He is against being compelled to use a variety of gender pronouns by legislation which is internally inconsistent, scientifically inaccurate, and additionally lacks clarity by punting process and standards to the Ontario human rights commission which can change their process and definitions without involvement from an elected legislature.
I've never had to think about how my outlook might change if all of that got a lot more inconvenient though (if more people start requiring ever more varied pronouns, or if so many words get soft-banned as being offensive that it's difficult to communicate with clarity). Much less have I thought about what if I were compelled by force/law to do the thing I've been doing voluntarily all along. I can understand and be sympathetic to Peterson's position in that sense, although I'm not sure if I agree.
It's hard for public or mass communications with people who have rapidly-evolving preferences and sets of things that can cause offense.
Peterson sounds like a dick in his methods, but there's a dangerous regressive trend picking up in mainstream circles of treating disagreement as heresy. We've picked up the worst habits of religion. (And the "right" is too intellectually dishonest to notice that this treend of whining/heresy/safe-spaces-desire trend is deeply entrenched in evangelical and right-wing America, with private schools, "wars on Christmas", etc.)
I'm not convinced of this. "Hi all" works as a salutation, in public speaking, you can substitute ladies and gentlemen with lots of far more engaging variants (eg: "Dear friends", "my fellow students" (a favourite of one of my best instructors in college), "distinguished guests", etc), announcers have been using "attention all passengers" and other formal identifiers for a while.
But I'm thinking more of things like "creating a gender drop down box for a tool where demographic info was desired." Or do we just drop the idea of even having a meaningful response to such a question? Sometimes it's relevant, though, especially in medical industries.
Have you never made a mistake in common courtesy? What if any mistake in common courtesy meant that you could be hauled before a kangaroo court which can use a scientifically dubious "test of unconscious bias" against you as evidence? What if that kangaroo court could get you kicked out of your job? Go and read the law Jordan Peterson is complaining about.
Also, enshrining into law of scientifically false statements. (Anyone remember the bit about Indiana doing that with pi == 3?)
Besides, although I said what I did to make a valid point, I mostly said it to be humorous. Sorry I did not put in the humor tags.
So he more or less had to create a controversy out of nothing. The great majority of people consider the question a matter of courtesy and hold no strong feelings.
This is a pretty low resolution summary of their correspondence. It’s also pretty easy to argue that his behavior is better described as refusing to play the victim. For him, the loss of his rights is more impactful than the consequences of not complying, so he refused to play a part in the quiet loss of his rights.
From my understanding, it is purely the attempt to compel behavior from him that is his issue.
Well, this is now enshrined in Canadian law, so it doesn't matter much what the great majority of people feel. It only matters how courts will interpret the law.
Well, something is enshrined in Canadian law, but the heat of the debate over whether what Peterson claims Bill C-16 does is a desirable thing for a law to do sometimes obscures the fact that people—including people who are experts in law, which Peterson is not—have challenged his characterization of what the law actually does.
I'm perfectly able to be understanding in these cases, but I'm not capable to be psychic.
> I take issue with being held to a standard of somehow needing to "know" that ahead of time, and respect it, with no effort on the part of the woman in question.
I'd like to postulate that it's not just ahead of time. It's really hard to change your usage of he to she or him to her, when you are visually presented with a man. The brain doesn't easily change, so don't get mad when it doesn't change as fast as you want.
I know two trans individuals, I address them by the correct pronouns probably 80% of the time if I'm being a little kind to myself. The other 20% they've been totally understanding. Anecdotal yes but I feel like this is the vast majority of trans people; they know it's out of the ordinary and respect that, and handle the inevitable slips with social grace.
I agree that this would be an unreasonable standard. But I've yet to see that standard being applied to anyone (And I run in circles where I'm exposed to quite a bit of very outspoken trans/nonbinary rhetoric).
What I see, time and time again, is people who explicitly refuse to call someone by their preferred pronoun, whether it's on the grounds of pure petulance ("You can't make me!"), or of some biological essentialism ("HE, because Y chromosome").
So unless you have any examples of people being attacked for a single, innocent mistake, I'm inclined to see this as a strawman (straw-person?) argument.
At some point, what someone literally says they are or aren't against starts to pale in comparison to the perception of their stance. And if that perception persists, at some point, one has to call into question their sincerity.
A lack of condemnation can, not unreasonably, be construed as a tacit endorsement.