Jordan Peterson: Gender politics has no place in the classroom

It is important to mention the characteristic insistence of the bill, the policies associated with it and the tenth-rate academic dogmas that drive the whole farce, that “identity” is something determined solely by the individual in question. Even sociologists do not believe it. In fact, they understand that identity is a social role, which means that it is by necessity socially negotiated. And there is a reason for this. An identity, a role, is not simply what you think you are, moment by moment, or year after year, but, as the Encyclopedia Britannica has it, it is an integral pattern of socially recognized behavior, providing a means to identify and locate to an individual in society, “who also serves” as a strategy to deal with recurrent situations and deal with the roles of others.

Likewise, her identity is not the clothes she wears, nor the preference or fashionable sexual behavior she adopts and shows, nor the causes that drive her activism, or her moral outrage over ideas that differ from her own. In fact, properly understood, it is a set of complex compromises between the individual and society as to how the first and the last could support each other in a sustainable, long-term manner.

Concerns about policies

There is no doubt that there was a great deal of concern about Bill C-16, which was then under consideration by the federal government, after the approval of similar legislation in several provinces. C-16 intended simply to add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination. However, it was embedded in a network of policies, many of them created by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which indicated that the bill included the tip of a large iceberg. And it is worth highlighting the insistence that the lack of use of the “preferred pronouns” chosen by people whose identity related to gender did not fit clearly, according to their personal criteria, into the standard categories of boys and girls or men and woman would now become a crime punishable by law.

Now, it is important to mention that during this week, the journalist Barbara Kay launched a story in The Post Millennials website about an application filed with the Human Rights Court of Ontario by the parents of a six-year-old girl, “N”, who was Subject to new principles of gender identity theory by her hypothetically well-meaning elementary school teacher at Devonshire Community Public School (Ottawa-Carleton District School Board). According to Kay’s story, the teacher insisted that “girls and boys do not exist,” and “girls are not real and boys are not.” Consequently, “N” began to manifest substantial confusion about her.

Source: Jordan Peterson | National Post