Jordan Peterson won’t stop criticizing Elliot Page’s transition, even after the controversial academic was banned from Twitter for calling the trans actor’s doctor a “criminal physician.”
On the podcast Krystal Kyle and Friends, Peterson explained to Kyle Kulinski why Page remains the focus of his ire.
“See, I would’ve left Ellen Page alone if she hadn’t been parading her new abs in a fashion magazine,” he said, continuously misgendering Page by using his dead name and his old pronouns.
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“How many kids do you think she convinced to convert? One? A thousand?” Peterson asked.
He was referring to Page’s turn as Esquire’s cover star in June. The Umbrella Academy actor showed off his new physique in several photos, some of them shirtless, and talked about how comfortable he feels working out in his new body.
For Peterson, it’s all tantamount to “social contagion.”
“She has the responsibility not to entice confused adolescents into a catastrophic decision before they have the maturity to make that decision,” he said.
The University of Toronto psychology professor—who has developed quite a following among the “intellectual” right—was suspended from Twitter after tweeting that Page “had her breasts removed by a criminal physician” on June 22. According to screenshots of his account shared on social media, the platform flagged the post as “hateful conduct” and barred him from posting until he agreed to delete it.
(L-R) Former Juno co-stars Jennifer Garner, Elliot Page, and J.K. Simmons speak onstage during the 94th Annual Academy Awards.
Neilson BarnardThe suspension even drew criticism from Elon Musk, who said the platform has gone “way too far in squashing dissenting opinions.”
Kyle said the tweet got Peterson in “trouble,” but the professor downplayed the importance of his suspension.
“Well, I don’t know if it got me in trouble, you know, I don’t think I’m in trouble, Twitter banned me, but I don’t consider that trouble,” Peterson said.
Kyle argued that trans people are going through the same kind of persecution that gay people did during their fight for acceptance, prompting Peterson to interrupt him.
“You’re utterly wrong,” he said. “There’s nothing about that that’s right.”
He brought up Canada’s 2017 law that added “gender identity or expression” to a section of the criminal code targeting hate speech, defined as inciting hatred and advocating for genocide. The anti-discrimination law “might” make it a crime to “repeatedly, consistently refuses to use a person’s chosen pronoun,” a University of Toronto law professor told the CBC.
Jordan B. Peterson is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, a public speaker, and a creator of Self Authoring.
Romy Arroyo FernandezNot one to be silenced, Peterson continued to rage against Page on Kyle’s podcast. Amid a flurry of typical anti-trans attacks, the professor expressed concern that the Canadian law would usher in a state of mass panic and uncertainty.
“For every one person of that sort that we hypothetically save, we doom a thousand more as a consequence of confusion and social contagion,” he said.
“Often, when you introduce social confusion, you can produce a psychogenic epidemic. Generally, it’s adolescent females who are more susceptible to it,” he added. “It’s absolutely and definitely the case that we’ve doomed thousands of kids to brutal, mutilating surgery and premature sterility and we’ve done that on the altar of our hypothetical moral virtue and compassion.”
Kyle, who continuously argued that adults should be able to choose what they do with their bodies, called Peterson out for his “moral panic,” sending the frazzled professor into another impassioned diatribe.
