Jordan Peterson: Gender ideology is ‘completely insane’
Psychologist and free-speech hero Dr. Jordan Peterson recently condemned the indoctrination of seventh-graders into gender ideology, what he called a new “unquestionable doctrine” that is “completely insane.”
Speaking to actor and podcast host Duncan Trussell earlier this month, Peterson explained that harmless-looking cartoon characters such as ‘genderbread person’ or a unicorn are used to teach children that their biological sex, psychological sense of their sex, the way they dress, and their erotic feelings towards others are all independent of each other.
“Sometimes it’s a unicorn, and sometimes it’s a gingerbread man, and it’s called the Gender Unicorn or the Genderbread [person]. Oh, there’s a teddy bear too,” Peterson said.
The cartoons introduce four rows labeled “sex assigned at birth”, “gender identity”, “gender expression” and “sexual preference.” Children are asked to put an X anywhere along the four continuums to indicate where they fall in all these apparently separate realms.
“That’s Grade 7,” said Peterson. “That’s basically targeted to junior high and above. And so you see, it’s inculcating a particular kind of philosophy of identity.”
The author of the bestselling book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos explained that there are problems with this “doctrine.”
“The first problem is that the evidence that there are biological differences between men and women is overwhelming,” Peterson said.
“The vast majority of people who have a biological sex also claim that they are psychologically … the same as that biological sex,” the psychologist continued. “So the idea that they are independent is completely insane.”
Even though there are men who are more feminine than other men, and women who are more feminine than other women, feminine men tend to identify as men, and masculine women as women, he noted.
Another problem with making divisions between biological sex, “gender,” “gender expression,” and sexual orientation is that it makes its adherents’ other ideas completely illogical. Peterson used bans on conversion therapy as his example.
“The LGBT lobby is dead set against anything that smacks of conversion therapy, the idea that you could convert someone who has a primarily homosexual identity to someone who has a primarily heterosexual [identity],” he told Trussell. “It’s illegal in Ontario and in many [American] states now to even attempt that. But if there’s complete independence between the biology, the identity, the expression and the sexual preference, then there’s no reason to assume that it can’t be changed.”
Bolstering his argument, Peterson mentioned the ultimate conclusion of gender ideology, namely that gender is totally fluid. Some activists teach that a person can be a man one day and a woman the next, or even change sexual identity from minute to minute.
“If it’s that fluid, and it’s only dependent on subjective choice, which is what the legislation now insists, then why can’t that argument be used by conservatives to say exactly the same thing about sexual preference?”
Peterson wouldn’t care if postmodernists were logically incoherent if they hadn’t had such an influence on contemporary society. He compared new legislation making “gender” a matter of subjective choice divorced from objective biological realities to laws made in communist Russia.
“One of the terrifying things about [The Gulag Archipelago] … is that [its author] Solzhenitsyn outlines these laws that were passed in the early part of the 20th century in the Soviet Union,” he said.
These laws usually stemmed from ideologically motivated utopian ideas, but they had devastating results.
“As the laws unfolded, they revealed their murderous interior and skewed the system to run by the legal code,” Peterson explained. “And if you put in code that you don’t fully understand--which is a very easy thing to do--you’ll end up with consequences that you by no means predict.”
“So one of the other things that’s very dangerous about what’s happening currently, I believe, is the all-out assault on gender identity as such, so the law now basically states that gender identity is something that is only determined subjectively.”
Peterson shot to fame in 2016 after taking to Youtube to state that he refused to be compelled by the Canadian government to use transgender pronouns. Peterson also testified before a Canadian Senate Committee to oppose Bill C-16, a bill that, when it passed, added so-called gender expression (i.e. cross-dressing) and gender identity (i.e. transsexualism) as protected grounds to both the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code.
