LBC: Jordan Peterson and gender pronouns

Jordan Peterson told LBC he is refusing to let the government tell him what he can and can't say.
A bill in his native Canada has made it a hate crime not to use the correct pronoun for transgender and other non-binary groups.
And Mr Peterson, a Clinical Psychologist from Toronto University who has shot to prominence in recent months, says it is not the government's role to control what language you use, especially pronouns such as ze and zir.
Speaking to Maajid Nawaz, he said: "There's 70 different pronouns to hypothetically describe people who don't fit anywhere on the gender spectrum, which is also something I don't understand conceptually.
"A person is now compelled under Canadian law to use the pronoun of another individual's choice on pain of law.
"And I thought, no that's not acceptable.

"It's one thing to put limits on what a person can't say, like in hate speech laws, which I also don't agree with.
"But to compel me to use a certain content when I'm formulating my thoughts or my actions under threat of legislative action, I thought no, the government has introduced compelled speech legislation into the private sphere. It's never happened in the history of English common law, so I said there's no way I'm abiding by that.
"I don't care what you're damned rationale is. 'We're compassionate'. No you're not. You're playing this radical, collectivist left-wing game. You're trying to gain linguistic supremacy in the area of public discourse.
"You're doing this by using compassion as a guise as you're not going to do it with me."

Is he referring to this law?

From what I can see, all this law is does is give transgendered people legal protection from discrimination. For example, a business couldn't refuse to give someone a job on the grounds of what their gender identity is. It's no different to laws which prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sex, race, sexuality, disability, etc.

The law also makes it a criminal offense to promote genocide and hatred against these groups. I seriously doubt mistaking or refusing to use certain gender pronouns is not considered hatred in the eyes of the Canadian justice system.

you're not wrong. this whole bill has been blown WAY out of proportion; but it got JP famous and his followers don't do their own research so it works for him.

i've listened to a lot of JP (not because i agree with him) and i have yet to hear a compelling argument as to why his so-called free speech trumps the dignity and security of trans people. common sense tells us that no human rights are unconditional; they are all balanced against each other and the price of using a non-gendered pronoun if you're in a business capacity costs one nothing. in fact, it will probably never happen. i've lived most of my life in metropolitan cities and i've never even talked to a trans person and i keep a wide variety of friends and i spent many years in customer service roles. plus, you only use pronouns when you're talking about someone -- not when you're talking TO them, so what are the odds that you'll need to use a pronoun at all? the whole concern over this is dumb.

and by extension, chosen pronoun, when possible. .

This always gets massively overblown by the zealous bigot crowd, the kind who immediately jump at any opportunity to paint themselves as the oppressed majority largely because they have no bloody clue what true oppression actually feels like.

So let's start out with manners. If someone introduces themselves as Roberto, but asks that you call them Bob, what do you do? If you're a polite and sensible human being, chances are you'd call them Bob. You wouldn't persistently refer to this guy as Roberto unless you deliberately wanted to piss that person off.

Makes sense right? So if someone introduces themselves as Margaret, but asks that you call them Bill, it's really just common decency to use their chosen name, and by extension, chosen pronoun, when possible. This isn't really rocket science, just common decency.

Bad manners are not a crime, obviously. Harassment on the other hand is, and while referring to somebody by the wrong name/pronouns is unlikely on its own to be considered harassment, everything depends on context.

If someone was deliberately and mailiciously trying to piss someone off by referring to them as the wrong gender it could well be taken to be a form of bullying. Especially so if they've been asked to stop, or to cease contact with the individual entirely. This is really no different to any other sort of harassment (e.g. stalking), just a different medium with potentially a different motivation. And unless you think harassment ought to be legal under some lawless lord-of-the-flies style free speech paradigm, you have to allow that this is a criminal act that deserves punishment.

Whether it deserves its own law or not is a different story I suppose. Naturally, politicians love to complicate the world with unnecessary legislation which makes it look like they're doing their job and helping people who need it, when in fact all they're doing is simply wasting everybody's time.

PRSOM

A lot of opponents of this will cling to the 'attack helicopter' caricature of transgendered people. Of course, nobody in their right mind would want to refer to someone as something outlandish, but at the end of the day I'd imagine (based on personal experience) that most people will use he/she/they.

There are two reasons why I completely disagree. The first is that nobody other than me decides the words I will use. I will happily use the proper noun you assign to yourself, but if you decide you wish me to also describe you as Lord of All He Surveys when I talk about you then I am unlikely to be going along with the joke. If anyone asks me to use a non-obvious pronoun about them I will automatically suspect something is not right and be on my guard.

Secondly, pronoun usage is subconscious. If I think of you as a woman then I will automatically use she and her. If I think of you as a man then I will automatically use he and him. If I meet Danny La Rue I will be using him and he.

Have you ever been asked to refer to someone as a non-standard (he/she/they) pronoun? If not, then why are you complaining about this?

obviously mistakes can easily happen if you're not paying attention. Really doesn't take that much effort to use the right word though. If you can master the technique of thinking before opening your mouth (a rare enough ability, to be sure) then you ought to be able to deal with this problem fairly easily.

I'm sure you must be able to understand the problems involved in claiming that someone can only take a position on an argument for which they have direct experience without me pointing them out. Do you think you should be able to opine on the ill treatment of historical slaves or of German Jews in 1933-45, or on whether women should be able to have abortions?

Ha! A sneer, an insult and a put-down, all in little more than one sentence. The point is that I wouldn't make an effort to use a requested pronoun if I thought I was being asked to join in a deception.

Okay, so aside from reading about it from potentially dodgy sources online, have you, or anyone you've ever spoken, emailed, or shared eye contact with, ever been asked to use a non-standard pronoun? Because from where I'm standing, you're just using this as a strawman argument here.

So if you're against the concept of "join[ing] in in a deception", why don't you post on TSR using your real name?

So you are persevering with the argument that you should only comment on something if you are directly affected, despite the facts that (a) you have no idea whether I have been directly affected (and I haven't said either way) and (b) you yourself frequently opine on matters you have no direct connection to.

In any event, I don't think the term 'straw man argument' means what you think it means.

I'm not against the concept, especially where it is useful or entertaining. I don't do that here in order to protect my privacy, just like you.

Like Jordan Peterson, I'm certainly not going to be bullied into conforming with avant garde concepts of what the world should look like and how I should behave. But you are probably all in favour of bullying as long as it is geared up to getting your rules implemented.

“Common sense tells us no human rights are unconditional” and yet you also imply ‘offending’ people is completely below the belt and their right to not be offended trumps all else ... how did you come to this rather amusing contradiction?

There are two reasons why I completely disagree. The first is that nobody other than me decides the words I will use. I will happily use the proper noun you assign to yourself, but if you decide you wish me to also describe you as Lord of All He Surveys when I talk about you then I am unlikely to be going along with the joke. If anyone asks me to use a non-obvious pronoun about them I will automatically suspect something is not right and be on my guard.

Of the people who are transgendered, how many want people to refer to them using non-common pronouns?

What?