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