Tim Lott

Jordan Peterson and the transgender wars

  • From Spectator Life
Dr Jordan Peterson (Photo: Jonathan Castellino)

After Google employee James Damore was sacked for suggesting that inborn differences in likes and dislikes (such as preferring people to things) might explain why there were fewer female employees working in technology than men, the first person he gave an interview to was a relatively unknown Canadian professor, Jordan Peterson.

To some it might seem like an odd choice. It’s true that Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has a substantial online presence — his videos have had 150 million views — but all the same, Damore had the world’s media knocking on his door. Why choose Peterson?

To those who follow Peterson, the reason will be apparent. Damore clearly picked up much of his information about innate gender differences from one of Peterson’s many lectures on the subject of psychometrics, an academic discipline that mainly focuses on empirically measuring the variations in different psychological traits between human beings, including across the axis of gender.

Peterson has been in similar trouble to Damore for posting his supposedly controversial lectures online. In August, he was briefly suspended from YouTube and Google without explanation, although he was quickly reinstated after a furore in the Canadian media.

At the University of Toronto, after receiving two written warnings, he has been in danger of losing his job following his announcement that he would refuse to use the preferred gender pronouns of students and faculty who don’t identify with their biological gender, to the fury of radical transgender activists. The use of such pronouns is mandatory under a recently instituted Canadian law, Bill C-16. Peterson rejects the injunction on free speech grounds. ‘I’m not going to cede linguistic territory to post-modernist neo-Marxists,’ he says. He has expressed the view that he might use the preferred gender pronoun of a particular person, if asked by that individual, rather than having the decision foisted on him by the state.

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