The mere fact that professor Peet would like to be addressed by a particular pronoun does not mean that I am required to address him by that pronoun. That doesn’t mean that I deny his existence or the existence of people who don’t fit neatly in binary gender categories. I reserve the right to use my own language and I’m perfectly willing to take that to its conclusion. If it’s the case that I can’t use my language the way that I see fit, because I’m using my language to formulate and articulate the truth in the clearest manner I can possibly manage and if that lands me in legal trouble — well, so be it.
CO: In Ontario, the law states that gender is a “person’s sense of being a woman, a man, both, or neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.”
JP: Yes. That particularly statement I regard as logically incoherent to the point of dangerousness. I think that the reason it’s been rushed into law is that people haven’t been paying attention. The mere fact that I don’t want to use pronouns that some else has decided I should use doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that transgender people exist. It also doesn’t make me a bigot. Regardless of how hard people try to push me into that corner — I’m not a bigot.
—CBC Interview with Professor Jordan B. Peterson (Listen to his explanation.)
R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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Sounds like in Ontario they might need a gender box that’s about 1 square metre for people to approximate their gender… One day we’ll need to tell our grandchildren: “We used to have tick boxes for that.”