Terchiak 1

Scott Terchiak
ENG112
Analyzing an Argument

In response to a proposed bill, bill C-16, Professor Jordan B. Peterson at the University of
Toronto uploaded a series of videos on his personal YouTube channel laying out his criticisms of
the legislature. The videos sparked controversy and discussion not only in Toronto but the West
in general. In the article, Canadian gender-neutral pronoun bill is a warning for Americans,
written by Peterson himself on thehill.com, Peterson argues his case in a generalized way and
briefly summarizes the events that surrounded the initial controversy of it all. Bill c-16 itself adds
gender identity and expression into the Canadian Human Rights Act, adding them to the list of
things prohibited by law to be discriminated against. The bill simultaneously seeks to amend
Canadas criminal code to include gender identity and expression as protected characteristics.
Two of the technical issues Peterson takes up with the bill are as follows: the malleability and
mutable nature of gender identity and expression (unrightfully finding company with the
immutable characteristics like race and sex typically protected by law to this degree), and the
punitive measures afforded by the Canadian Human Rights Act for those who trespass these
discrimination laws. Namely, the Canadian Human Rights Act metes out justice using a Human
Rights Tribunal which has the power and directive to preside over hearings investigating
complaints of discrimination as well as passing down judgment in the form of levying fines.
The issue, at a cursory glance, may seem to be predicated on the transgender or pronoun issue
itself, which is a fatal prism from which to glean the significance of the controversy.
Transgenderism and pronouns are a red herring, and perhaps the Trojan horse for an affront to
freedom of speech. There is no need to take a position on the pronouns themselves or
transgenderism. Indeed, Peterson even concedes that he is willing to call someone he or she
in accordance with their manner of self-presentation (Peterson). However, we would be remiss
not to delineate the consequences of linguistic legislation; the enforcement to say one thing or
the penalization to say the other. Unless we want to find ourselves in an Orwellian nightmare
where two and two make five, we must be able to separate ourselves from group identity and
embrace the individualism that allows for unabashed free speech, which is our main tool for
shining light on untruth.
An interesting dynamic highlighted throughout this controversy are claims made by Petersons
detractors and proponents of the bill; he is hateful and opposing this bill is bigoted. This self-
righteous moral indignation leads to a by any means necessary modus operandi in the pursuit
of seemingly virtuous goals. It is herd mentality in action; the emotional response of refusing to
give someone what they want, magnified because that person is of a minority group. In The
Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche writes on individuality; Basic error: to place the goal in the
herd and not in the single individuals! (Nietzsche) Who is the individual, clearly not a member
of this protected group, to stand up and dissent from the herds goal? This dynamic has played
out in real time as the protestors of Petersons slander his character and perpetrate violence, even
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against women, for having a different opinion. Cant the line be drawn in the sand where
violence should not be a means for any supposedly virtuous end? To be clear, Adolf Hitler was
undoubtedly vindicated in his perceived virtuous means. If we allow violence or penalize and
legislate against speech we disagree, we enter a slippery slope where the state decides what we
can and cannot say.
As a classical liberal, I see this circumstance as a degradation of my own side, as undoubtedly
the movement for a bill like this is largely supported by the progressive side of the political
spectrum that Ive always stood on. Ironically, these champions of progressive values seek to de-
platform those with opposing opinions as much as they possibly can. This is apparent in Canada
and America, as controversial speakers invited to colleges such as provocateur Milo
Yiannopoulos and conservative Ben Shapiro are regularly uninvited due to protests, protested if
they come, and intruded upon by organized dissenting crowds. More recently, Yiannopoulos
appearance to speak sparked riots on U.C. Berkley grounds, causing $100,000 in damages at a
college renown in the past for its Free Speech movement. (Lah). Peterson himself was met with
unrest and anger in his home campus for dissenting to this bill, including being de-platformed
and a reporter, Lauren Southern, being assaulted while covering a related campus event.
Typically, we protect discrimination based on immutable characteristics, yet the parallel to bill c-
16 would be like calling a black man white, is that discriminatory? That is essentially what bill c-
16 intends to prevent and penalize. If this argument for the linguistic legislature is indeed
progressive, we must stop and ask ourselves if the trend to feel compelled to de-platform
opposing opinions and name-calling isnt representative of a flawed position in the first place,
and if so then we can only surmise that the bills proponents, and by parallel detractors of free
speech, are nothing more than wolves in sheeps clothing.
In fighting for the rights of a certain collective, bill c-16 is no doubt underpinned by perceived
good intentions. Good intentions are not a bedrock for a necessarily just course of action, and so
in Western civilization, we are afforded the basic human liberty of free speech to enter a dialogue
on any issue together. Alarmingly, the nature of bill c-16 is seemingly not up for debate or
discourse. To oppose it is to be bigoted. The needs of the many, in this case, supersede the needs
of the individual based purely on subjective and mutable characteristics, the need in question
being the need to have protection under the law from discrimination. However, the best for the
common good has been shown time and time again to be when the rights of the individual are put
above all. Bill c-16 seeks to remove rights from the individual; security instead of liberty. The
unique issue with the pronoun phenomena is that getting a pronoun wrong, on purpose or not,
isnt anything more than rude or perhaps insulting. It isnt the same as using racist words in
derogatory ways (which even still are protected by the 1st amendment). The individuals right to
offend is under attack by this bill. When we protect the individual, we invariably protect the
collective without sacrificing a single individual. I would argue that the modern progressive
disavows these individualistic ideals of Western civilization itself, many being self-proclaimed
Marxists. The fundamental pathological battle at hand is individualism vs. collectivism, where
we find a modern exemplar of this battle in the Cold War. Not surprisingly, the collectivist
mindset leads to socialism and communism, which tend towards an abject infringement on
liberties such as freedom of speech and life itself. With a death toll of over 100 million lives, it is
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hard to understand why our college students in the West are so quick to subscribe to ideologies
that underpinned the rule of people like Stalin and Mao. It is exactly this group identity
politicking that those rulers thrived on accompanied by the utter destruction and
disenfranchisement of individualism. At the altar of group identity, it is inevitable that the
individual identity is sacrificed.
In many ways, the pronoun issue and Jordan Peterson encapsulate a much grander issue of
ideology, a Cold War of ideas. In the views of Petersons detractors, the oppressed (trans
community, non-straight and non-whites) must be especially protected from the oppressors
(generally straight white males). This strict dichotomy of either being oppressed or the oppressor
is a steadfast tenant of postmodernist philosophy, of which most of its mainstay authorities were
Marxists, such as Foucault and Derrida. These ideological frameworks are born from communist
pathology and play into group identity because they are the oppressed (those with different
gender identities or gender expressions) fighting the oppressors (those with binary self-evident
expressions of gender and identity) in a capitalist (bad) system. The power afforded to them by
our propensity as a Western people to be morally virtuous for the downtrodden allows for them
to be politically correct in fighting to limit and penalize speech. The idea of political
correctness is likened to a PC Game (Peterson) by Peterson and a fashion by Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn in a commencement speech given at Harvard University. Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel
laureate who survived the Soviet gulags to write about them in excruciating detail, went on to
say, selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent
independent-minded people giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous
tendency to flock together and shut off successful development. (Solzhenitsyn), continuing to
say This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our
dynamic era. The flocking together of those who wish to be politically correct are right now
proving Solzhenitsyn to be the augur of truth, as the proponents of bill c-16 parade their own
mass prejudices against perceived bigots and blindness to the fundamental issue of free
speech as politically correct compassion.
As Peterson poignantly and succinctly concludes, Freedom of speech protects our societies
from shipwreck on the Scylla of tyranny and the Charybdis of nihilism and despair. Freedom of
speech allows us to identify the problems that beset us. Freedom of speech allows us to
formulate solutions to those problems, and to reach consensus on the solutions. There is nothing
in the absence of freedom of speech but tyranny and slavery (Peterson). There is nothing for us
in a world where our freedom of speech is edited at whim, by herd opinion, by the group with the
most sway and the most political capital at any given time. We know tyranny to come from one
man in the form it has throughout history in places like Russia and China, but we absolutely must
remain vigilant in the framework the democratic West allows for tyranny to take place in the
form of protected groups with sensibilities not aligned with freedom they disagree with. What do
we do if what we can and cant say with freedom is up for grabs? What precedence is created by
quantifying free speech? What exactly is free speechBUT? Unless we want to fall into the
trappings of group identity politics where the most oppressed dictate the way the oppressors
(majority) act, behave, or speak, it is our individual duty to speak up for freedom of speech as a
fundamental and immutable human right. The right to speak freely in support of minorities, the
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right to criticize government and those who do wrong takes no precedence over the right to
offend, the right to be wrong, and, albeit superficial, the right to call a he a she and refuse to
call someone a zir.
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Works Cited

Lah, Madison Park and Kyung. CNN. 2 February 2017. Article. 11 February 2017.

<http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/>.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kauffman. Trans. Waulter Kaufmann and

H.J. Hollingdale. Vintage Books, 1968. Book.

Peterson, Jordan B. Canadian gender-neutral pronoun bill is a warning for Americans. 18 10

2016. Article. 11 02 2017. <http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/301661-this-

canadian-prof-defied-sjw-on-gender-pronouns-and-has-a>.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr. A World Split Apart. 8 June 1978. Transcript. 11 February 2017.

<http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenitsynharvard.htm>.