The Peterson Principle
Our profile of U of T’s rabble-rousing professor, Jordan Peterson—who’s either a heroic defender of free speech or a trans-phobic bigot, depending on your point of view—got both camps in a froth. Let’s start with his fans:
“Needed course @ U of T: ‘how to deal respectfully with the self-proclaimed social justice warriors.’ This is a left-wing lynch mob against this professor.”
—Barry Dennison, Facebook
“We need more Petersons— people in academia who are more than armchair scholars, who personally engage in current debatable issues.”
—Jessie To, Facebook
“Jason McBride’s piece on Jordan Peterson was exceptionally thoughtful. I had the same response as the author toward the gender pronoun request—just call people by the names they request and forget the rest. I wish Jordan had not become entangled in gender name-making. But mandatory training for unconscious biases is a whole different kettle of fish, and I think it has been lost in the gender brouhaha. Jordan is taking a very important stand on the issue of political correctness, the hollowness of imposed ‘niceness’ and the resultant catastrophes. He’s a deep thinker, but he also carries the naïveté of the stereotypical academic.”
—Patricia Dawn Spence
“I see a lot of hate for a man for taking a stand for something he believes in. So what if he won’t identify a gender as ‘they’ or ‘them’? Don’t crucify a guy without knowing the man himself.”
—Nicholas Donaldson, Facebook
“Doesn’t seem like a bad guy but is unfortunately emboldening bad guys. The repulsiveness of his largest backers may turn people off of his central message, which seems to be that language should be used to communicate ideas rather than suppress them.”
—Greg Stealth, Facebook
And now the foes…
“I’ve heard this guy defend his point in detail on a couple of different podcasts, and he is crazy as a loon. He equates identity politics with a concerted Maoist effort to use language as a weapon to insidiously infect our ideology with the precepts of communism.”
—Hugh Gee, Facebook
“Hey, news flash: when you’re insisting there are only two genders, you’re trans-phobic. Probably should take that sensitivity/ inclusivity training.”
—Jasmine Tea, Facebook
“I wonder how he’d feel if all his students called him Skippy? Stop wasting space on this dustfart.”
—Shane Cameron, Facebook