“Please, Sir, Can You Stop the Torture?” (Or, When to Stop Begging)

Recently I declined a request for a radio interview in Ottawa, the first interview I’ve ever declined since the publication of my book, The Inheritance of Shame, in 2017. This latest request came from a journalist who wanted me to discuss “Trudeau’s promise to prioritize the conversion therapy bill his government failed to pass if he’s re-elected.” I told the journalist that I feel “quite conflicted (at times, disgusted) about this government’s past so-called ‘promises’ and any new ones they’re making along an election campaign”—so, for the time being, I would “not be able to add anything constructive to an interview at this time.” And then I politely declined. 

What I did not tell the journalist, as I know it would have served no greater good, is that I’m just not interested in repeating myself endlessly in the form of yet one more interview about the harms of so-called “conversion therapy.”

I have no interest in clarifying, yet again, that the term itself, “conversion therapy,” is a misnomer and that these “treatments” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexual minority people are nothing more than institutionalized abuse.

I do not want to say for the hundredth time that I think a ban on “conversion therapy” is important, life-saving; that the language in such a bill should criminalize “conversion therapy” outright—that it should be for all people, regardless of their age, and not split it by age so that only minors would be protected and not explicitly adults. Criminalizing “conversion therapy” for minors but not explicitly for adults makes about as much sense to me as criminalizing sexual violence on minors, but not on adults, since some adults might “consent” to the “treatment.”

The fact that Trudeau still makes the issue of outlawing conversion therapy to be about protecting “kids” instead of eradicating a form of torture of all LGBT people tells me that he either still does not get it or is playing more games of political wordsmith. When he talks about his party being committed to the issue of banning “conversion therapy” since the “beginning”—I have to wonder which “beginning” he’s referring to. If memory serves, in early 2019 his government rejected the idea of banning “conversion therapy” and said that it was a “provincial and territorial” issue, not a federal one.

The “beginning” can also stretch back years and years earlier, for survivors and advocates who’ve been trying to get their voices heard through legislation, but hearing only silence.

What I also did not tell this journalist is that I absolutely do not think that I can stomach telling my “personal story of ‘conversion therapy’” one more time to anyone. A lawyer acquaintance recently asked me to tell her “what happened” in my treatment, and I told her to maybe just read my book. It wasn’t a sales pitch, it was self-preservation. 

The thing about repeating one’s own personal narrative of trauma is that if we tell it to enough people over a long enough period of time, decades, really, eventually the same story told just does not reflect who we are as a person “today,” which of course is a constantly shifting point in time. Facts remain the same but their meaning changes dramatically. After a period of years, relaying the details of torture even becomes somewhat banal, and I do not want to do that to myself anymore. I deserve better.

Naturally, I also did not tell the journalist that I do not think I have it in me to say much more about these issues on radio shows that care little about nuance, but are all about a “7-8-minute” sound bite. In less than five minutes on-air, I’m sure, I would be afraid I might start crying (I’ve come close during other interviews in the past). 

When I talk about these issues publicly, all the rage that I felt originally around the injustice of my own “therapeutic experience” and how these forms of abuse continue to play out today, in different ways and with more and more people, sets me on an emotional tailspin. Speaking on the radio about these issues stirs my emotional juices and then, all at once, the interview ends, I hang up the phone, and it is me who has to pick up the pieces of my broken heart. Alone. Again. The job of these journalists, through no fault of their own personally, I’m sure, is to get a quick and catchy on-air interview, but it is always me who has the job of dealing with the atomic fall out to my soul once the interview ends abruptly.

In one form or another, I have been writing and talking to political leaders about these issues for almost twenty-five years, and I sincerely cannot tell any journalist today how sickened I’ve become by the ways in which these leaders make the issue of saving lives into their latest election tactic. The cruelty of it all hurts far too deeply. 

To review the facts: “Conversion therapy” would not exist at all if these practices were aimed at trying to change a heterosexual’s opposite-sex desires, or to change a cisgender into a trans person.

Well, of course not. The mere suggestion is absurd.

“Conversion therapy” exists solely because of the oppression, the shame, inflicted on people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or any other sexual minority—or even those who do not identity as such but whose inner desires and genders do not match what society has told them they ought to be. “Conversion therapy” exists because of the internalized shame that drives these people to think they just do not deserve better.

“Conversion therapy” exists for no other reason than to try to “change” or to kill these people out of existence. To silence them.

“Conversion therapy” is sexuality abuse.

“Conversion therapy” is gender abuse.

“Conversion therapy” is torture.

Finally, what I find most troubling about discussing the whole idea of trying to outlaw what amounts to torture is that at the end of these interviews I often leave feeling like little orphan Oliver, in the musical, Oliver!, begging for one more measly bowl of soup. “Please, Sir? Please can you stop the torture?”

We deserve better.

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

Religion as a Front for Tyranny

It is often criticized that bans on conversion therapy are “anti-religious,” that they impede on citizens' freedom of religion. To this claim I quote Margaret Atwood from the Introduction to her novel The Handmaid's Tale: “It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether.”

Bans on conversion therapy are not, in and of themselves, anti-religious; bans on conversion therapy, especially those that operate through some kind of religious organization, do not, in and of themselves, threaten anyone’s freedom of religion. I, myself, having experienced conversion therapy and now advocate for these types of legal bans, still strongly believe in the value of religion and “faith.” But “conversion” practices that are enforced by religious organizations use religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether. Religion, for these organizations and the people who run them, is erroneously conflated with opinions of ignorance and hatred, and so any opposition to what they say or do around issues of sexuality or gender are understood to be opposition to religion. It is not.

Opposition to religious organizations that enforce conversion treatments is opposition to their use of religion as a front for tyranny. The difference is subtle but vast, and I sincerely hope that all governments, both local and federal, currently or in the future considering any kind of legal ban on conversion therapy, understand this difference. Religious-based organizations that enforce any kind of conversion treatment tyrannize people into conformity; legal bans of their treatments oppose this tyranny, not religion.

Apologies

On November 28, 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered an impassioned, historic speech before the country’s House of Commons in Ottawa, formally apologizing for the federal government’s “systemic oppression, criminalization, and violence against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit communities.” Trudeau was referring of course to the time, in the not-too-distant past (throughout the Cold War era, though as late as the 1990’s) when thousands of LGBTQ2 Canadians were systematically purged from federal jobs and active service in the military simply because of who they were.

I was eating dinner with my 93 year-old mother at the family home, where I was born and raised and where my Catholic European mother still lives, when the segment aired on the evening news. My mother, who would have normally turned the volume down on such issues, said nothing, and did not touch the remote control, as Trudeau delivered his speech.

It is with shame and sorrow and deep regret for the things we have done that I stand here today and say: We were wrong. We apologize. I am sorry. We are sorry.

When Trudeau said the word “shame” I thought of my book, whose title is The Inheritance of Shame, and I had to look away, overcome with emotion. I thought for sure I’d start to cry, and not just with a trickle of tears but with a full on wail of grief. Somehow, I didn’t. 

After the news, as my mother drank her evening coffee in the living room, she asked a series of surprising questions.

“Can you please explain this acronym ‘LGBTQ2’ to me?” she said. “I understand lesbian and gay, but . . . how can a person be bisexual? You are one or the other, no?”

I wondered how much my mother really wanted, or needed, to hear. Should I talk about sexuality occurring across a spectrum, and that more people than would often care to admit are truly “bisexual”? 

“A lot of people are not necessarily gay or heterosexual, they are attracted to both genders.”

My mother looked unconvinced.

“And what about this word ‘queer’?” she continued. “At one point all of these people were called ‘queer.’”

“In a disparaging manner, yes. But the word today has been reframed in a positive light; it’s now more of an umbrella term to describe a lot of different sexualities, even heterosexual people who are considered allies.”

For a moment I heard the dialogue between my mother and I, as if outside the conversation, and I wanted to laugh. Even still, I felt tense, on guard, prepared to perhaps still defend myself against an onslaught of moralizing judgments, which had been the history between us.

“And I don’t understand transgender. Or is it transsexual? Isn’t that the same as homosexual?”

“Transsexuals or transgender people have nothing to do with sexual orientation. One is about gender identity or expression, the other about sexual desire. A person could be transgender and also homosexual.”

“And what is this ‘Two-Spirit’?”

“'Two-Spirit’ are the Indigenous communities.”

From the look on my mother’s face I could tell that she had reached the point of over-saturation, and the entire subject quickly waned.

“I'm just too old fashioned, I guess,” she said, shaking her head. “In my day, men were men and women were women and they got married and that was all there was to it. I loved being a mother. There was no greater joy. I’m proud to be a woman. I don’t understand what’s wrong with ending it at that.”

I left my mother’s house later that evening still thinking about the Prime Minister’s “apology.”

Though I’ve never faced any systematic attacks on my sexuality by the country’s federal government, I was born and lived the first few years of my life at a time in history when homosexuality was still a criminal offence in my own birth country.

A criminal offence.

I was already nine years old before homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness and removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM. 

Today, I have to wonder what it must have been like for me as a child in my family home, or in the school playground, or during Sunday Church sermons, when homosexuality was still considered the worst of all crimes against humanity. As I neared puberty in the mid-1970’s, how must I have experienced the palpable dread of knowing that I was “becoming” what there was no greater shame in being: a homosexual. What must that have been like for me, or others like me, as my own body was like a runaway train that I could not stop from nearing a cliff of my own undoing: toward eternal damnation, or at least toward social ridicule and familial and religious alienation? Where do we turn when the shame of who we are, or what we’ve been told we are—or what we have become because of some injustice committed against our person—cuts so deep, like a vein cast through our very soul, that even sleep provides little respite? When mornings bring us back to ourselves, and our ever-present elusive shame, what then? And what happens to all that shame once we learn to view ourselves more humanely, when we finally do begin to “heal”? Does knowing differently really mean that the shame is expunged from our soul?

Shame, I’ve learned, is definitely learned and inherited, and while apologies from those who’ve wronged us in some substantive way truly matter, since they recognize and validate harms committed, they do not necessarily undo damage caused by the acts inflicted. Apologies do not necessarily rid survivors of their own shame. Apologies matter, as even the recent #metoo outrage demonstrates, but even after receiving such apologies survivors must still face the lifelong impacts of their own personal shame or guilt. Like my mother, I’d like nothing more than to “end it at that.” But I also recognize that this “inheritance” lingers on, like the gift that goes on giving, rippling through my life, and every day I am faced with it yet again.