? How is a person’s “will” even gauged? 

While a helping professional could, conceivably, act in a way that is considered coercive, what I know to be true is that LGBT clients will also, always, bring to the helping relationship their own history of having had already been coerced by a lifetime of messages, not all of them explicit, that said they would never be able to be themselves but would need to “change” in order to be accepted, even loved. Conversion therapy is not just any kind of therapy; in fact, it is not any kind of real therapy at all, and so the world in which these people exist, prior to seeking help, must also be considered. In its current wording, the proposed ban would be akin to banning slavery for minors but not explicitly for adults because some “could conceivably defend the right in a court to consent to this kind of activity.” Like slavery, the LGBT adult could only ever defend the right to consent to this kind of activity because of society’s earlier oppression over them. The fact that anyone, including adults, would seek out or fall prey to conversion therapy today speaks to society’s pressure of conformity over LGBT people—they have internalized their oppressors’ messages and now go about the business of oppressing themselves. Bill C-8’s focus on “consent” and “coercion” instead of on conversion therapy’s fraudulence and harm, is misdirected and fails to recognize the antecedent impact of homophobia and transphobia on the lives of all LGBT people everywhere.

★★ 

Over the years, many people have asked me how I could have sued my former psychiatrist for a therapy that I, myself, presumably consented to, especially as I was 24 years old, a legal adult, when I first met him. This issue of “consent” was one of the first questions my lawyer asked me when we initially discussed a possible medical malpractice suit: Did I “consent” to the therapy? Did I “choose“ it? 

For those who have the time, reading my book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, may answer this question. I’d by lying if I said I didn’t write my book, at least in part, to try and answer it even to myself. 

Now that I am a good many years on the other side of the trauma of that experience, I can safely say that even the suggestion that I may have ever consented to or chosen, of my own free will, the kind of treatment that the doctor ended up using on me is completely blind to the potential practices of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation (as, I think, it would also be for others, trying to change their gender), the vulnerability of anyone who seeks therapy, for whatever reason, and the power differential implicit to all therapeutic relationships. 

People typically reach out to a helping professional during a time of crisis. In a best case scenario, clients are able to explain their life situation and the reasons for seeking help; in a worse case scenario, which is far more common, they are too emotionally distraught to articulate much of anything. Maybe they know enough to say they need some guidance; maybe they’ve been forced into treatment by life circumstance beyond their control—a breakdown, a divorce, etc. It would not be uncommon for the deeper issues that drove the person to seek help to take months, even years, before unfolding. 

For myself, I had not approached my psychiatrist in order to change my sexuality. During our first meeting, I told the doctor I was gay but that my parents had rejected me because of my sexuality. I also explained that I’d been sexually abused as a child but had never dealt with the abuse. Depressed, suicidal, anxious and with persistent insomnia, it is no exaggeration to say that I was in the “worse case scenario”—too emotionally distraught to articulate much of anything, except to say that I needed help. If my “will” desired anything, early on, it was simply to feel better; the rest I left up to the doctor, the medical professional. 

I began the psychiatrist’s treatment model, a form of primal scream therapy. One by one, over a period of months and then years, the doctor introduced various practices into my therapy: a sedative and an antidepressant for insomnia and depression; various causation theories, including the explanation that my history of sexual abuse had created the false identity of homosexual. My treatment’s goal, the doctor explained, would be to face that trauma through repeated “primal” regressions in order to heal and thereby revert to what I was prior to the abuse: a heterosexual. This one tactic alone, the doctor’s ideological interpretation of what he thought it meant for me to be gay, redirected my treatment on a trajectory that I could never have anticipated or fully understood at the time. 

Eventually, the doctor explained that everything we were doing in my therapy—primal regressions, near-fatal doses of various prescription medications, weekly injections of ketamine hydrochloride, reparenting techniques, aversion therapy—would all help “correct the error” of my homosexuality. 

One main question I’ve been asked over the years is why I stayed in this “therapy.” The question itself seems to lack any great insight, or empathy, into what could possibly compel a person to remain in an abusive relationship, a dynamic that is not, of course, restricted to domestic partnerships. Conversion therapy is an abusive relationship: its perpetrator is the person in authority; the victim is the vulnerable person seeking help. While minors may be forced by a parent or guardian into one of these treatments, the kind of “force” that compels an adult into, or to stay in, this kind of situation is often related far more to their own internal belief in the lie that their sexual orientation or gender identity is somehow “broken,” and needs to be healed. Their own apparent “choice to stay,” however, does not make the subsequent treatment any less coercive, or dangerous. In my case, the doctor introduced all of his practices into my therapy over a period of years. The last thing I thought about was whether or not we were engaging in a form of conversion therapy; instead, we focused on healing past trauma. Long before I met the doctor I had been raised to believe the lie that sexual abuse could make a person gay, and so by the time I was deep into treatment I accepted as truth what turned out to be the false promise of “correction.” 

Over the years, my psychiatrist produced various forms that he told me to sign and so I did—through the haze of my medicated stupor—and he later then used as evidence during my malpractice suit against him several years after leaving treatment. On paper, I had “consented”—not to the practice of conversion therapy, words never mentioned on the forms, but to his use of some of the medications and the re-parenting techniques in order to treat my “official” diagnosis and reason for therapy: depression. Consent was definitely lost along the way, but even at the start of that relationship it is difficult to know how true consent could have ever been given while under the influence of medication and such distress.

To this day I still believe the only thing I had consented to was the doctor’s invitation of trust—his claim that he knew the best way out of my misery. The level of betrayal I experienced after leaving his care, withdrawing from the last of the medications, gaining back some semblance of sanity and realizing the full extent of our malevolent pact, left me shell-shocked. 

In 2020, the most publicly known “change“ treatments are through faith-based or religious organizations, which often describe their practices as “helping” homosexual or transgender people. Many times the goals are overt, as in the memoir Boy Erased, when a young person knows beforehand that the treatment’s aim will be to change their sexuality—indeed, the client (often, but not always, a minor) or their guardian seeks out treatment for this purpose. Other times, as in my case, and, I believe, probably the case of many other adults, the ultimate plan of the therapy can remain covert—clients may be lead down a path not of their own, initial, intent, or else a history of trauma is erroneously conflated with their struggle over sexual orientation or gender and the therapy becomes implicitly homophobic or transphobic but remains opaque to the client, who remains trusting that the helper has their best interest at heart. 

In these cases in particular it is important to remember that conversion therapy is ideology—it is a belief in the brokenness of people by virtue of their homosexuality or trans identity, and speaks to the intent of the practitioner in their goal that the sexuality or gender of the client can then be “cured,” “corrected,” or “healed” through various therapeutic or religious interventions. Practitioners never refer to themselves as practicing anything remotely called ”conversion therapy”; not all who end up going through one of these treatments always understands that they are undergoing something called conversion therapy; they certainly don’t always label it that way. What is true for us all is that when we feel bad and seek help, we trust that our helper will not hurt us even more. 

Adults are even more likely than minors to initiate a helping relationship, both secular and faith-based, but that does not prevent them from becoming susceptible to the influence of the practitioner. “The patient enters therapy in need of help and care,” writes author Judith Herman, M.D., in her book Trauma and Recovery.

“By virtue of this fact, she voluntarily submits herself to an unequal relationship in which the therapist has superior status and power. Feelings related to the universal childhood experience of dependence on a parent are inevitably aroused. These feelings, known as transference, further exaggerate the power imbalance in the therapeutic relationship and render all patients vulnerable to exploitation. It is the therapist’s responsibility to use the power that has been conferred upon her only to foster the recovery of the patient, resisting all temptations to abuse. This promise, which is central to the integrity of any therapeutic relationship, is of special importance to patients who are already suffering as a result of another’s arbitrary and exploitative exercise of power” (1992, p. 134-35).

Indeed, implicit in all of these relationships is the fact that the client is vulnerable to the innate power differential of that relationship. For this reason alone, the proposed legislation’s use of the word “will” seems entirely redundant—as a client in one of these relationships our will is already broken, or at least we experience it that way, which is why we have sought help, although our perceived “brokenness” can also be worsened significantly or taken advantage of by the tactics of the practitioner. 

Another way of looking at it is that the new law’s reference to the word “will” makes it sound as if there will be times in these relationships when the client is not vulnerable; when they are not consenting to whatever treatment the practitioner enforces; when in fact they have complete and autonomous agency—control over their “free will”—while also under the influence of whatever messages from their history may have groomed their belief systems, and then, of course, other powerful dynamics that will arise in the course of treatment (e.g., the medications, in my case)—a suggestion that is entirely false and does not adequately reflect the reality of the helping relationship. 

Similarly, Justice Minister Lametti’s reference to the word “coercion” makes it sound as if the act of conversion therapy could be anything other than coercive—that there may be some forms of conversion therapy that could be considered non-coercive—and of course that also is not true. All forms of conversion therapy—all treatments aimed at changing or suppressing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity—are inherently coercive in that they exist solely because of some LGBT people’s pre-existing confusion and vulnerability around their sexual orientation and gender identity, which is directly attributable to society’s earlier coercion over them. This is true regardless of whether or not the client seemingly “consents” to treatment, and it is disingenuous to imply that in certain cases it could be otherwise. 

One argument against any kind of legal ban on conversion therapy today is that some who oppose these bans state that in a free and democratic society adults should retain the right to “choose” these treatments, if that is what they want. What I find most troubling about this argument in particular, and by government’s apparent concession to it, is that these adults’ “right to choose” to live any way they please, even to think anything they want, does not mean that practitioners should be given free reign to reinforce these treatments through their own programs or tax exempt organizations. Adults have the right to think and do as they please, even to discuss those thoughts in the privacy of their own lives—a person who is attracted to members of the same sex can “choose” to live a celibate life or to marry a person of the opposite sex, for instance, if that is what they want. Helping professionals, conversely, absolutely do not have the right to practice, advertise or charge a fee to anyone, regardless of that person’s age, for a kind of treatment that is proven to be fraudulent and can cause harm. Consenting adults can think and do as they please, so long as they do not cause harm to others. Helping professionals—and in this definition I include all faith leaders—are bound by a code of ethics that says, “First do no harm.” I think someone named Christ even went so far as to say: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

★★ 

For years I had hoped that a federal ban on conversion therapy would be an answer to what I experienced 25 years ago. On some level, I suppose all of my advocacy has been like a fight to win back the life that was stolen from me—that if I could use my own past to help prevent the recurrence of similar forms of abuse on others today, then all of my experiences would not have been for nothing.

But the way it’s written now, this new ban is not any kind of answer, at least not a helpful one, to what I experienced: it would not have prevented the kind of treatment that I went through before; it would not have held my former psychiatrist accountable for his efforts to try to change my homosexuality; and I doubt very much that it will help protect others from going through anything similar today. 

For years I had thought that any federal ban on conversion therapy would be better than no federal ban on conversion therapy, but now I’m not so sure. The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that some forms of conversion therapy are coercive, while others aren’t; that conversion therapy is both a dangerous practice for some, but not for others—it sends the message that conversion therapy could be anything other than inherently coercive, or dangerous. 

The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that there are situations under which an adult could reasonably “consent” to enter into a form of conversion therapy; that there will necessarily be a moment in the helping relationship when the adult client has enough clarity of mind or prescience to consent to what may later turn out to be a form of conversion therapy; that it is even possible to consent to what has been shown and proven to be a fraudulent and harmful practice; that it will ever, ultimately, even be helpful for an adult to consent to more of the same kind of coercive practice over their sexuality or gender that led them to seek out the professional or spiritual intervention in the first place, not to mention that it could ever be morally or ethically appropriate for that professional to then perpetuate the same kind of coercion over their client that brought them into treatment initially. 

The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that the “force” that may drive a client into one of these treatments will always be from another person—rather than from the lies around their sexuality or gender that they’ve been taught for years, probably their whole lives, to believe as true.

The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that the adult client will always even know that what is happening to them through the course of their emotionally-charged, mentally-fatiguing, and spiritually eviscerating treatment is conversion therapy—and that is just not true. None of this is necessarily true. None of it was true for me, so by the law of averages I know it will not always be true for others. 

The fact is, the way it’s written now, this new law will not protect all LGBT people from the experience of conversion therapy; the way it’s written now, this new law will actually embolden, if only inadvertently, so-called conversion therapy as a valid form of treatment that would be both outlawed and allowed—and that message alone will make these forms of hatred and ignorance prevail.

Conversion therapy is an expression of homophobia and transphobia from within a helping professional environment, it is institutionalized torture, and so the aim with a ban should be to break down and obliterate systems of prejudice and injustice that have targeted and caused undue suffering to countless individuals—not simply to win incremental gains from within the structures of oppression. Conversion therapy is a lie that those who practice, perpetuate, and those who fall prey, forget, and so the aim with a ban should be to firmly and resolutely destabilize and eradicate orders of hatred and intolerance—not simply to pick and choose which kinds of bigotry may be less harmful than others or under what circumstances some people could reasonably “consent” to bigotry. That some adults could still “defend the right in a court to consent to this kind of activity” is not the point; the point is that the very thing these adults would consent to is what a ban on conversion therapy should seek to abolish. 

Darkness Lurks

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies on Netflix. Isolated, at times quarantined due to COVID-19, I have resisted all better judgment to the contrary and submerged myself in one movie after another. And always very late at night. Call me crazy; or maybe there’s far more to it than that.

I’ve never been a fan of gratuitous violence, so my perception of most “modern horror” movies has often left me lacklustre, but here’s what I’ve learned lately about the content of many of today’s horror movies: most are about trauma. It’s curious to me why they would all fall under the genre of “horror,” but I suppose there are few things more terrifying, more horrifying, than incidents of trauma, as Stephen King probably knows all too well. “Trauma movies,” as a genre heading, likely would also not get as many clicks.

How we’ve all been traumatized and what happens to our inner demons certainly does make for the most hideous viewings, as I was reminded even last night while watching The Invitation, or Gerald’s Game a few nights earlier. We don’t have to think too closely on the specifics of our own particular histories—I suppose that’s the point; that’s the allure of watching a good “horror” movie in the comfort and relative safety of our homes, all snuggled up cozy under a duvet, or even sitting in a crowded theatre, munching popcorn, scared witless. We return to horror but are safe from horror. In our own limited ways, we exorcise ourselves of demons. But they’re never really gone. They never leave us entirely.

Demons have a way of leaving behind their residues. Like “burnt toast,” the character Dick Halloran says to young Danny in King’s The Shining. And they all speak to us in a language often only we, their survivors, can understand. Growing up, trauma had never been a foreign concept to me personally. Both my parents had survived World War II—my mother, after escaping three years in a communist concentration camp in the former Yugoslavia, my father, an orphan, after fleeing communist Hungary—yet they’d also never wanted to talk much about their “former lives in Europe.” They’d silenced themselves, or maybe were silenced because they did not have the emotional vocabulary to talk about their traumas. As an adult, I can now understand that they also did what they needed to do in order to survive.

As a child, however, my parents’ lessons cascaded down to me and preempted even the possibility that I could ever talk about my own childhood abuse. I, too, had been silenced, and then I learned to silence myself. Six years of a form of “conversion therapy” silenced my sexuality, and I’d felt silenced while fighting for legal vindication. No one, however, could silence my word. Silence equalled death, so I wrote my book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, to find my voice, speak up and out, not die silent. I wrote to resist invisibility, and shame, the lies of these “therapies.” Words helped me heal, and each one was the truth.

Or at least this is what I tell myself, now; this is my narrative. The “story” of my past.

According to Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., in his 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score, a new generation of antipsychotics are the top selling drugs in the United States, with $1,526,228,000 spent on Abilify (a 2014 figure), one of the many available. I wonder how this figure has grown these last six years. In 2014, half a million children in the US took antipsychotic drugs, which are often used to make abused children more manageable, less aggressive, even as they also decrease motivation, play, curiosity, and stunt the development of well-functioning and contributing members of society. Where does the experience of trauma go when it is stunted by medication, wiped off the screen of our conscious minds? One has only to look at the rise in graphic violence in television and film, with movies about zombies or cannibalism, “torture porn,” as it is now referenced, even the current plethora of “horror” films, and we can see how a projection of what’s been erased, through medication and other means, is potentially played out around us. What we cannot contain we project. More than a few wars, I’m sure, have been started by men with demons that needed to be projected. The doses of medication that my former psychiatrist prescribed far exceeded any kind of approved or recommended levels, but I did as I was told, because my doctor was the expert. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Somewhere deep beneath all words, maybe near the bottom of the sea inside, the timelessness of my own particular traumas has remained, coded into my cells. I often think now that it doesn't matter an iota what we tell ourselves about how we have or have not survived; our past shows itself, regardless. On one level I can say that I have healed a great deal; on another level I am drawn to the darkness that also repels. I return to what I escaped, not in reality but figuratively, ceaselessly. Even to this day I still dream about the doctor who practiced this “therapy” on me. I am crying in my sleep, afraid that I will never escape. I am trapped, still, to this day. Trapped by the limitations that the past trauma has imposed on my present days. For anyone who has ever been the victim of sexual assault or rape, we know that the assault did not end when the physical incident concluded, “in the past”; it lives on in the body of the person who was traumatized.

I struggle with suggestions that traumas of the past can be fully healed. Spoiler alert: I don’t think they can. We can learn; scar tissues form and conceal abrasions, physical and emotional, psychic, and spiritual—but the point is there are demons. They linger, and often in the dark. I can never get back the years that were stolen from me, not just from this “therapy” but also as a result of the childhood sexual abuse. All the years of depression and suicidal thoughts, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, unreasonable fears, staring into faces at schools or in places of employment but fighting to breathe through waves of panic. And then the sex. Sex has never been easy, even to this day. Sex will likely always resurrect the past, take me back to the therapy, what the doctor did to me to silence my sexuality, how the man who abused me as a child left me decimated. My childhood night terrors started not long after that incident in my elementary school, and in all of them I fought to escape life through an invisible hole in the air. I wanted death, or what came before life. I wanted peace.

Here’s another thought I can’t escape: if many of today’s most popular horror movies are about trauma, and the popularity of these movies has never been higher, what does that say about the people who are drawn to these movies as a form of entertainment?

My days today are highly functional; I work, play, have friends, family; I shop, cook, eat, clean, iron, read, write, watch films, listen to music, exercise, discuss interesting topics and try my best to be good, and moral, to not succumb to the darkness. But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t lurk.

How to Make Chicken Goulash (“Paprikás Csirke”)

Not that long ago, I found some old paystubs from my father’s job as a mechanic in a saw factory where he worked for over 25 years, until his retirement in 1990. The particular paystub was from 1972, and his hourly earnings were $3.26.

Three dollars and twenty-six cents an hour.

My parents had five children and a mortgage. My brothers and sisters and I all went to private schools. We had piano lessons, always a fridge full of food, our own bedrooms, clean clothes and toys, roast beef dinners every Sunday, and colourfully wrapped presents for each of our birthdays, Christmases and Easters, every year. Looking back today, I don’t know how my parents did it.

One of our “special” meals was Chicken Goulash, or Paprikás Csirke, my father would always say in his native Hungarian. It’s also the first meal I ate when I arrived into Budapest, Hungary, in 2004, a trip I will always cherish because it’s when and where I started to write my book, The Inheritance of Shame. I’ll also never forget that first meal in Budapest. I’d arrived by train, late night. Thrilled beyond words to be in my father’s birth city, the rapturous Budapest, I had failed to notice that the restaurant I’d chosen for my inaugural meal did not accept Euros, only Forints. At the end of my meal, several glasses of Bulls Blood later and not speaking a word of Hungarian, I went about trying to pay for my meal when the waitress, not speaking a word of English, tried to explain something that I could not hope to understand. Finally, the couple in the adjoining table, speaking both languages, translated for us both. Reluctantly, the waitress explained in Hungarian to the couple, who explained in English to me, that I could go in search of a bank machine, as long as I left my belongings in the restaurant, which by then was also closing 15 minutes later. So that’s what I did, frantically. I left my belongings with people I did not know in a restaurant that was about to close in a city whose language I did not speak while I ran for blocks in search of a bank machine, which, at least in 2004, the year Hungary joined the European Union, was still far less common than in North America. Finally, blocks later and panting like a dog out of breath, I found a bank machine, withdrew the Forints, then ran the blocks back to the restaurant, paid my bill and went on my merry way. Such was my introduction to Budapest.

As for Paprikás Csirke – though labor intensive, the payoff is definitely worth the effort. Served over egg noodles is great, but for a little more effort (and even great pleasure), you can make homemade potato dumplings, or “Nockerl,” as we called them at home. Finally, Cold Cucumber Salad is the perfect side dish.

3 - 4 large onions, chopped
A whole chicken, cut in pieces
3 - 4 red bell peppers, washed, cored and quartered
2 large carrots, peeled and quartered
2 celery stalks, quartered
1 parsnip, peeled and quartered
1 tomato, quartered
Several cloves of garlic, minced
Chicken broth
3 - 4 heaping Tbls Hungarian Paprika
Caraway seeds (optional)
Worcestershire sauce
Soya sauce
Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
Salt and pepper to taste
Sour cream
Flour

Cut the chicken into pieces, wash, pat dry, set aside.

Chop the onions and sauté in EVOO over a medium heat for at least 20 to 30 minutes, or until well caramelized. Add the garlic and roast; add more EVOO and the paprika, then the chicken pieces, searing on each side. Do not burn. Add all the vegetables, seasoning, and a little bit of stock. Cover and steam a few minutes, adding more and more stock until all the chicken and vegetables are just barely covered. Bring to a boil; turn down and simmer, stirring often, until chicken falls from the bone, about 1 hour.

To thicken sauce before serving, add sour cream and a few tablespoons of flour to a serving Pyrex dish over heat. Once well mixed, add sauce and chicken to the sour cream mixture.

Dumplings (“Nockerl”)

6 Eggs
8 - 10 Tbl Flour
2 tsp salt
Water

Beat eggs lightly, add salt and flour. Mix well. Slowly add a bit of cold water, then more flour, until very thick and smooth. Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil. Add salt. Spoon one teaspoon of batter into boiling water, and repeat, one at a time, moving quickly in order to use up all batter within a minute. Bring dumplings to a boil and cook for about 5 minutes (dumplings will triple in size once cooked). Drain and add a bit of melted butter. Serve with the chicken goulash.

Cold Cucumber Salad

Long English Cucumber
Dill
Sour Cream
Salt

Slice the cucumber thinly. Salt well and sprinkle with dill until well covered. Refrigerate for at least an hour. The cucumber will release a lot of juice. Before serving, add sour cream (or half sour cream and mayonnaise). Sprinkle with paprika. Serve as a side dish to the Goulash and Dumplings.

Pride and Prejudice

On June 17, 2018, CBC journalist Wendy Mesley interviewed me for her Sunday morning show, “The Weekly,” about gay conversion therapy in Canada. Within a day of that interview, a link to my segment appeared on several websites, including, of course, on CBC’s site for “The Weekly.” 

That is—until just the other day.

Now when I search for my name on “The Weekly” site, nothing is found. If I search on the CBC main site, the June 17 episode is listed with the heading: “Gay conversion therapy in Canada,” followed by a summary: “Is gay conversion therapy growing in Canada? While there is much to celebrate during Pride month, there are faith-based groups in Canada planning events this summer that, LGBT activists say, are practising a version of ‘conversion therapy,’ which purports to change sexual orientation. Wendy Mesley talks to author Peter Gajdics about the influence of the controversy ideology.”

However, clicking on the body of the above paragraph brings up only an error message: “Sorry, we can’t find the page you requested, please try again from the homepage.”

Mesley had opened the actual segment, called “Pride and Prejudice,” by mentioning a man named Michael Carducci, from a U.S.-based organization called The Coming Out Ministry, who the 7th Day Adventist Church in Canada had invited to Nova Scotia to speak about being “freed from the chains of homosexuality.” She played a short video clip of Carducci: “Before I was even conscious,” he stated, “Satan began tying knots through the rope than became my life. I thought that God had made a mistake and I’d pray at night that I would wake up the next morning and I would be a girl.”

Mesley went on to reference another organization, called Journey Canada, based in Vancouver, B.C. She showed the image of one of their website pages, highlighting a section that read they offered “sound biblical teaching for the relationally and sexually broken.”

She showed a map of Canada, and said that Journey Canada was “big and growing, with ministries in 42 cities, offering retreats across the country. Last year, it raised over $600,000 in donations.”

Mesley continued: “LGBT activists say the group’s approach sounds a lot like conversion therapy—the idea that homosexuals are broken, and can be fixed with spiritual intervention.”

She then introduced me onto the program.

She mentioned that I had helped “persuade” the city of Vancouver to ban conversion therapy, and she asked for my thoughts about these faith-based groups and ministries in Canada. 

“It’s the same ideology of what I went through,” I said, “which is ‘love the sinner, hate the sin.’ It’s a shame-based approach to who a person is. ‘You are not to be, you are not to experience, you are not to desire these feelings in your body and in your mind,’ and so you do anything to exorcize yourself of them. That sets up a person for years of suffering and prolonged distress. This is torture.”

Mesley told me how both Journey Canada and The Coming Out Ministry state they are not involved in conversion therapy. “So I’m just wondering,’ she asked me, “is it conversion therapy?”

“I think a lot of these ministries change their language,” I said. “They’re much more subversive and subtle, so now they talk about ‘helping the homosexual.’ But it’s the same ideology; it starts with the same lie, which says a gay person, a trans person, is inherently broken because of their homosexuality or trans identity, and so they can ‘help them’—help them overcome this brokenness.”

Mesley asked me if I thought there was a “resurgence” of these types of “treatments, or healing, as they call it.”

“I don’t think it ever went away,” I said. “Conversion therapy is an umbrella term and these types of treatments happen subversively under many labels. Of course, people who practice them don’t refer to themselves as practising conversion therapy, so, the nature of these treatments is they’re very hidden. They’re covert.”

Mesley referenced the legal bans emerging in Canada—by legal statute in Ontario and health regulation in Manitoba (2015), and the recent city-wide ban in Vancouver. She asked me if I thought these bans were enough to “stop it.”

“No, it’s not enough to stop it. I’ve said to everyone, including through City Council [in Vancouver] in the process of getting the ban through, that these bans won’t stop them, because the nature of these treatments are they’re covert and subversive—but it’s a definite step in the right direction.” 

Mesley mentioned the obvious discrepancy in the language used by these organizations, since they state they don’t want to “change” people, but “then go on to say they are able to help people reconcile their faith with their physical desires, and to bring those together. And they end up happier. They end up with less desire for the same-sex person.” 

“When we’re talking about faith-based organizations in particular,” I responded, “you’re talking about wanting to belong, you’re talking about wanting to stay with your church, your community, your family, for sure, who’ve raised you with this faith. To lose contact with your family and your faith is enormously distressing. People have killed themselves over things like this. And so, when you’re faced with this, of course, sometimes you choose to stay with your faith, and you do whatever you need to do to suppress . . . the desires, your same-sex feelings.”

In closing, Mesley mentioned that CBC had contacted Journey Canada to ask them to respond to these concerns, and they had declined to comment. Then the interview wrapped.

For several weeks the interview, as a stand-alone segment, was available on-line. Now it is gone. For some reason, it has been severed. It is also not searchable.  

Why?

I emailed the producer of the show. He and I had spoken several times in the days leading up to the interview. Even as recent as July 4, this producer had emailed to ask for more information about Journey Canada’s “methodology.” I was happy to tell him what I knew, and he responded again and thanked me.

But now, he would not respond to my email, or even a voice mail that I left on his personal cell.

Fortunately, I was able to retrieve a lingering copy of the stand-alone interview,

Vancouver, Canada, Bans Conversion Therapy

On June 6, 2018, City Council in my hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, unanimously approved a motion to ban conversion therapy in the city limits, making Vancouver the first city in Canada to pass such a law. I was one of three speakers who appeared in-chambers and addressed Council in support of this ban. In five brief minutes I detailed my history with this “therapy” and my reasons for approaching the city’s LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee in 2017 with a recommendation for some kind of public statement denouncing these treatments, or better yet, an outright ban. I was thrilled when the Committee invited me to help them draft the motion that was later approved and submitted to Council for consideration. “Conversion therapy is a problem of ideology,” I told Council on June 6, “not nationality”—so Canada must do its own part in preventing these treatments from continuing. Legal bans are an important step forward.

I have written elsewhere about my frustration around the city’s delay in considering this ban, but I have to say how proud I felt when several Councillors voiced their shock that these “pseudo-scientific therapies” are continuing at all, with anyone, anywhere. When I first approached the Committee last year, I had sincerely hoped a ban in Vancouver would be for all, adults and minors alike, since experience has taught me that even adults can fall prey to these forms of institutionalized hatred, which are every bit as harmful no matter what the person’s age. I was disappointed to learn, only a few days before Council’s meeting, that the motion had been rewritten to cover only minors, although, again, the fact that the motion was even being advanced seemed promising. All this to say that when one Councillor suddenly introduced an amendment so that the motion would ban conversion therapy “outright”—not only for minors but also for adults—I almost burst into tears. “This is a fraudulent practice,” another Councillor stated. “Not only is it cruel and dangerous, it’s fraudulent, so legally, we should be fine in preventing it happening to anyone.” At no time during the two-year complaint against my former psychiatrist through the College of Physicians and Surgeons, nor the four-year medical malpractice suit I filed against the doctor, did I feel so vindicated as when I heard these Councillors voice this kind of unequivocal support.

The City’s motion on conversion therapy is available to view on-line (personal remarks begin at 11:11). Maclean’s published my Op-Ed on the topic that same day. PBS NewsHour covered the story, as did CBC, 1130 News, The Georgia Straight, and The Star Vancouver (among others).

When people talk to me about “moving on” in life and “not looking back,” I often wonder if what they’re really saying is they want me to be happy, and they just don’t know how I could ever be happy when past trauma, like with what I experienced in this treatment, still seems to impact my life today. Their comments seem to suggest that I am perpetuating the trauma by facing it square-on—talking or writing about it continuously—rather than by turning away in an attempt to save myself more suffering, “the memory of it all.” I understand these sentiments. I think we all, on some level, simply want to be happy. No one chooses to be traumatized; but when our bodies and internal sense of self are violated, shattered seemingly beyond repair as a result of some kind of incommensurable trauma, and struggling afterward even with the daily tasks of shopping, cooking, and feeding ourselves, not to mention holding down a job and caring for loved ones—when faced with the very real impact and devastation of trauma on our daily lives, I really do believe that conscious recognition of what we’ve lived through and survived helps us to heal. The act of “healing,” of course, is ongoing; there will likely never come one final moment when we return to who we were “before.” Healing is a deliberate act of agency; we may need to nurse ourselves to this end in perpetuity. We certainly do not heal by turning away and betraying our past, but, I think, by embracing, with compassion, what we’ve survived. When we see ourselves, wholly, we recognize others; when we’re blind to our own suffering, anyone else’s becomes intolerable.

To be heard and recognized by our government officials is a deeply meaningful, and healing, experience.

To Ban or Not to Ban

A journalist, let’s call him Sam, called me recently to discuss my experiences in conversion therapy because of a possible ban of the practice in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada. Sam asked if I thought these kinds of bans were even necessary today, since he said he hadn’t found much information on the internet to suggest that conversion therapy still occurred, much less locally, in Canada. 

First, I answered to Sam on the phone, the fact that cursory Google searches for labels like “conversion therapy” do not result in many hits from actual organizations or practitioners claiming to endorse it does not mean it isn’t still occurring; in fact, one of the most common misconceptions I’ve encountered, I explained to Sam, is that many people tend to think conversion therapy is always an actual thing that can be quickly identified, or found, so that it can be eliminated or prevented. How do you “find” homophobia, or transphobia? How do you “find” ideology, hatred or prejudice? Especially when it's behind closed doors in a therapeutic relationship between two people in privacy—can fear ever be “found”?

Conversion therapy begins with the thought that gay and trans people are somehow ill and need to be “fixed.” Thoughts carry into beliefs that are then projected outward into systematic acts of oppression by “helping professionals,” whether religious or secular, who are in positions of power over the vulnerable. Shame is the breeding ground on which these kinds of “treatments” thrive, I told Sam, and shame is fostered by silence. Few, if any, will ever admit to practicing anything remotely called “conversion therapy”; in their minds, “conversion therapy” likely doesn't even exist. Instead, they are trying to “help.”

Sam went on to ask that if practitioners aren’t openly admitting to practicing conversion therapy, how can we expect to regulate them; and if they can’t be regulated, the question remains: why are these bans still worthwhile?

These are all good questions, I told Sam, and ones that I’d been repeating to many people for a long time. However, I reminded Sam that all of these concerns are the exact same “problems” that any jurisdiction would likely face, and about 30 U.S. cities / counties, 10 states and D.C., even the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario, have all banned the practice of conversion therapy, even though regulatory policies against the practice already exist in nearly every national and international health organization. Obviously, further preventative measures are still needed. Just as morality cannot be legislated—despite laws against sexual abuse or rape, some go right on sexually abusing and raping—no ban against something as elusive as “conversion therapy” will ever prevent every act of hatred toward gays or trans people, but it is a start.

All that said, not all proposed bans have been successful; as it turns out, one such bill in New Hampshire failed to pass just recently because opponents believed that “conversion therapy” was not a concern where they lived (funny how that works: shame from these treatments fosters silence, and because of silence the opponents claim the treatments don't exist); that actually banning these so-called “therapies” might prevent minors from wanting to openly discuss their “unwanted” same-sex attractions with counsellors; and that many “former” homosexuals (known colloquially as “ex-gays”) have claimed to have actually been helped by these “therapies,” living out their lives now as heterosexually married or at least coupled in opposite-sex relationships. Once again, as in past, such opponents confuse these types of coercive treatments with safe, honest, and emotionally fulfilling discussions around sexuality and gender, both of which are of course complicated issues and well deserving of serious attention. Banning conversion therapy in no way prevents such discussions. Torture is never “therapy,” and conversion therapies torture people, through various shame-based approaches, into trying to become who they’re not. In terms of apparent “success rates,” the director of the sexual orientation and gender diversity office at the American Psychological Association was quoted to have said in a follow article in The New York Times: “Even if someone agrees to behave differently, it doesn’t change who they are.”

Sounds simple enough, and I couldn’t agree more.

I’d also add that even if a gay person changes the “map” of their sexual identity—engaging in opposite-sex partnerships—it will never change the “territory” of their underlying desires. I call myself a gay man but I could also call myself a heterosexual man and even go about having sex with a woman if I wanted; I could change my behavior—but would any of that change my underlying sensibilities and desires? Is what I do or how I present myself to the world always the same as whoI am and know myself to be? Of course not. People live a lie all the time. All that sort of contradictory, duplicitous, behaviour would do for me personally is betray who I know myself to be and thrust me back into the state of dissonance and inner turmoil that I also struggled most of my early life to escape. To live my life as truthfully and as honestly as possible is what will bring me peace: this much I know for sure. A map may not be the territory it represents, but to align my authentic self, my territory, with my outer behaviour, my map, is my objective.

Bans against “conversion therapy” hold great value, I told Sam, finally, since they set a tone and create a precedent, thereby possibly preventing these kinds of “therapies” from recurring again; they also bring the issue out into public scrutiny, which is already a step forward. People don’t discover who they are simply from within; people discover who they are, and also who and what they’re not, by what they encounter in the world outside. Bans against conversion therapy send a clear message to all by destabilizing the belief system—which is of course just that: a belief system; it is not Truth—that says gay or trans people are somehow “broken” and must be healed. Bans like the one proposed in Vancouver and already passed in numerous other jurisdictions tell us all that there is nothing wrong with being gay, or lesbian, queer or trans. Bans like this tell us we are valued, and protected; that when we, as LGBTQ people, are depressed or unsettled, struggling with feelings of displacement or alienation from family or our religion, that this very alienation and displacement is not as a result of our true nature, but as a result of being shamed and dejected, silenced, of being subjected to people promoting hatred and intolerance in the name of God, which in my mind is never godly—maybe even as a result of trying to change ourselves, through extraordinarily twisted and counterintuitive measures, into something we are not. Trying to change our sexuality or gender in order to feel less alone and “normal” is antithetical to what we truly desire and ultimately need, which is to be accepted and valued, loved, for who we are. If bans like this can prevent even one LGBTQ person, who may still believe there’s something inherently wrong with them simply for being themselves, from falling under the spell of even one “practitioner,” who may still believe there’s something wrong with them simply for being LGBTQ—then that ban, as far as I’m concerned, will have succeeded triumphantly.

To Ban or Not to Ban may be the question for lawmakers, but the underlying issue, at least in my books, remains helping to prevent immeasurable harm while fostering lives lived in honesty and integrity, or perpetuating institutionalized hatred by turning a blind eye for the sake of maintaining a lie.

From Plan A to Plan D: Stop Having Sex

During a recent media interview about conversion therapy, the reporter I was speaking with on the phone cited a known religious “ex-gay” organization operating out of Vancouver, Canada, where I live, and said that its leader claimed they were “not practicing conversion therapy,” but merely “helping homosexuals to not have sex,” to “remain celibate.” The reporter then asked me what I thought about this statement.

I’ll admit that in the moment, I had trouble articulating my full horror. Nevertheless, I told the reporter what I know to be true, which is that few, if any, organizations today would even admit to practicing “conversion therapy,” so in this sense it was not surprising to me that they would deny practicing what is now considered to be a universally debunked form of “therapy” to change sexual orientation. My former psychiatrist would have never admitted to practicing “conversion therapy” on me throughout my own six years of “therapy,” yet that is precisely what he was doing.

“Conversion therapies,” I know from experience, occur across a spectrum of experiences, and can range from electric shock treatment and aversion therapy, to the more benign “talking therapy,” and all of them outwardly geared toward “changing” sexual orientation—though even this language obfuscates their real intent, since in truth they are technically less about “changing sexual orientation” than they are about “stopping homosexuality” (do they ever try and “change” heterosexuality to homosexuality?). Thrown into the mix by many religious “ex-gay” organizations is an effort to try and realign a person’s apparent “gender confusion” in order for them to live “according to scripture” (males being masculine; females being feminine; both sexes coupling only in heterosexual marriages). The magic (toxic) ingredient in all of these “treatments,” whether one wants to call them conversion therapies or not, is shame. Shame about one’s homosexuality or gender identity is what leads people (or causes parents to send their kids) to these treatments; shame is what imprisons them.

With the demise of Exodus International, the world’s largest “ex-gay” organization, and virtually every leading medical and mental health organization now denouncing all forms of conversion therapy, many of these organizations have subsequently reframed their methods from claiming to “change” sexual orientation to the softer but (in my opinion) no less onerous “helping homosexuals to not have sex.” Nomenclature changes; shame remains.

Helping anyone to not have sex specifically because they are gay is not the same as not having sex because, oh, let’s say, a person chooses to not engage with anyone on a sexual level, gay or straight. At various times in my own adult life (er, during my post-conversion therapy years) I have remained celibate—or maybe just single with no sex—because I chose to focus my energies elsewhere (or I just couldn’t deal with the whole “dating scene”). But at no time during any of these times has my choice to not have sex been precipitated by the belief that to be gay or homosexual is a sin and I should therefore not act on those desires—that I should “love the sinner” (myself), but “hate the sin” (sex with other men). Shame was never driving my choices.

I have never heard of any organization that “helps heterosexuals to not have sex” specifically because their “heterosexual sex” was immoral. Hiding behind the religious veneer of “no sex before marriage” never cut it for me either. Recent same-sex marriage laws have obviously complicated many religious arguments, since previously they would have simply forbidden “sex outside marriage,” therefore de facto precluding all gays from having sex. Now that gays can marry in Canada and the U.S. and in many other countries, forbidding sex outside marriage no longer necessary prevents or precludes gays from having sex—they can simply first marry. But that doesn’t solve the “religious problem.” What to do about all that “gay sex”?

No longer strapping gay people into chairs and shocking them with electricity but merely “helping” them to not have sex may sound like progress, it may no longer sound like conversion therapy, and therein lies the rub. Looking for something called “conversion therapy,” or that anyone admits to being called “conversion therapy,” will always shield the culprit. When we talk about conversion therapy we are talking about an ideology, not any one “type” of treatment. All of these scenarios, and more, are bound by the same awful shame, and the same shameful ideology, which says that being gay is a sin or disease (abnormality, error, etc.) and should be “changed,” or at least not acted on. In other words, if you can’t change ’em, at least make sure they stop having sex.