Between meetings, I called another group member, a gay man in his thirties. He repeated that he didn’t have an issue with the change. I asked if he had any issue dating someone who identified as a ‘trans man’. Without hesitation, he said he had no issue with it. I was stunned. I had always known that ‘trans men’ were still just biological females (and if attracted to men, were then also heterosexual), the same way that I never thought trans women were real women. They were biological males. How could someone be gay while being open to dating and sleeping with a biological female?

When I met continued resistance in the group, I withdrew. I supported bans on conversion therapy, but I had no interest in debating why erasing sexual attraction from the definition of sexual orientation was a bad idea. If they couldn’t see it, I was not going to try to explain it.

As 2021 wore on, my horror at what I was continuing to learn grew tenfold. Many nights I lay awake, ruminating on how children were being sexualised under the banner of ‘trans healthcare’, which to me looked like mutilation straight out of Frankenstein. If minors could consent to surgeries on their sex organs, what would stop arguments for minors consenting to sex with adults? This should have alarmed everyone, not just survivors of childhood sexual abuse. For gender-nonconforming minors who would likely have grown up gay, ‘gender-affirmative care’ was clearly a new form of conversion therapy – medicalising their bodies and appearance to match an internal feeling now called an ‘identity’. This approach felt completely antithetical to the earlier women’s and gay-rights movements, which had fought to free people from rigid sex stereotypes rather than reinforce them through medical intervention.

What I still did not fully see was how even the term ‘conversion therapy’ itself had become part of the problem. When I first began speaking out in the 1990s, I never reduced my experiences to a catch-all phrase. I simply described what had been done to me – drugs, ketamine injections, primal-scream sessions, aversion techniques – and why: to change me from homosexual to heterosexual. Later, when the terms ‘reparative’ and then ‘conversion therapy’ gained widespread use, I adopted them too, although somewhat nervously. Once a single phrase was used to describe these treatments, its meaning expanded dramatically—and so did the bans meant to end them. Those bans shifted from ending treatments aimed at changing sexual orientation to protecting, affirming, and enabling any claimed gender identity. In effect, a term originally intended to stop one form of intervention was stretched and inverted to enable another – ‘gender-affirmative care’.

Following a snap Canadian federal election in September 2021, the government introduced Bill C-4, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). On 1 December 2021, Bill C-4 was fast-tracked and passed unanimously in the House of Commons, which was virtually unheard of. On 7 December, the Senate also passed it unanimously, and on 8 December, it received royal assent and became law. I watched much of the process live, alone in my apartment.

In the days that followed I felt nothing – no excitement, no sense of victory. A few long-time advocates, including Noah, sent brief, polite congratulations. I didn’t reply. By then I sensed what the new law would unleash, but I could not yet fully sort it out in my head. The feeling of dread was palpable.

Beginning in January 2022, the full implications of the new law started to become painfully clear. By including ‘gender identity’ in the protected categories and providing an exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, the legislation effectively criminalised attempts to change sexual orientation while codifying and protecting medical transition for anyone claiming a gender identity. What I had understood for decades as conversion therapy had now been broadened to include any challenge to a person’s belief that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. The law I had fought for had, in practice, legalised what I saw as a new and more invasive form of conversion therapy.

Conversion therapy for sexual orientation historically meant attempts to change same-sex attraction – through lobotomies, drugs, aversion techniques or the kind of psychiatric regime I endured. The goal was to make someone heterosexual, or at least to silence their same-sex attractions.

Conversion therapy for gender identity worked in the opposite direction. By banning challenges to a claimed gender identity, the law effectively removed barriers to ‘gender-affirmative care’ – social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and in some cases surgery. What was called a ban on conversion therapy for gender identity actually increased access to medical treatments that could sterilise, impair sexual function, weaken bones and create lifelong dependence. It facilitated conversion therapy on sexual orientation.

The irony was stark. Youth who might otherwise have grown up gay or lesbian were now being steered toward medical transition, often presenting afterward as ‘heterosexual’ in their declared gender identity. Because biological sex cannot be changed, it would be more accurate to say they had become mutilated homosexuals. Helen Joyce, in her 2021 book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, described these treatments as ‘postmodern gay conversion therapy’. The ban – and others like it that bundled sexual orientation with gender identity – had not ended conversion therapy. It had simply given it a legal sanction under a new name.

This realisation hit harder when I remembered the 2018 Vancouver City Council debate. Across hours of presentations and discussion, the focus was almost entirely on changing homosexuality. There was almost no meaningful reference to ‘gender identity’, even though the final bylaw bundled both together. Most people – including the politicians who passed the law – likely did not foresee how that conflation would play out. I had strongly advocated for these bans to apply to all ages, believing even young adults needed protection. What I did not yet see was how that all-ages language, combined with the bundling and the exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, would ultimately put minors at the greatest risk.

In 2022, Florence Ashley’s Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis was published. It was promoted as the first major legal and policy analysis of ‘trans conversion practices’. The foreword, written by Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on Protection from Violence and Discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, celebrated Canada’s Bill C-4 as a landmark victory, and spoke exclusively about harms to ‘trans and gender diverse persons’. There was no mention of homosexuality, sexual orientation or conversion therapy against gay people – even though the bill had originally been crafted to protect them.

In the first chapter, Ashley defined ‘trans conversion practices’ as any sustained effort to promote gender identities aligned with one’s ‘sex assigned at birth’ or to discourage behaviours associated with a ‘gender other than the one assigned’. Any questioning of a self-declared trans identity, or hesitation around puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries, was labelled a ‘corrective approach’. I was surprised to see my own name in the index. Ashley referenced me alongside a publicly known trans-identified person, suggesting I had experienced a ‘conversion practice’ as a young adult and had ‘ostensibly consented’.

The claim was false on multiple levels. I am gay, not trans. I had always described my experience as gay conversion therapy (or conversion therapy of my sexual orientation). And in numerous interviews, essays and my book, I had explicitly stated that I never consented to my psychiatrist’s treatment. Ashley’s misrepresentation was especially striking given that we had previously appeared together on a panel and she had told me she was familiar with my work.

Early in the book, Ashley discussed ‘gender-creative’ children (whom she also called ‘gender-variant’, ‘gender-expansive’, or ‘gender-diverse’), noting that they ‘may grow up to be transgender’. At no point did she mention that these same children had historically grown up to be gay or lesbian. She framed historical ideas around gender variance entirely through a modern gender-identity lens. Her omission stood in stark contrast to earlier (and some of the first known) advocates for homosexuals like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who in the 19th century argued for the rights of same-sex attracted people – not to medicalise their bodies.

Ashley’s book was so deeply immersed in a worldview built on falsehoods – about biological sex, about notions of gender and gender identity, about who grows up to be trans vs gay – that even attempting to analyse it felt like speaking in a language that was not real. Ashley made painfully clear how thoroughly the language and logic of conversion therapy had been inverted. Where earlier advocates sought to protect same-sex attracted people from coercive change, today’s gender ideology often medicalised the very children the bans were meant to protect. What began as an effort to end harmful attempts to change sexual orientation had, in practice, enabled a new and more invasive form of conversion under the name of ‘gender-affirmative care’.

After stewing over the ban, Ashley’s book and the growing damage I saw gender ideology inflicting on minors, I finally posted my first public statement on the subject in April 2022. I wrote that I struggled with how conversion-therapy bans had conflated sexual orientation with gender identity, and that the two should never have been bundled together because their developmental trajectories are entirely different.

The response was immediate and hostile. Several users called me hateful. Advocates I had worked closely with on the federal ban called me out online. One long-time collaborator responded publicly within minutes, stating that bans on trans-conversion therapy were ‘every bit as important as bans on conversion therapy for sexual orientation’. His tweet felt like a public rebuke.

In another comment posted days later, I explained why I rejected the label ‘cis’, which was now commonly used as the opposite of ‘trans’. The term presupposed that a person had never struggled with gender dysphoria. As a gay man, I was often lumped into the ‘cis’ category, yet I had experienced significant dysphoria as a child. That discomfort later resolved as I matured and accepted my homosexuality. Like many other gay adults who likely experienced similar dysphoria when young, being called ‘cis’ felt factually incorrect and incoherent to me.

Responses from Florence Ashley and others were swift and critical. One former member of the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee tweeted that I was ‘undoing all that good’ and looking for ‘10 minutes of fame’. Her words stung. The last thing I wanted was fame. What I wanted – what I had always wanted – was to prevent further harm and to end what I now saw as a new form of conversion therapy.

In a Quillette essay published early June 2022, I publicly stated for the first time that combining sexual orientation and gender identity in these bans was a mistake. In a second Quillette essay later that year, I laid out my opposition to many of the core tenets of gender ideology. I rejected the idea that a person could be ‘born in the wrong body’, that biological sex was ‘assigned at birth’, or that a person’s sex could be changed through hormones or surgery. I did not believe gender identities could supplant biological sex, nor did I support ‘gender-affirmative care’, especially for minors. These beliefs were incoherent to me and ultimately erased my gay sexuality. I also rejected the label ‘cis’ as meaningless and the term ‘transphobia’ as so broad and elastic that it now equated simple disagreement or appeals to biological reality with hatred. The pieces drew strong reactions, including from some of the advocates I had worked with for so long.