Excluding the 2%

Re: Need Your Own Pronoun? Well, No, Christie Blatchford, Oct. 22.

According to Christie Blatchford’s report, Jordan Peterson readily admits he has done the math and his biologically determined binary pronouns “he” and “she” match the gender of only 98 per cent of University of Toronto students. This calculation implies that, for whatever reason, two per cent remain unrepresented. Yet he insists on labelling these excluded remainders with his obviously incomplete set of pronouns.

Redo the math and grammar, Prof. Peterson. If your closed system of grammatical naming can’t handle all the elements, isn’t it time to listen to others who have looked elsewhere for knowledge to fix the gap in our pronoun references over the statistical reality of ambiguous gender? Tony D’Andrea, Toronto.

Christie Blatchford writes the data show, “98 per cent of people have the same gender identity as their biological sex.” If that’s true, it means two per cent have a gender identity that does not match their biological sex. Would it be such a huge burden for Jordan Peterson to learn to call those few individuals by a pronoun more fitting than “he” or “she”?

After all, French children learn that everything under the sun has a linguis- tic gender identity that they must memorize, then match with the appropriate forms of not only pronouns, but articles, prepositions, adjectives and verbs as well. If he were learning French, would Peterson refuse to go along with that on the basis it’s inconvenient for him to remember what is, after all, just a French “fashion”, or an interpretation of language that is “unmoored from the underlying reality”?

Kurt Weinheimer, Toronto.