University of Toronto Professor Pushes Back Against Political Correctness
“I won’t mouth the words of ideologues, because when you do that you become a puppet for their ideology.”
9.30.2016
22
University of Toronto professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has posted a fascinating hour-long YouTube lecture on political correctness in which he objects to the Justin Trudeau administration’s Bill C-16, which proposes to outlaw harassment and discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression under the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code.
As Canada's National Post reports,
Gender identity is defined by the Ontario Human Rights Commission as “each person’s internal and individual experience of gender. It is their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.” The commission defines gender expression as “how a person publicly presents their gender,” which can include behavior and outward appearance such as dress, hair, make-up, body language and voice, as well as a person’s name and the pronouns they use.
Peterson, a middle-aged white male, has argued against the existence of non-binary gender identities, saying “I don’t think there’s any evidence for it.” He also decries the transformation of the university into “a politically correct institution” and is pushing back against the creeping policing of expression in higher education that he finds suggestive of “totalitarian and authoritarian political states.”
Peterson rather courageously -- considering the hysterical degree of PC policing in academia these days -- has said that if a student asked to be referred to by a non-binary pronoun, he would not accommodate the request: “I don’t recognize another person’s right to determine what pronouns I use to address them. I won’t do it,” says Peterson. “The pronoun issue is straightforward. I won’t mouth the words of ideologues, because when you do that you become a puppet for their ideology.”
Bravo, sir.
The professor also said he believes the writing in the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s terms and definitions is in his view “incoherent, over-inclusive and all encompassing." He fears Bill C-16 could lead to legal action against legitimate discussion and research on gender and sexuality, including research on the “biological origins of gender.”
He added that he is concerned that the university is consulting groups like the Black Liberation Collective on campus policy matters. Peterson respects their right to exist and protest, but questions their credentials:
“I have no problem with them, people can organize themselves however they want, but I have an issue with U of T considering them a legitimate policy advisor. I don’t think there is any evidence U of T is a racist university. I think we have done an extraordinary job of building a multi-racial and multi-ethnic university and community, better so than almost all schools.”
Peterson told the National Post that he decided to make the video and go public with his views after receiving a memo from university HR outlining new mandatory anti-racist and anti-bias training. “That disturbs me because if someone asked me to take anti-bias training, I think I am agreeing that I am sufficiently racist or biased to need training,” he said in an interview.
Physics professor A.W. Peet, a colleague at U of T, said Peterson is wrong and is failing to live up to his responsibilities as a faculty member:
“All that is necessary to invalidate a faulty claim is one counterexample. Here, I am that counterexample. I openly defy Peterson by existing: I am nonbinary, and transgender.
“I refuse to stand by and just let him hurt vulnerable genderqueer members of the university community… Academic freedom was never intended to be used as a general-purpose shield against professorial accountability.
“If Peterson fears the Trudeau government passing Bill C-16 into law, he should smarten up his act by upgrading his ethics circuits, not by trying to marshal opposition to basic human rights protections for people he refuses to even try to understand."
In his video, Peterson suggests there is now an “overrepresentation of social justice warrior-type activists” in government; the LGBT community, for example, “has become extraordinarily good at organizing themselves and has a fairly pronounced and very, very sophisticated radical fringe.”
Indeed. The video above is a full hour but Peterson is remarkably articulate and relentlessly interesting. TruthRevolt salutes his common sense and his willingness to tell the truth in the face of Canada's increasingly repressive anti-free speech laws.
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