The loud-mouthed U of T prof vs. the political correctness crusaders

When U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson publicly pledged never to use gender-neutral pronouns, he sparked a vicious battle on campus and beyond. The free-speech advocates say he’s combating the tyranny of trigger warnings and political correctnes

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September 27, University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson posted a video titled Professor Against Political Correctness on his YouTube channel. The lecture, the first in a three-part series recorded in Peterson’s home office, was inspired by two recent events that he said made him nervous. The first was the introduction of Bill C-16, a federal amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code that would add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination. Peterson’s second concern was that U of T’s human resources department would soon make anti-bias and antidiscrimination training mandatory for its staff—training he believed to be ineffective, coercive and politically motivated. “I know something about the way that totalitarian, authoritarian political states develop,” Peterson said in the first video, “and I can’t help but think I’m seeing a fair bit of that right now.”

Other profs in his position might have written op-eds, circulated petitions or negotiated with university officials. But Peterson is a big believer in the power of YouTube—“a Gutenberg revolution for speech,” he calls it—and, as it turns out, he had a lot to get off his chest. He carpetbombed Marxists (“no better than Nazis”), the Ontario Human Rights Commission (“perhaps the biggest enemy of freedom currently extant in Canada”), the Black Liberation Collective (“they have no legitimacy among the people they purport to represent”) and HR departments in general (“the most pathological elements in large organizations”).

Peterson also said he would absolutely not comply with the implied diktat of Bill C-16, which could make the refusal to refer to people by the pronouns of their choice an actionable form of harassment. He believes the idea of a non-binary gender spectrum is specious and he dismisses as nonsensical the raft of genderneutral pronouns that transgender people have adopted—ze, vis, hir, and the singular use of they, them and their. “I don’t recognize another person’s right to determine what pronouns I use to address them,” he said grimly. “I think they’re connected to an underground apparatus of radical left political motivations. I think uttering those words makes me a tool of those motivations. And I’m going to try and be a tool of my own motivations as clearly as I can articulate them and not the mouthpiece of some murderous ideology.”

A good number of reasonable people are also skeptical about the newly developed assortment of personal pronouns. How will all the new pronouns work in practice? How will we know what to call someone? And can people call themselves whatever they wish? This is new territory where the usual maps don’t apply, where some of the tiniest words in the English language can cause offence. But it’s a problem that, to my mind, can be resolved with little difficulty—just ask people what they want to be called. It’s not so different from learning how to correctly pronounce a name that’s foreign to you. Peterson seized on the pronoun issue, above all other free-speech-related matters that bother him, because it’s an effective dog whistle. It underscores the lengths to which people will go in the name of political correctness while exposing and exploiting the anxiety that already exists around trans culture.

Within days of going live, Professor Against Political Correctness had created the most intense campus firestorm since the University of Western Ontario psychology professor and race scientist Philippe Rushton whipped out his measuring tape. To many in the trans community, Peterson was a middle-age, white, tenured university professor—the very embodiment of patriarchal privilege—who was denying their existence, tacitly inciting prejudice and targeting an already vulnerable group to make a questionable theoretical argument. He was called a bigot, a racist, a relic.

On October 3, Peterson received two letters from U of T: one from the undergraduate chair of the psychology department, Susanne Ferber, and the other from David Cameron, the dean of arts and sciences. Both urged him to stop repeating the statements he’d made in the videos and comply with applicable human rights law. Student groups demanded Peterson apologize and take the videos down. Several of Peterson’s fellow faculty members castigated him on TV and online. A trans nonbinary physics prof named A. W. Peet tweeted: “Jordan Peterson is an overprivileged blowhard who needs to grow some humility.” LGBT students said that, in the wake of Peterson’s videos, they were threatened and doxxed (their addresses and phone numbers published online). Peterson said his office door was glued shut by vandals.

Students on both sides of the argument took to the streets—or, at least, to the steps of Sidney Smith Hall. In early October, non-binary activists held a rally. A few days later, Peterson supporters organized their own rally, during which their opponents tried to drown out speakers with a white-noise machine. After scuffles between the two camps, a trans student was charged with assault.

The hostilities continued to play out for months in the media. Peterson gleefully watched his YouTube subscribers swell to more than 100,000. On his personal website, he linked to every one of the 180 articles published about him

Peterson believes the idea of a nonbinary gender spectrum is specious. “i don’t recognize another person’s right to determine what pronouns i use,” he said in a YouTube video

and the controversy he had launched. Peterson had already enjoyed a cultish following among U of T students. Now his fan club expanded to include a cadre of big-name columnists—Margaret Wente, Christie Blatchford, Conrad Black—and a chorus of vocal online extremists: 4chan and Reddit trolls; UK Independence Party supporters; Gavin McInnes, the Vice co-founder and head of the Brooklynbased misogynist libertarian group Proud Boys. The attention seemed to embolden Peterson. On a panel on The Agenda, where he’d been a pundit for years, he vowed he would go on a hunger strike before letting other people put words in his mouth.

In his fervent opinion, the issue wasn’t pronouns, per se. It was much bigger than that. It was truth itself. Being told what to say—and by the government no less—was just one more step along the slippery slope to tyranny. The way Peterson tells it, the only thing standing between us and a fullblown fascist insurrection was him.

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spectre of political correctness has loomed over universities since I was at U of T in the early ’90s. The term was used then to attack everything from shifting standards of language—What, I can’t say “Oriental” anymore?—to new academic departments like gender studies, African-American studies, and gay and lesbian studies. Conservative politicians and scholars believed political correctness had led to cultural relativism, a disdain for the canon and misguided affirmative action. They were convinced that the zeal for plurality ironically created growing intolerance and the silencing of debate.

The hysteria around political correctness today is not so different, but now the debate centres on the idea that students are coddled, over-sensitive and entitled. Designated safe spaces and the desire for trigger warnings reinforce this notion. This has all happened amid a radical reframing of race, gender and sexuality. Transgender and queer people have never been more visible, and major protests against sexual violence and racism, propelled by social media, have given marginalized groups a much louder voice. Both on campus and off, it’s never been easier for activists to confront authority. The result has been an unending series of dust-ups over free speech and power.

Peterson characterizes the “PC game” like so: divide the world into winners and losers, insist that division is the result of oppression, and claim allegiance with the losers. And though I think such PC game-playing is relatively rare and these scenarios are not the harbinger of doom that Peterson sees them as, you can find examples almost everywhere. A couple of years ago, students at Oberlin College in Ohio were ridiculed around the globe for complaining that the sushi and bánh mì served at a campus cafeteria constituted acts of cultural appropriation. It’s easy to mock such extreme, counterproductive pieties.

More recently, and more distressingly, queer film director Kim Peirce was verbally attacked by trans activists at Reed College during a screening of her landmark film, Boys Don’t Cry, for failing to depict trans life in a positive light (among other things). Closer to home, last November, the head of Ryerson’s social work department stepped down over murky allegations of racism directed against him by the Black Liberation Collective.

To Peterson, the patrolmen of the thought police lurk around every corner, most insidiously in the modern university. The academy, he argues, has been thoroughly corrupted by political correctness, especially the humanities and social sciences. “The education department is the worst of the lot,” he says. “It used to produce teachers and now it produces ideological activists.” In his courses, Peterson teaches his students to resist what he calls “ideological possession,” but his real work now, it seems, is to take those lessons into the wider world.

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early November, I met Peterson at his home, a cozy semi on a serene, leafy street in Seaton Village. The house is a warren of small rooms decorated with Peterson’s large collection of Soviet realist paintings—the immense canvases cover almost every wall—and bookshelves that Peterson built himself. He shares the house with his wife, Tammy, and their 23-yearold son, Julian, a web designer and programmer. They also have a 25-year-old daughter, a Ryerson student named Mikhaila, after Mikhail Gorbachev. Peterson, who is 54, was barefoot, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. He took me up to a recently completed third-floor addition, an unusual aerie modelled after a Kwakwaka’wakw big house and decorated with colourful carvings and masks by his friend, the West Coast Indigenous artist Charles Joseph. With its pale wood salvaged from his great-grandfather’s barn