Listen now | In an episode months in the making, Krystal Kyle & Friends’s Kyle Kulinski is joined by psychologist and political commentator Dr. Jordan Peterson. For Kyle, it’s the “perfect situation” of getting to speak with someone whose work in psychology and philosophy has been particularly interesting to him — but who differs from him significantly on most political issues. They’re here for a back-and-forth on everything from Twitter controversies to Trump, economics, liberal versus conservative mindsets, and interpreting the results of Kyle’s personality quiz.
He’s not wrong about the trans issues with kids and the surgeries though, it’s a slippery slope and I don’t think a child feeling they are another gender is a valid enough reason to go into something as drastic as surgery for a child that’s brain hasn’t developed enough.
No surgery is being performed on children. All you can give to someone under 16 is puberty blockers which delay puberty and are given to children for other health reasons already.
And you can find many documented cases of minors getting double mastectomies online, whether as testimonies or on social media.
Hope you retire this talking point.
Puberty blockers for healthy puberty is not FDA approved and the UK's NHS says there is no data to justify the claim that they are reversible when used against healthy puberty. They are largely unmonitored experiments.
Almost all who take puberty blockers take cross sex hormones; when combined this results in infertility and loss of the ability to orgasm. More unmonitored experiments. I am sure 11 years olds know the implications of that /s.
It's absolutely catastrophic that children are being subjected to reading anal plastic surgery journals in school, and it's driving so many young men into the arms of the feminine dragon of chaos.
The study also showed that of the 200 adolescents who got the mastectomy, only 2 regretted it. I definitely hope that they find a way to bring that down further, but the 99% success rate very strongly contradicts what JP was saying about for every successful transition, there's 1000 catastrophic ones.
I'm very curious what he was looking at where he can comfortably say "I know the literature and the literature is clear on the topic".
They also give hormones,hormones can cause serious health problems, and the blocker lupron they use has caused serious health problems.you can google it.and they can also cause sterilization
You are correct on bottom surgery in the US specifically, for the most part. Although that is besides the point.
From the Boston Children's Hospital on who is eligible for phalloplasty (bottom surgery):
"People who choose to undergo phalloplasty usually do so after taking other steps in the gender affirmation process, such as taking supplemental hormones and undergoing chest surgery. "
As for top surgery, you only need parental consent to perform on a minor, along with meeting the other criteria. (hormone treatment for 12 months, referrals, etc.)
As it currently stands, the level of social pressure, forced affirmation, and incentive to coax children down the path of bottom surgery by the age of 18 is massive. The procedures that are allowed to children before the age of 18, including the ones considered "Fully Reversible Interventions," can very well sterilize them and deform their development forever. The further down that path they go, the more it sets like cement.
The slippery slope comes in as it does and as it always has, where bottom surgeries are not generally permitted for those under 18 in the US, until the day they are permitted with parental consent, just like top surgeries. After all, the financial incentive to expand the practice under the guise of "medical care" is ever present. The slope is slicked in the glitters of profit and an insidious ideology.
Irreversible genital mutilation is being carried out on babies within days of birth legally at the direction of their ideologically or religiously driven parents. Grotesque and horrible as it may be, it's performed daily in every hospital in America and the individuals affected have no opportunity to consent to this life altering surgery. Hard to make the case that adolescent minors wanting gender affirming surgery, with the consent of their parents, should be denied. Especially when we don't bat an eye cutting off foreskins, forcing boys into a lifetime of diminished sexual pleasure.
You see what’s happening and you’re turning mental gymnastics to try to avoid understanding it for what it is. This is one big medical experiment in let’s see what happens if we try to put a child through opposite sex puberty, with a side order of infertility and castration. It is not “affirming” anything except the medical community’s bottom line as it creates lifelong medical patients who will require expensive hormone treatments for the rest of their lives.
By all means try to conflate this with circumcision. You might be able to fool yourself for a little while longer, but it will get harder to justify. At some point society will acknowledge the parallels with that time when the medical community thought lobotomies were a fab way to treat mental illness.
Kids aside, Peterson admitted he's not even sure that consenting adults should be allowed to transition legally. He even inferred that broadly accepting gay people in society was a mistake. If that's not an authoritarian bigot I don't know what is.
What’s that got to do with anything? I don’t care what he thinks, I care what’s happening to our young people and the fact that the instant I ask a question about whether a 14 year old can give informed consent to the removal of healthy breasts, I get called a bigot. Shut up TERF, they tell me. Which means we never take an honest look at whether youth transition is necessary or even ethical. Is there a better way to help kids who feel like they’re the wrong sex? Should we start by going straight to the use of powerful hormones, followed by experimental surgeries? Or should we be damned careful because these are kids?! We never get to have this essential conversation. Ever. In any forum.
Sadly, the growing number of detransitioners will be forced to speak for themselves after the damage is done since those of us trying to raise concerns to prevent the damage have been silenced by activists, who are enabled by the “be kind” lot.
How do you know? Are there any longitudinal studies measuring satisfaction with transition over various periods, say 2 years to 5 years, to 10 years… spoiler alert - no, there aren’t any studies like this. Which is odd, as you’d think there’s quite a big population to sample at this point, with such a booming gender transition industry.
How do I know there are no studies? Wouldn’t the ACLU and the Trevor Project and HRC have all this proof posted front and center on their websites? It would surely shut every naysayer if they just pointed to the comprehensive peer reviewed studies that have actual control groups and account for participants who drop out. Like science and stuff. Go look. Seriously. I can’t find anything that covers a period of time with a reasonable sample size and a control group. If you find some let me know!
Kids want to do a lot of crazy reckless shit. It’s a parents job to keep them safe and make sound judgement on their child’s behalf until their brains are fully developed and they can make sound decisions for themselves. I agree at 18 your legally considered an adult (maybe not a mature one considering your brain is at the tail end of development) and that’s your decision to make. Doesn’t mean they won’t regret it.
They also give hormones,hormones can cause serious health problems, and the blocker lupron they use has caused serious health problems.you can google it.and they can also cause sterilization
Again, no. It's not happening legally because that would require a law to pass permitting it that would be on public record. If it has happened at all "that we don't know of" it would be illegal under current law. "Hormone therapy" is not "giving kids hormones", it's giving them a medication that blocks the release of puberty inducing hormones... when you stop taking that medication, you go through puberty.
AND
The Slippery Slope Argument is an argument that concludes that if an action is taken, other negative consequences will follow. For example, “If event X were to occur, then event Y would (eventually) follow; thus, we cannot allow event X to happen.”
Reactionary conservatives like Peterson love the slippery slope.
I know what hormone blocking therapy is, that’s a slippery slope for a child that “feels” they are another gender, they aren’t developed mentally that “feeling” something of that nature would immediately lead to hormone suppression therapy. What I meant bout surgeries is it could be happening, just not legally, we do t have the data if there is any. Nothing I’ve said is incorrect or a logical fallacy just because you misunderstood.
It’s you that has the bias, just by labeling Peterson as a reactionary conservative, I don’t agree with him on many issues, but he’s definitely not just reactionary, he thinks things through and he’s right with what he’s said here about the trans issue, specifically whtn it pertains to children.
Do you know what some of the research that goes back 300 years that he refered too as far as pyshcogenic epidemics is actually about? Him saying young girls are particularly suceptible to mass hysteria makes me think of boy bands or like Kpop. I just don't think thats what being trans and having surgery is going to turn into.
An interesting analogy is that tic attacks (involuntary movement or utterance of phrases) was almost exclusively recorded in prepubescent children, but due to social media such as TikTok most Tourette-like cases now are now first appearing in teenagers.
Gender dysphoria was mostly first appearing in very young adolescent males. Before 2012 there is no literature about it appearing in ages of 11-21.
Teenage admission overtook prepubescent admission in gender clinics, and in the mid 2010s the female adolescent admissions suddenly exploded so now they outnumber males by 2:1; this is consistent throughout multiple gender clinics in Europe and North America.
We have no long-term data on how this develops, yet we have double mastectomies as unmonitored experiments.
This has all the signs of social contagion, and the literature doesn't support that the older generations has a disproportionate number of females with gender dysphoria.
This is an extremely short leap. Teenage girls with body image issues can get into all sort of weird trends: cutting, claims of being demonically possessed, witchcraft, anorexia, bulimia, etc.
When we change the definition of gender so that if a girl doesn't have certain personality traits or doesn't adhere to stereotypes then she is not really girl, transition can likewise be a trend.
Reading through some of this and arriving at the conclusion "due to social media such as TikTok" is what caused the age shift is inaccurate. The triggers are actually attributed to an increase in stress and anxiety, ranging from a climate change crisis, the COVID19 pandemic and lockdowns in responce to that, and other more personal things like PTSD events. Its not monkey see monkey do, and thats not what any medical professional that gives a dam about the people affected by mass psychogenic illness wants spread as a message. A new method of transmission is not a cause of an illness.
You wouldn't ban tourette's-like behaviour from social media and say there we go problem fixed.
Making it seem like if we just see more transgender people as influencers there is going to be a mass hysteria event of copy cats seems more like a person fear being projected from some bias towards a minority group of people. Not something based from reading and understanding the objective research. "Moral panic" as Kyle put it.
I'm a trans man, and I've felt this way all my life, since I was 3 years old. I am 35 now, and so for most of my childhood I knew this about myself but because back then there was no information out there, I thought I was the only only in the whole world that felt this way and had this secret, which caused a lot of shame. I didn't learn of transgender people until much later, around 18 years old, and I transitioned in my 20s. Almost all trans people I have met over the years, have the same story. They felt this way all their lives. No one told them to feel this way. I didn't need to see other trans people to identity as male, because there are literal MALES everywhere, which I have seen all my life, and I identify with THEM. What can you do about that? Hide all females from all males all the time until they are 18, because if they are around males they might become influenced to want to BE male? Your logic makes no sense. It's the same as saying you can make someone gay by allowing gay people in society.
I thought about writing something similar to what you point out with, we are surrounded by masculine and feminine role models our whole lifes and will identify with one more than the other, neither, or both as we grow up. Heck it might even shift at different points in our lifes. Its just a hard position to defend when you have research put out by qualified doctors, that compare it to mental illness and think it might have specific triggers like the tic attacks stated above. I think even in the professional mental health fields theres a lot more to be worked out before gender will truly be recognized as a spectum and where someone is on the spectrum supercedes the biological binary when it comes to mental health.
There definitely seems to be a lot of confusion about gender in our society, I think on both the left and right to be honest. I actually think there needs to be MORE public discussion with trans folk who do NOT regret their transition (most don't), but who are honest about the risks and the experience. (For example, most trans men do not want and never get bottom surgery (genital surgery) for a variety of reasons like risk of complications, but people who are not trans assume most trans men do want that surgery which is not true. ) There are trans people who are successful productive people in society, like Ben Barres, a neurobiologist at Stanford who was a good friend of Andrew Huberman. Before his death he said that, "I have zero regrets and I’m ready to die. I’ve truly had a great life." We are not really hearing that perspective. To actually try and understand. They just want to label us crazy. Freaks.
All these NOT trans people guessing what our experience must be like, some even flat out say they don't get it. WELL ASK. LISTEN. lol. You'll watch popular podcasts that discuss trans issues like it's one of their favorite topics (Joe Rogan), and yet, they have not had any actual trans people on their show (Joe had 1 trans porn star on his show like 10 years ago), to actually learn from someone who have lived through the experience. Truth will set us all free. The ones confused about their gender, will see, "Oh actually now that I have heard what the trans experience is fully like from a trans person WHO IS TRANS, I realize now that has not been my life experience." Not a de-transitioner that everyone tries to find to interview who is NOT trans and so their understanding of the trans experience is different. A person who is confused about their gender and sees an interview with an actual trans person, might then think, "I'm glad I listened to an actual trans person who was happy with their transition, so see I do not relate to their life experience. Trans people exist but I don't relate to that. I am just a girl that likes hockey."
I notice that the right likes to contradict themselves when talking about gender constantly, and I think it is because deep down they really don't know what to do with trans people. They will say on one hand, just because you like sports and are a bit of a masculine female, it doesn't mean that you are a man (this is not what makes you trans anyway, btw). But then on the other hand if they see a super butch woman, they will make fun of her and say she is trying to be a man. They will act like sex and gender are the same thing when it is convenient for them, then later even acknowledge they are different and the relationship with gender and sex when it makes sense for them, like how it is natural for most men to like more masculine things, like masculine clothing, masculine jobs, hobbies. But when it comes to trans people, they will act all confused like, well if you say your gender is male even before you transition, why do you have to change your body? It's really not that different then a cis man who has a masculine identity, and wants to become a body builder or really fit. In his mind he sees himself a masculine strong man and has that goal and eventually he achieves it, even if at the start he weighed 115 pounds and had noodle arms. Doesn't make him crazy.
No one can make you identify with something or like something that you don't like. Everyone can tell you that you should like vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate ice cream. But if you really dislike vanilla and really like chocolate, no one can change that. They can bully you into pretending to like vanilla. They can even say liking chocolate is illegal you must like vanilla only. It will still not change it. That is how gender identity and sexually work. That is why trans and gay people still exist in countries where they are even killed for who they are.
I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Hearing other lefties is great but I love hearing the other perspective especially when it comes with rationale and data. Didn’t agree with everything but thought it was fair. Learned quite a bit.
It seems like jordan has some lefty tendencies but he’s so focused on hating the crazy lefties that he ends up saying some shit i dont think he even believes. Him and kyle probably agree on a lot. Jordan is like a smarter rave dubin. “The far left is so crazy, i guess I’ll just be a right winger even though i disagree on most of the issues”. I’d like to see jordan talk to more “anti-woke” lefties like big dick kyle
I don’t consider Jordan’s ideas right wing at all. They are quite liberal in my opinion. Just based in evidence and inquiry not blind affirmation. They used the be the left’s way. They lost it
Agreed. My point was that some of jordan’s views are left wing, but he seems to identify all economic leftists with woke leftists(jordan’s biggest detractors), so he sees people like kyle(and all lefties) as his enemy, and ben shapiro as his idealogical ally, when in reality that might not be true. For example, I feel like jordan was a little too defensive when trump came up, bc he just hates certain people on the left so much that he won’t give an inch, even in the face of facts, which makes him come off as a right winger.
JP is a scholar that has dedicated a lot of his studies on the atrocities of the 20th century, with a particular question burning in his mind: how the hell could people commit such atrocities upon one another? How could people become such monsters?
After years of studying the matter, he has learned to recognize the patterns of tyranny and authoritarianism that have lead to the deaths of millions of people. He sees those patterns in the crazy lefties and he sees them eroding the western values that fought so hard against the tyrants of the 20th century.
I'm sure many can make arguments of the authoritarian tyranny capable of the far right and I don't think JP would disagree. I'd imagine he would argue the far left is posing a more credible threat in the present day based on the lessons of recent history.
All-in-all, JP has made it clear that he stands for libertarian values far more than authoritarian values of both the left and right variety.
I don’t think Jordan has ever claimed to not be leftist, in fact I have heard him say that he has a leftist temperament. I think that he values leftist ideals so, that he is defending the virtue of the ideals.
It's more simple than that. He's petty, vindictive, and sociopathic, as with anyone who spends their lives in political or online discourse.
He knows that leftists have reasonable stances, but he wants to deny that because her PERSONALLY likes right wing *people* The problem here is everyone's insistence that ideology and policy dictate preference. The opposite is true here. This is the same issue with Elon Musk, and Tucker Carlson. He feels personally offended by the sentiments of left-wing people, and he is actively trying to ascribe a sense of evil authoritarian dictatorial power to the left, all of the left, and as such he uses scathing and contemptuous descriptors at any chance.
However, he likes the right, so he doesn't want to seem as though he is being unfair, so he also glosses over the right as "Also having a fringe" yet never being personally and emotionally invested in criticism of the right, because he ultimately wants the right to change for the better and the left to fail. He wants the right to be the people's party, the party that has the best stances. He has no intention on destroying the right over their authoritarian tendencies as he does the left.
The same exact things can be said for Tucker Carlson who has repeatedly called for left wing, even radical left wing policy, while simply forcing the narrative that it's always been the right who wanted it, and the left is the enemy. Politics isn't always about ideas, sometimes, many times, the human aspect is involved, and it is increasingly about sentiments - especially as debate happens more online and becomes more vitriolic and showy.
I think you hit it on the head. I just saw a video of tucker talking about john bolton and he goes, “John bolton is a progressive. Don’t let the mustache fool you. He wants big government to solve all the world’s problems.” He loves to jump when democrats or even progressives slip up on a left wing issue( snowden, ukraine, free speech), but you rarely hear tucker criticize republicans for fucking up on these issues. When he does, he just frames it how he likes; “Look at this republican holding a pro war, left-wing position.” He likes republicans so he just asserts they have the correct positions and hopes they adopt them. I remember kyle saying he hoped for a bernie vs trump race to see how tuck would dance around claiming trump is the real anti-war, anti-corporate candidate.
He's done so many episodes like that. Just like when he talks about amazon abusing its workers he describes them as "Progressive" lol
The level of petty personal vindictiveness in politics, especially on the right against "the woke radical left", has made a class of politics where you have people who are intelligent and can understand what's happening in reality, but whose primary concern is the political marketing around fixing it; Who gets the credit for being the good guys.
That becomes more important than allowing the people who want to fix the problem to fix it. but to truly help, it requires the problem to be more important than one's thin-skinned posturing.
Psychology is his wheelhouse, but philosophy no, plus he injects too much religion into his philosophical discussions, he’s also a gish galloper and uses circular reasoning to sound like he is making a point and a good majority of the time he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about outside of his wheelhouse, especially when he talks about Marx and uses the phrase “Cultural Marxism”, it’s cringeworthy, that doesn’t have anything to do with Marx, he keeps talking about free market capitalism, but a truly free market has never existed, that’s a myth.
*he injects too much religion into his philosophical discussions*
disagree. he talks about religion as a structure of values via timeless stories. he is actually not that religious, as he didn’t raise his kids religious.
That’s not true, he became more religious as he’s gotten older and many of the values from stories in the Bible predate the Bible like the golden rule which dates back to Confucius and most likely before.
He definitely promotes theocracy in what he believes is a crafty way and I’m saying there is nothing crafty about how he goes about it. He definitely leans towards theocracy in his diatribes.
Being a scholar is JPs wheelhouse. Ideas are his wheelhouse. The only useful way to approach the statement "he injects too much religion" is to take the use of religion and faith/belief interchangeably. Of that notion, I disagree completely. JP is a proper critic of religious faith, as a good philosopher would be. He also derives the value in the meaning of religious traditions and stories. He has spent a a great deal of focus in making meaningful and pragmatic connections with the stories that have been with humanity for hundreds of years and day-to-day life in modern times. He brings relevancy to lessons of old for those who don't want to fuss about the faith and belief part of religion.
You can paint his way of speaking as gish galloping, and I think that is a fair assessment because JP is just as fallible as any man. But the majority of the time he gets his points across in an impactful and thought provoking way. You cannot deny his skill of words and reasoning while pointing out his faults.
Criticizing the concept of cultural Marxism is ol' Slavoj Žižek's line and has been glommed onto by the far left as a far-right conspiracy theory pejorative to protect the instruments of its authoritarian movements. If you want to hear someone with more scholarly expertise on the matter, check our James Lindsay's work on Race Marxism and Identity Marxism, where he more succinctly and deeply explores the authoritarian ideologies that have evolved through a Marxist lens for over 100 years.
A truly free market is not a myth, it is an economic model used in market theory. Referencing a free market does not imply support for free market fundamentalism and JP affirms that when he mentions regulation is necessary to some degree. Generally, referring to a free market implies minimal regulation needed to address market failures. Whereas coordinated markets require regulations that go well beyond addressing market failures, to the point of requiring a centralized authoritarian state in the attempt of forcing a vast array of outcomes.
The argument is generally centralization vs decentralization while considering scalability. JP leans on the side of the latter as the scale increases.
Jordan stated that capitalism must be regulated. Are you stating that there should be no capitalism? If you are stating that an economy adhering to capitalist ideals as well as a socialist ideal and to be regulated, you are agreeing with Peterson.
We're not advancing much in this world with Jordan Peterson's views. He's old school to the point of being painful. He almost posits that capitalism is the ultimate way of being and nothing else matters. So all in all his take on 'free market' is the only way. It's more complicated than that. There are other ways between State and pure Free market. There is a possibility of coops and other ways of organizing a society.
Did you guys listen to the interview. Jordan’s main point was that capitalism must be regulated and that it was not a “fair” system, but demonizing it and manifesting it as a pejorative is not useful.
Of course I listened to the article, he also uses the word “free market” like libertarians use it which is in the pure sense, but there has never been a pure free market, it’s never existed, markets are all subject to regulation, tariffs, currency differences, customs laws etc...
When people like Peterson and libertarians talk about the free market they might as well be talking about unicorns, there has never been a pure free market, there have always been regulations, currency differences, customs regulations and tariffs of some degree, so when he goes on about free market capitalism he just regurgitates the same thing libertarians do and it’s a myth, what free market is there when everyone else doesn’t have access to quality healthcare and only the wealthy can go to another country to pay for that treatment? I also think he started using circular reasoning when he went on his diatribe about healthcare not being a right. I think if you are participating in a functioning society it should be a right for citizens of that society.
But it is a right for citizens in countries that have it, I live in one of those countries. Now, if he were to use entitlement then that would be more appropriate, but healthcare should be a right under a society that you participate, pay taxes in and benefit from and that’s the basis of the countries with universal healthcare, now if he said you are not entitled to healthcare then that would be a more logical discussion because having a right to it under a system you participate in is different than being entitled to it. What he did with the word “right” is what he always does, he tries to wrap some kind of discussion around the use of a word then tries to convolute the discussion with circular reasoning by defining it and making it far more complicated than it actually is and that’s how he fools people that he’s being philosophical when he’s actually just making a straw man argument.
But it’s always strawmans with advocates for both fully public and fully private healthcare systems. I’m from the U.K., we are one of the only countries in the world with a fully nationalised healthcare system and I assure you it’s not the land of milk & honey I often hear Americans claiming it to be. Is it preferable to what you guys have in America? I’d say absolutely but the great irony is that both the US and U.K. healthcare models are held back on the same grounds and that’s dogma. There are plenty of countries in Europe who put the U.K. to shame in this regard and they aren’t fully nationalised healthcare systems.
What countries should be aiming for is universality. That doesn’t necessarily mean the government has to own it from top to bottom.
Such a bad faith representation. He almost posits? How about we talk about what he actually posits, where he argues that capitalism is the best economic order that mankind has ever implemented on a massive scale when considering the overall level of upward growth and enrichment of millions of lives. Comparing to other economic orders paints a contrast so stark and severe when the result is the wretched death and despair of hundreds of millions.
He does not argue that it can't be improved. He does not argue for zero-regulation free market fundamentalism. He has always considered the scalability of economic systems. Coordinated and cooperative markets with positive liberal results are possible, but only on a limited scale.
I don't think we should care too much about someone's views as long as they meet the minimum quality of logic and reason. Let the best ideas win! Having tough opposition in this space is good for everyone.
Good lord this guy has no understand of Marx. Also "we hold these truths to be self-evident... all men are created equal" was in opposition to the concept of the divine right of kings. It was a rebellious, secular notion at the time.
He has zero appreciation for all the rights and freedoms he has because of Marx's ideas. From the west passing reforms to prevent revolution, to free speech precedents, to the existence of the weekend, accessible schooling, to racial equality. From the 1890s to the 1960s, a huge amount was accomplished by activists, movements, court cases, and strikes whose ideas were shaped by 19th century socialists, including Marx. In the 1930's there was a word in America for colorblind people who treated people of any race as adult individuals, as Peterson recommends - that word was communist. The most anti Jordan Peterson group of all time, the anti-capitalist anti hierarchy IWW, was conducting "free speech fights" over 100 years ago in the US.
Yea separation of church and state is a big give away. Still many founders were openly Secular Even if the opposite was the case. Is it self-evident if someone else makes the truth evident..I don't think thats how it wrks. Maybe i'm wrong, However is it funny how God is "Self-evident" In lack of any evidence for God. Also Thx Kyle! Great Ep!
the full quote is "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.", kinda hard to say religion doesnt take place at all in that
It is and isn’t, when you realize that many of the forefathers were Deists and held the belief that religious truth should be subject to the authority of human reason rather than divine revelation and that God doesn’t interfere with the day to day lives of humans and the world. I think that if the forefathers who were Deists were alive after Darwin’s studies and development of evolution they would either be agnostic or even atheists.
JBP thinks Marx was complaining about inequality (that's false), and that capitalism was criticized by the gospels- 1400 years before capitalism even existed. The man is so arrogant, he makes loud proclamations without basic information.
I haven't stopped laughing ever since he went on stage to debate marxism with Zizek and proclaimed that he only read The Communist Manifesto in preparation. A book that was written to deliberately dumb down the theory to the level of understanding of a 19th century factory worker. Man, did the bar for being recognized as an intellectual drop worse than the crypto market...
None of these two people ever read Marx and yet they proceed do evaluate his ideas as if they know what they're doing. That's American intellectual culture in a nutshell for you.
I never realized that bundling mortgages of different risk levels into one tradable security was a genuinely well-meaning – although not completely well-thought-out – attempt to provide more not that well-off people with access to quality housing that unexpectedly backfired. I was under the impression that it was all about leveraging financial speculations beyond any limits without raising any red flags from a risk management standpoint. And that was the case from Day 1. Would anyone with actual knowledge in the field and practical experience in financial and real estate markets – who additionally happens to be a person of integrity :) – be able to validate Jordan’s interpretation?
It’s also a little surprising that Kyle didn’t press his guest on the Assange case with regard to the freedom of speech topic. Jordan talks about this issue all the time but I don’t think he mentioned Assange even once. Moreover, he posted his another teary-eyed video where he praised the situation with freedom of speech in the UK right in the middle of the “legalized lynching” (as Chris Hedges put it) of someone who is probably the most relevant figure in modern history as far as the issue is concerned…
But Mr. Peterson is right about one thing – decentralization is key…
Krystal and Kyle did an episode where they interviewed the guys that produced the phenomenal documentary "The Con" on the 2008 crisis: Patrick Lovell and Eric Vaughan. After watching the documentary, listening to their interview (Episode 48), reading Matt Taibbi's books and articles on the subject, and listening to Paul Jay's interview of the forensic financial investigator, Bill Black, I have to say that this is a subject that Dr. Peterson should not be discussing. I can't help wondering if people like this, who are held up as intellectual giants by so many, feel that they have to pontificate about anything...even subjects upon which they are woefully ignorant.
I’m not sure if it’s ignorance, though. Jordan might be not as smart and knowledgeable about all sorts of things as he thinks he is, but he’s hardly an idiot. However, despite the fact that he likes to emphasize that he is not an ideologue and being totally genuine in his investigations of reality, he seems to have a pretty rigid outlook and can be quite defensive about his views – like he was during this conversation, for instance :). It surely takes a certain amount of special knowledge to figure out the truth with regard to some intricate financial affairs. But it doesn’t take an Einstein to understand what’s been happening in the case of Assange. However…crickets. Our champion of free speech opted for silence. So it looks more like a deliberate choice to me...
All good questions, I think you are on the right track on the mortgage bundling, I do believe it was more complex like Peterson said and people were taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford too, so there was a lot more to it and got out of control. Regarding Assange and free speech, Peterson has never discussed that issue and oddly, nobody has ever pressed him on it, he whines about being blocked from Twitter, but Assange has lost his health over utilizing free speech.
yes, the initial intention was to minimize risk. The problem was that financial institutions and hedgefund types wildly mispriced the risk premia of the securities, in order to sell more and therefore make more money in bonuses, and when they ran out of prime mortgages, they pushed sub-prime mortgages to keep their volume (and bonuses) high. Then they paid the rating agencies to look the other way and rate all their crappy securities as safe as a goverment bond.
This all was allowed to happen due to de-regulation from the goverment
Longtime follower and fan of both of you, Krystal and Kyle. New subscriber though. So excited to finally be here and support your phenomenal work! <3
I hope this long ass post doesn’t come across as a gotcha or anything of the sort. I’m just a leftie gay guy who attended the University of Toronto and always found Peterson to be a skilled orator who cloaks his reactionary politics in sophistry. As a behavioural neuroscientist who now teaches at the same university, I find his use of the DSM and clinical frameworks as a tool for gatekeeping people’s identities to be intellectually lazy and/or dishonest.
Some of my immediate thoughts regarding the interview:
1. Kyle, you had a very admirable degree of patience throughout the interview. Not surprised by this but still worthy of note. Mad respect to you, man.
2. At some point, Peterson said: "For every one person of that sort that we hypothetically save, we doom a thousand more as a consequence of confusion."
He also said: "It's absolutely and definitely the case that we've doomed thousands of kids to brutal and mutilating surgery and premature sterility."
Peterson speaks of a so-called social contagion/mass hysteria of gender confusion. You rightly called this a moral panic. Where is the evidence that anything resembling a catastrophe is occurring? That there's more people (openly/publicly) identifying as LGBTQ nowadays? That there's more people getting gender affirming surgeries than ever before? Those are the only pieces of 'evidence' Peterson cites to support his argument that gender affirming surgeries cause much more harm than good. He's basically saying that gender affirming interventions (and support for said interventions) is harmful because now there's more gender affirming surgeries. It's a circular argument: supporting and normalizing gender affirming surgery is bad because it leads to more gender affirming surgery which is totes catastrophic. In essence, it is a statement based entirely on a subjective revulsion to the notion of gender affirming surgery - or as he calls it, genital mutilation. Frankly, that choice of language/articulation is consistent with my characterization that his argument rests solely on a juvenile puritanical sense that there is an 'ick factor' to gender affirming surgery. Show me the data that warrant this high degree of alarmism...
3. "The clinical literature is clear: 80% of kids with gender dysphoria identify as homosexual when they mature. That means the vast majority of people who are being converted surgically are gay. How is that an advantage to the gay community?"
People can be trans and gay. They're not mutually exclusive. The fact that there is some overlap does not in any way mean that transness equates to confused gayness. Also, people's identities aren't static. Some people can and do question their sexuality and gender for years (e.g., coming out as a gay man and later coming out as a trans woman who is attracted to men). This shouldn't be shocking nor hard to wrap one’s head around: if you've always felt an incongruence between your assigned sex and gender identity in a society that is implicitly and explicitly telling you that you should feel no such thing, then figuring out whether or not to reconcile that incongruence is not going to be easy. In a similar vein, figuring out what conclusion to draw from that incongruence and what the next steps are for you to feel at peace with yourself is not going to be simple. In those circumstances, people's self-concept and self-identity can evolve. It's not always a linear process. To the untrained (read: cisgender) eye that may seem like reason to question the validity of people's identity (i.e., clearly you're confused and that confusion must mean that you're, in reality, a cis person in need of guidance. It is your confusion that needs addressing, rather than anything related to your gender or sex). But as you suggested, Kyle, anyone who values personal liberty and has a shred of humility would likely defer to the person since they're likely to be a better judge of who they are. Peterson made no compelling counter-argument here.
Another major assumption Peterson makes is that transness = gender dysphoria. But people can be trans and not have gender dysphoria. This is consistent with what the DSM-5 says, which one would think Peterson would take seriously given his dogmatic obsession with clinical guidelines and diagnostic criteria. Gender dysphoria is not a requisite feature of transness.
4. Peterson also says: "What used to be repressed? - first of all, they're not a community. No, neither I understand it nor you. First of all, they're not a community. That's just a catchphrase. It's a buzzword. "
The notion that there is no such thing as an LGBTQ community is laughable and honestly embarrassing. Was he making a semantic argument? I don't know but that is the most charitable interpretation I can come up with and I think that's a testament to the poor quality of his argumentation. I'd concede if his argument was that there is not ONE community but several (e.g. lesbians and gay men tend to socialize in separate circles, on average). But the notion that we have no community is so far removed from reality. Nevermind the countless subcultures, neighborhoods, establishments, art forms, vocabulary that can be directly traced to LGBTQ people. Yass hunty werq those backrolls the house down boots mawma, okurr. Unless you are part of the community or consume queer media, you will likely find the above lingo a tad foreign/novel. Twink. Bear. Chaser. Reading. Shade. Ballroom culture. Bathhouse culture and etiquette. These are all things that stem from various LGBTQ subcultures and continue to be relevant primarily to those who are LGBTQ. When people experience years of structural discrimination, they bandy together and form community. We queers may not be a monolith but our marginalization is rooted in rigid conceptions of gender and sexuality. We have a common enemy: cis-heteronormativity.
Also, I love that he started out challenging the idea that we've experienced repression and then proceeds to argue that there is no LGBTQ community. Perhaps he realized that arguing that we haven’t experienced repression was a losing battle. Not sure where he was going with that one.
5. Peterson also argues that the banning of conversion therapy is catastrophic because it has made it illegal/impossible for therapists to have an honest discussion about identity with their clients. Again, this is bullshit. People can still talk about their identities. Conversion therapy is a very specific thing and it is wholly separate from discussions with a therapist about things like gender dysphoria or questioning one's sexuality. This is another instance where Peterson promotes baseless alarmism. People defer to him because he's a clinical psychologist. It is an unfortunate case of the appeal to authority fallacy.
6. Peterson argues that the Abraham Accords warrant a Nobel Peace Prize. The same Accords that emboldened Israel to further oppress Palestinians. Who are the accords really good for? This, to me, is one of several instances where Peterson demonstrates that he isn't the heterodox thinker that he is often painted as. His positions on most issues are quite predictable. He just delivers his arguments in a manner that seems more evidence-based. But more often than not, the substance of what he's saying is textbook right winger shit.
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the episode!!! Just wanted to share my two cents. Thanks again for the great content <3
2. He may have not supported his argument well here, but he sure does elsewhere. Read Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier for the data justifying the alarmism.
3. His point is that the inclusion of the T+ into the LGBT+ ideology is simply a product for intersectional critical theory for the sake of entrenching a victimhood ideology into western culture. It does no service to the feminist movement where a man can just become a woman or the LGB movement where we the trans movement is a gem to the fundamentalists that would find this as the ultimate form of conversion therapy.
JP has on several occasions shared his opinion on the latest renditions of the APA DSM.
4. Its not a community because the intersectional ideology that defines it and continuously grows it through the "+" will forever intersect and intersect and cut and divide until you can't determine a real connection between the people within the category and from within the category to include the marginalized you will inevitably marginalize more people. The ideology has spurned an industry in support of an endless civil rights movement in search for the next most marginalized to make money off of and add to the list. The LGB at the root of it will continue to be overshadowed by the most marginalized lesbian trans queer quadriplegic person of color.
Even the left acknowledges that it is not a community. It is an amorphous blob that serves to promote an ideology.
5. Bill C-4 is an absolute catastrophe worthy of alarm. Your claim of BS is false. A therapist can go to jail for not affirming a persons gender. That is the bottom line in the way the bill was written.
Check out the opinion of a lefty feminist for more info:
6. The same accords that normalized relations between an Arab nation the UAE and Israel. That is a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Although a 100+ year conflict wont be remedied so easy. It is a timeless shit show. And the Nobel Peace prize has been awarded for equally, if not more, controversial causes like Barak Obama or Yasser Arafat.
2. I am familiar with Abigail Shrier's book. It has zero evidence of anything resembling a catastrophe. It is alarmist TERF propaganda in dire need of citations. The 'studies' she relies on most heavily (and does cite) are so poorly conducted that one would honestly be generous to even call them pseudoscience. Happy to break down the specifics if you'd like but I'll keep it short for now as others have done this work already (e.g., Science-based Medicine .org). All I'll say is that the book peddles an unsubstantiated phenomenon, so-called "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" (ROGD). This is an unrecognized condition that no serious psychological or psychiatric association takes seriously. The basis for ROGD is a study that conducted interviews with unhappy/confused parents of trans kids who frequented very specific websites and blogs. Not exactly an elegant experimental design. It is not at all rigorous. In other words, the entire book rests on a false premise. So in terms of the book providing evidence of a catastrophe, I remain completely unconvinced.
Another point regarding the book: the first chapter is titled "Introduction: The Contagion". Contagion. That is a word that people associate with pandemics. If that's not alarmist, I don't know what is. The fact that most of Peterson's fans were completely unaware of there being a problem until he and other conservatives realized they could profit from their transphobic BS supports my argument: that there's no catastrophe and the vast majority of those who think otherwise do so BECAUSE of alarmist drivel from Peterson and other whiney transphobes.
Regarding your reference to Peterson's position on the DSM: I'm well aware of his diatribes about the DSM-5 and how it has become yet another horrific manifestation of cultural marxism that has produced Third Reich-like atrocities. I say this with the utmost sincerity and goodwill: ask yourself why you defer to Peterson over the scientific consensus on this matter. Science is about consensus based on a synthesis of the available evidence. Sometimes the evidence is pretty even so ideas get hashed out at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals as more evidence accumulates. It is by no means a perfect system but it yields better results than merely deferring to the positions of one individual with the right-sounding accreditations. If you find yourself agreeing with someone who you KNOW holds a widely rejected position in their respective scientific field, ask yourself (sincerely) how well you'd perform in a debate if you had to take the position of the consensus rather than Peterson's. Guesstimate how many hours you've spent watching and reading his work vs. the mainstream position that has scientific consensus. When someone tells you that they are a proponent of a widely rejected view, the burden of proof lies on them. Unfortunately, Peterson and co have yet to offer any compelling evidence to shift consensus. It is intellectually lazy to blame wokeness.
Another point regarding Shrier's book: she shows her egregious bias from the very beginning of the book where she tells you straight up that she is choosing to deadname and misgender a good chunk of the trans people she talks about ("For the sake of clarity and honesty, I refer to biologically female teens caught up in this transgender craze as 'she' and 'her'"). She repeatedly reduces people's transness to something borne out of "angst" and a drive to pursue a "fashionable cause". Please ask yourself why one should be so quick to accept Shrier or Peterson as arbiters for who is and isn't "caught up in the craze" or who is and isn't following a trend. Peterson and Shrier have peddled verifiably false information about our communities and histories time and time again. Peterson has demonstrated that he's unwilling or incapable of doing his due diligence with respect to learning about us and citing reputable sources (whether in terms of empirical research or even mere case studies). So his accreditations are immaterial at this point. I too have a PhD but if I repeatedly went on public forums, peddled harmful misinformation, cited pseudoscience, and made unwarranted conclusions, I should most definitely lose some standing in the field.
By the way, Shrier's book was published by Regnery Publishing, a self-described "politically conservative publisher" in the US that is behind other works like "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left" and "The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind". So even if Shrier's intent was not to write a book of TERF propaganda, the book is nevertheless operating as TERF propaganda.
3. Sorry, but this is ahistorical. Including the T into the LGB was not at all driven by "intersectional ideology". The T began being incorporated into the acronym before Kimberle Crenshaw even coined the term "intersectionality". As for your spiel about victimhood ideology, the reason the acronym includes the T is because, as I said in my original post, the barriers experienced by queer people are the consequence of the same societal factors: rigid beliefs on how gender and sexuality ought to be (AKA cisheteronormativity). Think of it this way: people very often conflate our identities. My trans friends are confronted with gay slurs quite often. As a gay man, I have been on the receiving end of transphobic slurs. When someone comes out as trans, they're often told they're probably just gay (e.g., case in point, Peterson in the video). In fact, in many languages and dialects, the words for gay and trans are the same. For example, in most Arabic dialects, transphobic and homophobic slurs are one in the same. There is no distinction made because they are seen as the same sin/personality flaw (e.g., weak masculinity/excessive femininity if you're a queer person who was assigned male at birth). I use this as an example to convey a simple idea: LGBTQ people have a shared struggle and a common enemy and have, thus, formed community and fought a lot of the same battles for decades. This is common knowledge and I'd be shocked if this was news to you or anyone reading this. So I wouldn't say that the lumping of our identities into one label (LGBTQ) is due to a "victim ideology" any more than the lumping of brown and Black people is. Brown and Black are broad categories of identity composed of ethnically diverse peoples that face non-identical challenges. Nonetheless, they have a shared struggle so it makes sense that categorizations that lump these diverse groups would arise over time as that can help those groups form coalitions to challenge the existing structures that marginalize them.
Regarding your point that "it does no service to the feminist movement where a man can just become a woman [sic]" - Please explain why feminism and gender affirmation are incompatible rather than just saying it like it's a foregone conclusion a la Jordan Peterson. Make your arguments and own them. What's your argument? That we should restrict trans people's freedoms due to a baseless inkling that doing so will help the feminist movement? I assume you're re-articulating the idea that doing so would be safer for cisgender women - another idea that has been peddled by alarmists. The statistics run counter to such a notion. Trans people are the disproportionate targets of gender-based violence. And there is no evidence that having, say, inclusive washroom policies, increases the risk of gender-based violence to cisgender women in those spaces. So again, not sure what that's about.
4. I'm curious, are you queer yourself? Obvi feel free to not share. I am. I have also worked in LGBTQ non-profits/charities and have dabbled in research in this area. The vast majority of us queer people don't give a rat's ass about the supposed dangers of including more people in our community. Every letter in the acronym refers to a group that is marginalized by cisheteronormative puritanism in some way, shape, or form. For the longest time, we were all so marginalized that we could only comfortably form safe community amongst ourselves. So over time, we developed art forms, instituted organizations and advocacy groups, opened up businesses, developed lexicons etc. that are unique to LGBTQ people. Communities are not monolithic. They have commonalities on one or more dimensions but nothing about the concept of community precludes it from being diverse on other dimensions.
Why does the + irk you (and many others who are predominantly not LGBTQ) so much? I'm a cis gay guy and most reasonable people will acknowledge that in this day and age, I have it easier than the average trans person. Why is it so bad for me to place more emphasis on their needs than mine? What frustrates me about this is that the loudest whiners when it comes to this topic are not even queer. To what extent does it truly impact straight and cisgender people's day-to-day to let us pivot our attention toward extending rights to our trans friends? Or for the community to recognize that it needs to be more inclusive of a subset of people who have been marginalized from within? Why are we pretending like the cost this imposes on society is so dire? Most people who are against gender affirming care have never met a trans person, have learned nearly everything they know from cishet fearmongerers like Peterson, and are actually completely unaffected by the matter.
5. You cite an op-ed and an NYpost article to argue that C-4 is an absolute catastrophe. Need I say more? I'd appreciate it if you could share a specific instance wherein a therapist of some sort got in trouble for discussing gender, gender dysphoria, sexuality etc. I am a gay guy in Canada and I have had more than one therapist for over 7 years. Never had a therapist who felt the need to tread lightly on these topics. I have a sibling and 3 close friends who are either psychiatrists, clinical psychologists or social workers. So far, 2/4 have balked at the notion that this is an issue for them. Again, I'm sorry but this is textbook fearmongering.
Go and read your post. You never point the reader to an actual harm warranting the alarmism. Instead, you make the slippery slope argument, point to potential harms etc. Let's look at some quotes:
No actual evidence articulated:
"He may have not supported his argument well here, but he sure does elsewhere. READ IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE BY ABIGAIL SHRIER FOR THE DATA JUSTIFYING THE ALARMISM."
Theoretical harms of "entrenching" trans inclusion on "western culture":
"His point is that the inclusion of the T+ into the LGBT+ ideology is simply a product for intersectional critical theory FOR THE SAKE OF ENTRENCHING A VICTIMHOOD IDEOLOGY INTO WESTERN CULTURE."
Trans inclusion as something that's bound to worsen fundamentalist queerphobia (e.g., conversion therapy):
IT DOES NO SERVICE to the feminist movement where a man can just become a woman or the LGB movement where we the trans movement that is A GEM TO THE FUNDAMENTALISTS that WOULD FIND THIS AS THE ULTIMATE FORM OF CONVERSION THERAPY."
Hypothetical harms of including trans people and others:
"the "+" will forever intersect and intersect and cut and divide UNTIL you can't determine a real connection between the people within the category and from within the category to include the marginalized you WILL INEVITABLY MARGINALIZE MORE PEOPLE."
6. Agreed that the Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless. I was merely saying that Peterson is not a heterodox thinker because he's heralding the Accords as a win that will spur more peace when in reality it has helped ease the displacement and violence of Palestinians by the settler-colonial state of Israel. As a Syrian person, I find it abhorrent when people who know next to nothing about the Middle East view the accelerated dispossession of Indigenous peoples as the path to peace. But I digress.
Anyway, I know I typed a lot. I wish Substack could do audio and video posts as that would be a much more efficient way of communication. Hope my vehement disagreement is well taken - I am expressive but I appreciate a discussion as long as it happens in good faith.
Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage is garbage pseudoscience. I'm a trans man myself who has been on testosterone for over 8 years, so I know how this hormone works, and I know a lot about the surgeries. Most of the information she provides in her book is flat out wrong and not true at all. I also know some of the people she manipulated into a interview for her book.
I appreciate all of the info here; thanks for sharing. The only thing I found unsettling is the statement" we have a common enemy: cis-heteronormativity".
Being cis and hetero are both the statistical norm. Being L,G, or T is the statistical outlier. B is a bit vague, because as JP stated himself, there's varying levels of same-sex attraction across the board so I'm a bit fuzzy to when it would cross the threshold into bisexual territorial.
I'm from a refugee family in an ethnicity that takes up a whopping .3% of the US population, so I grew up in a very different culture from the people around me, "the norm". And in a stereotypical refugee way, I grew up really poor (another box ticked for marginalization for me I guess). There was certainly tension to harmonize the two throughout my life; to fit into either culture while having distinct parts of me being the "other" in each community.
But to make an enemy of the normativity of the 99.7% of Americans would be asinine. To expect them to take a backseat in their own lives to accommodate me because I was different is also asinine. If I'm being persecuted or oppressed, that's a problem. If others groups are, that's a problem as well. But if that's not enough, and your goal is a universal assimilation into a new manufactured culture where everyone feels "not normal", or perhaps the norm should feel not normal so you can, that's just as problematic to me.
First of all, you seem to take issue with the word "enemy". I used the term to convey that LGBTQ2+ people have a shared struggle against cisheteronormativity. I don't see why you're latching onto it and calling it "unsettling" as if I'm saying something controversial or provocative. My point was a retort to those who were arguing (like JP) that LGBTQ2+ people don't constitute a community. I'm saying that we have our own shared culture by virtue of the fact that we face the same exclusionary forces in society. Those forces can be categorized under the banner of cisheteronormativity.
Second, you misunderstand what cisheteronormativity is. The keyword is normative (rather than normal). If your existence is not factored into society, then your experience will necessarily be worse. If you cannot express your identity like others can (e.g., your gender having to fall into a binary within legal documents and in your social life, your long-term romantic relationship not being afforded the same rights as others' etc.) then you will by definition be excluded. Rejecting cisheteronormativity does NOT entail rejecting the statistical fact that I - as a gay man - am a statistical minority. That is a straw man argument. It DOES entail revisiting a lot of the structures of society that have long implemented a normative framework with respect to sex, sexuality and gender. Basically places in society where there is an assumption that everyone falls into the dominant groups. And yes, statistical minorities get to say "ummm, your client intake form doesn't have a box for me so if you don't want me to give you false info, perhaps it'd be wise to add a box for people like me."
We may be a statistical minority but we still exist in very large numbers.
Now you may say "Well, it's not nefarious. It's not like anyone's out to get you. These are just the byproducts of a society in which you are a statistical minority." And to that I say: things don't have to be nefarious to have a substantial negative impact on one's life. Cisheternormativity means that society becomes exclusionary even on auto-pilot. You don't need to ACTIVELY exclude when everything is built/designed with the assumption that you don't exist, thereby PASSIVELY excluding.
You make another straw man argument when you say "To expect them to take a backseat in their own lives to accommodate me because I was different is also asinine" - what backseat are you talking about here? Be specific. I'm over these rudimentary, grade school-level arguments. Try harder. Honestly. What are you saying? What do the things I'm advocating for take away from cisgender and heterosexual people?
You make YET ANOTHER straw man argument when you say "But if that's not enough and your goal is a universal assimilation into a manufactured culture where everyone feels 'not normal', or perhaps the norm should feel not normal so you can, that's just as problematic to me". Sorry but this is abysmal argumentation. Please try harder. At no point did I call for anything assimilationist. To call people by their correct names is not assimilationist. To recognize that gender is not binary is not assimilationist. You know what IS assimilationist? Forcing people into a binary and viewing any efforts to pushback as "unsettling" and "problematic". It is objective that people do not fall neatly into two buckets gender-wise. That is a fact. It has been a fact for eons. There is nothing assimilationist about saying "these people exist and we should probably make sure we account for that in x, y and z departments."
Affording queer people basic rights is not going to impact the vast majority of cishet people. But maintaining the status quo DOES impact queer people. So your characterization of what constitutes "problematic" and "unsettling" applies to things that would have no measurable negative impact on you or anyone. My characterization of YOUR stance as being the actual problematic and unsettling stance is rooted in the basic fact that LGBTQ2+ people face more hate crimes, violence and systemic exclusion than the cishet majority that you're so darn worried about. Your and JP's arguments maintain a status quo that objectively harms us.
As an aside, I'd ask you don't assume my intent. I'm not debating, I'm sharing a genuine thought and hoping to get a genuine response that could be enlightening. I am now doubting the value of doing so, considering how much correction I have to do with all of the "you misunderstand..." (Nothing you said there was news to me), "you make a straw man argument" (again, it's not a fuckin debate), "I'm over rudimentary grade-school arguments, try harder" (the arrogance around that statement alone is usually enough to convince me not to bother). And caps-locking definitely doesn't help. I guess we'll see how it goes.
You're correct; I take issue with the word "enemy". It's not an opponent (for which you can still have respect, empathy, and civility regarding the people on the opposing side), it's not an obstacle or impediment, for which you can. Enemy is far more incendiary, it's something you fight to conquer or slay.
That's why its more unsettling and quite valid for me to latch on to. I agreed and disagreed with a whole lot of what JP was saying. For that which I disagree, I'll oppose it in civil conversation with others and in the ballot box, but I can still feel there can be civility between the two parties. But when he went on the trans diatribe, his speech went more into a heated "I'm the hero battling the enemy" direction, which some people were obviously good with. I also found pretty damn unsettling.
The assumption that cis-hetero-normativity being the enemy is not controversial or provocative, I don't agree with at all. It's the enemy because of exclusionary forces both passive and active? Which societal or cultural or philosophical framework doesn't have that? Who successfully thought up anything practical and fully inclusive where everyone is everything all of the time? I'm straight, I'm cis, am I a part of the LGBTQA+ group too? If not, does excluding me and other straight cis dudes make the LGBTQA+ community the enemy? Should we band together and dismantle this exclusionary force?
I obviously don't think so. Which is why I was intentional in saying that I oppose oppression, not exclusion. No functional society that I've ever seen can cater to everyone, so it's a matter of who does the society serve best, and who, on balance, makes the most sense to serve better than others, and which society can best serve the people on the margins while still being functional.
Who's the "you" that isn't factored into society? LGBTQA+ is literally one of the hottest topics in the Western world right now. Do you mean LGBTQA+ affirming? In the market, there's way more elite corporations taking pro-LGBT than anti. On the private citizen level, self-identification as LGBT has, on average, doubled with every subsequent generation in the US. On the cultural level, there are leading protagonists on popular shows or movies that are in the LGBT category. The political level, I can't think of one right currently, that is afforded to straight cis folk that isn't to anyone in LGBT. Would you say the West is cis-hetero-normative? Then the "your existence is not factored into society" concept doesn't really work. Was it cis-heteronormative before, but now we moved the needle to "kinda cis-heteronormative"? Then at what point (specifically) is has the job been finished?
"Rejecting cisheteronormativity does NOT entail rejecting the statistical fact that I - as a gay man - am a statistical minority. That is a straw man argument."
Once again, not an argument, and not my position. You literally just straw-manned your own strawman here.
"It DOES entail revisiting a lot of the structures of society that have long implemented a normative framework with respect to sex, sexuality and gender. Basically places in society where there is an assumption that everyone falls into the dominant groups. And yes, statistical minorities get to say "ummm, your client intake form doesn't have a box for me so if you don't want me to give you false info, perhaps it'd be wise to add a box for people like me."
Yep, I'm aware. Which is again why my stance was, "Are they oppressive? That's a problem". Would you consider having a conversation so that a company updates a form oppressive? That's a genuine question.
"We may be a statistical minority but we still exist in very large numbers."
That's true. As a result, the statistical norm exists in even larger numbers.
"Now you may say "Well, it's not nefarious. It's not like anyone's out to get you. These are just the byproducts of a society in which you are a statistical minority."
I would not. My question is if it is actual oppression? Are you enduring "prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control"? Personally, I'd venture to say "absolutely" in some cases, in which I provide my support. The fact that cis-hetero-normativity hasn't been eradicated isn't that, as far as I've read.
"And to that I say: things don't have to be nefarious to have a substantial negative impact on one's life. Cisheternormativity means that society becomes exclusionary even on auto-pilot. You don't need to ACTIVELY exclude when everything is built/designed with the assumption that you don't exist, thereby PASSIVELY excluding."
Again, exclusions are an inevitability. Everyone experiences them in one form or another. If that's where the bar is for "we need change", that a bridge too far for me. I agree that there are exclusions that are oppressive and do have the substantial negative impact on one's life. Again, I've categorized those as "oppression".
"You make another straw man argument when you say "To expect them to take a backseat in their own lives to accommodate me because I was different is also asinine" - what backseat are you talking about here? Be specific. I'm over these rudimentary, grade school-level arguments. Try harder. Honestly. What are you saying? What do the things I'm advocating for take away from cisgender and heterosexual people?"
Barring the arrogance here, and the persistent call outs of all of my straw-manning, I'll answer. People have to categorize and use heuristics as a means of simplifying and short-handing their communication and expectations. It happens organically in any group of people that are working or living together. People don't have the mental bandwidth to consider every outlier in their day-to-day. Thus in my case, people assumed I was fully American, other people didn't know how to pronounce my full name, other people couldn't communicate with my parents due to a language barrier. I had to take time out to translate. How much of that onus was on them? Did they fail, due to their cultural normativity? I'd say not. It's not a reasonable expectation.
Some government forms didn't have enough blocks in the "Last Name" section to fit my last name. Did they fail me? Depends on what the consequence would be if I wrote past them into the margins of the paper. Was it a crisis that there wasn't a de facto affirmation of my ethnic identity? No, I survived quite unscathed. Because I didn't base my identity on whether a boilerplate form would affirm it. Again, it wasn't oppression.
For the people who subscribe to cis-hetero-normative view, encouraging them to consider the people on the margins is very much a positive thing. Demanding that they go through the difficulties of changing themselves and societal forces is a positive thing, when there are (again) oppressive consequences. Putting the onus on them to factor in all of the complexities of every kind of person in the margins, because you don't want to ever feel excluded in any situation, is narcissistic. Expecting them to only fix their cis-hetero-normative world view so you don't feel excluded in any situation because sex, sexuality, and gender marginalization is the only kind that matters, that would again, be pretty narcissistic. To be clear, I'm not assuming your position. I'm just stating my beliefs.
"You make YET ANOTHER straw man argument when you say "But if that's not enough and your goal is a universal assimilation into a manufactured culture where everyone feels 'not normal', or perhaps the norm should feel not normal so you can, that's just as problematic to me". Sorry but this is abysmal argumentation. Please try harder. At no point did I call for anything assimilationist. To call people by their correct names is not assimilationist. To recognize that gender is not binary is not assimilationist. You know what IS assimilationist? Forcing people into a binary and viewing any efforts to pushback as "unsettling" and "problematic". It is objective that people do not fall neatly into two buckets gender-wise. That is a fact. It has been a fact for eons.
How does this homogenization happen? For the person who genuinely doesn't believe that gender is not binary, how do they just organically get absorbed into the population that believes the opposite?
"There is nothing assimilationist about saying "these people exist and we should probably make sure we account for that in x, y and z departments.""
Let's check the definitions:
Assimilationism:
"the practice or policy of assimilating or encouraging the assimilation of people from all ethnic groups and cultures of origin"
Assimilate:
Sociology. the merging of cultural traits from previously distinct cultural groups, not involving biological amalgamation.
You just gave a perfect example of assimilation.
"You know what IS assimilationist? Forcing people into a binary and viewing any efforts to pushback as "unsettling" and "problematic". "
That would also be assimilation. Well done. If that's ascribed to me thinking that's a great idea, then you, again, assumed a position I don't hold.
The last paragraph would be redundant to respond to.
When I say "Is this what you meant? If so, then blah blah", I am openly acknowledging that there are blanks to be filled and that, consequently, an assumption is being made. I think that's super reasonable given the lack of detail in your post. I'm going above and beyond to engage with you. No one is assuming your intent. If you don't want people to misunderstand you or feel the need to fill in the blanks, don't respond with ambiguous takes. Be specific. I invite you or anyone reading this to ask the same of me if I'm vague at any point. Honestly.
You said: "I'm straight, I'm cis, am I a part of the LGBTQA+ group too? If not, does excluding me and other straight cis dudes make the LGBTQA+ community the enemy? Should we band together and dismantle this exclusionary force?"
You not being included in the LGBTQ2+ umbrella as a cishet person does not have the same impact on you as trans people not being able to seek gender affirming care or not being able to safely access bathrooms. In other words, you've set up a false equivalency. Trans people experience disproportionate amounts of violence and obscenely high homicide rates. That is an objective statement. The theoretical harms of cishet exclusion that you raise in your post are nothing but a thought experiment. There is zero evidence for cishet people being harmed via a system of exclusion-by-default and autopilot marginalization. Yes, there is no "cisgender" or "heterosexual" in the LGBTQ2+ acronym. But that is not the same as being excluded at a fundamental, structural level from society. Where you have to advocate for decades to get your relationships recognized by the legal system. Where you have to spend years and years advocating for your state to issue IDs that represent your true identity. Where you have to worry every time you walk down the street because you face disproportionate rates of violence and homicide. So yeah, there's no real exclusion of cishets and the fact that you're not actively celebrated within a community that faces harms precisely because they are NOT cishet is not a compelling way to make your case. I'm talking about real harms. You're talking about theoretical exclusion.
You said: "Again, exclusions are an inevitability. Everyone experiences them in one form or another. If that's where the bar is for "we need change", that a bridge too far for me."
So what are you saying? This is another instance where I genuinely feel I am left with no choice but to fill in blanks. What exactly is "a bridge too far" for you? The mere idea that some instances of societal exclusion ought to be addressed? Because that's what I'm saying. No one is saying that the world will ever be perfectly egalitarian. No one is saying that we need to rid the world of individual differences (or advocate for "homogenization", as you call it). What I AM saying is that addressing discriminatory policies is a good thing and that I have yet to see a single compelling argument for how the costs outweigh the benefits. All you've done is opine about the theoretical harms of cishet "exclusion" from LGBTQ2+ communities and draw a false equivalency between the objective harms endured by queer people with the ideological isolation a transphobe would feel as a consequence of queer-inclusive policies.
You said: "How does this homogenization happen? For the person who genuinely doesn't believe that gender is not binary, how do they just organically get absorbed into the population that believes the opposite?"
Once again, you've set up a false equivalency. The harms endured by queer people as a result of cisheternormative policies are not theoretical. You use words like absorption and assimilationist to describe something extremely innocuous: the mainstreaming of evidence-based ideas and demographic realities such as gender not being binary/trans people existing. The impact this has on people who subscribe to a binary framework is not at all comparable to the impact cisheternormativity has on queer people. There are people who did not believe in interracial marriages and still don't. Do we shed tears for them when society enacts policies that leave them/their views behind? Sorry, but unless I'm missing something, this strikes me as a shockingly weak argument.
You pose the example of having a long name as an instance of exclusion I too have a super long, hyphenated last name. One that the vast majority of anglophones can't pronounce. I don't expect people to pronounce my Arabic first name correctly either. So I go by an anglicized name. I can't fill in most forms without writing in the margins. I do not see those things the same way because there is no systemic exclusion of my identity as a long-name-holder. There is no community of us long-name-holders that is advocating for more rights. We don't have the same statistics saying that we encounter more rape and homicide because we have long names. Or that we have a shorter life expectancy. Or that we experience medical discrimination. By contrast, queer people ARE asking for more rights because the numbers are clear. Again, I'm not in theoretical la la land. I'm talking about objective realities. So yeah, no one is expecting the world to address every gripe they have. That is a BS non-argument that the JP's of the world spout to ascribe to their opponents the least charitable position. I do not expect intake forms to have longer brackets for last names just for me. It's not an undertaking that I see as particularly important or worthwhile. I do think it's worthwhile to listen to queer people when they remind the world of the indisputable fact that they are on the receiving end of disproportionate rates of violence, workplace discrimination etc. leading to significantly lower life expectancy. That our society is set up with a presumptuous, cisheternormative framework that leads to our marginalization is not a theoretical idea. Anyone having a good faith discussion would have no problem acknowledging this.
You repeatedly make the argument that exclusion is inevitable. Again, no one is arguing that a perfectly egalitarian world is possible. Yes, we cannot guarantee that no one will ever feel excluded. Duh. How is that in any way a counterargument against anything I'm saying? How is that an argument against gender-inclusive policies? It's as if you're saying: "You can't make everyone feel included! Plus, you're gonna upset the transphobes who are gonna feel ideologically isolated. So why bother?"
If I misunderstood some integral argument that you're attempting to make, don't hesitate to clarify. But that is honestly what I'm gleaning from your post. It's not compelling. No shade.
Based on the responses, I was very skeptical that you're coming at this with no shade and all in good faith, and even more so now. The unsettling feeling was actually full-on affirmed by that last response, as well as what you think is an approach that's "going above and beyond". Over the years, I've learned to identify the markers when a conversation has the potential to be worthwhile and illuminating, and when it's going to be fruitless. So I'm really not interested in your take on all of this or how you think I should behave in a conversation, and I'm opting out. Respond however you want, I won't read it.
Unfortunate. Can't say I didn't try. I'm always happy to have an open discussion about things. Even if it gets heated. Even if there's vehement disagreement on some aspects. How firmly one articulates their arguments is not an indication of bad faith. To call an argument weak or poorly thought out is also not a indication of bad faith. If you have a change of heart, try me. Otherwise, I hope you engage with the counterarguments to your position in good faith somewhere... If not with me, with someone else. Have a good day!
Thank you for taking the time to write this. You clarified some things for me related to his comments about therapists being hogtied because of conversion therapy laws. I plan to quote you on this. And, you're right. I was giving him more credit than he deserves because of his credentials. Sadly, a lot of people are doing that. With regard to his denial of a gay community, frankly, I wonder if envy entered into the equation...lots of straight folks, including me, are envious of the tightknit gay communities in our midst. He'd have to be blind not to recognize them. Finally, thanks for pushing back on the Abraham Accords...the only comment he made that made me fall of my chair!
I think JP has a habit of not fulling researching topics before forming strong opinions and taking action on them, which is not wise. He never believed diet could affect his daughters health, which resulted in her having to get many surgeries as a kid from her autoimmune disease, which she later in life cured with diet. He also though benzodiazepines were harmless, until he found himself in the middle of hell with them. It is the same with this issue. He needs to talk to some actual trans people. It seems like he is getting all his info from memes online or something. You are wrong about this too Jordan.
"...We have a common enemy: cis-heteronormativity...."
Then you wonder why there is a 'hardening' of attitudes to the politics/perceived agendas of the alphabet 'community'. When without doubt our western societies had been moving towards greater acceptance of people, whatever they wanted to be, at the level of individuals.
My recognition in my senior years after a life-time of 'left'/liberal values and being the product of 1950's radical left political father...is that natural/blood family (nuclear and extended) is a cornerstone of cohesive community. Strong cohesive community has the potential to accept outliers to a degree. The 1960's (and beyond) social changes were ultimately used by the globalist marketplace to weaken family and community and enable greater centralised controls. Basic marketplace things like a more compliant work force were produced creating a 'war at home' to weaken men inside unions, alongside literally feminising the work force...compliance wanted and achieved.
The 'alphabet community' is another weaponised devise (the more splintered groups there are the easier centralised control) to achieve a 'reset' leaving the same elite and their marketplace in charge. Good luck all, as 'we' push back and to do such 'we' need recognise who and what the enemies are. It is not the families that produced you.
I just have one question. How can anyone be genuinely transgender without gender dysphoria? The whole essences of transgenderism is the feeling of being born in the wrong body, that the sex assigned to you at birth doesn't match the gender you internally perceive, ie gender dysphoria. Please explain.
First and foremost, I'm cisgender so there are certainly many trans people out there who are better equipped to talk about this.
Onto your question - gender DYSPHORIA involves CLINICALLY SIGNIFICANT DISTRESS due to the incongruence between what one is assigned at birth vs. one's authentic, experienced gender identity. Here's a relevant quote from the DSM-5:
"Transgender refers to the broad spectrum of individuals who transiently or persistently identify with a gender different from their natal gender. Gender dysphoria refers to the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender. Although not all individuals will experience distress as a result of such incongruence, many are distressed if the desired physical interventions by means of hormones and/or surgery are not available.”
Another point to bear in mind is that to be diagnosed with any psychiatric disorder or condition, (including gender dysphoria), there needs to be an impairment in functioning that impacts one's social/interpersonal life, occupation, health etc. Here's a relevant quote from the DSM-5 on what constitutes a mental disorder:
"A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above."
So to summarize:
1) Gender dysphoria involves experiencing clinically significant distress. Not every trans or non-binary person experiences this. They may experience an incongruence between their assigned sex and gender vs. their authentic, experienced gender identity without having clinically significant distress.
2) For anything to qualify as a disorder, it has to impair one's functioning in some way, shape, or form. Again, some people may feel distress about the incongruence between their assigned sex and gender vs. their authentic, experienced gender identity. But for that distress to equate to a DISORDER, it has to have a palpable impact on one's functioning. Not every trans person experiences this.
I appreciate your long, detailed, and well-structured easy-to-read post.
I agree with your assessment of petersons' methods and goals; I see him as someone who knows what music speaks to a certain audience he is trying to court. He creates a mesh of fancy sounding words, concepts, and "facts". Conservatives embrace these "facts" because these facts reinforce their already held fears, transforming their fears into facts, logic, and science! They're not crazy, their the sane ones holding the center of an ever devolving moral landscape. And that fact, that the liberals are wrong headed, is borne out by the fact that people on the same end of the ideological spectrum are in charge of large institutions that have messed up the world in a variety of ways, including economical.
I'm not sure if you've seen it before, but there is a clip from a joe rogan interview, where peterson states that he found a way to monetize sjw's. He and joe then go on to chuckle and laugh about that. I feel that is one of the most genuine things he has ever said.
I wanted to ask for your opinion on something, and I'm probably going to come off as a total dumbass, but it's something I've found swirling around in a corner of my brain when I see this topic talked about. The topic is people who are trans and want to surgically transition to make their sex and gender the same. I have zero personal/anecdotal experience, within my social circle or anything like that, hence my relatively high ignorance. First let me state that I defer to the relevant experts in the field, and if they (doctors and psychiatrists) say this is the best option, then so be it. But I would like to ask about one thing. If gender is a construct, then is it possible to construct a gender with gender norms that fit them, instead of surgical transition. Allow me to elaborate...
...If a girl says she feels like a boy, if I understand correctly, she is saying she doesn't identify with the constructs associated with girlhood: dolls, frilly pink dresses, makeup, and dainty pursuits.
...If a boy says he feels like a girl, he is saying he doesn't identify with the constructs associated with boyhood: rough and tumble, physically aggressive, getting dirty, and associated traits.
Is it possible then for the girl in this scenario to lead a life with traits associated with the construct of boyhood: she dresses like a boy, is rough and tumble, no makeup, etc.
And vice versa for the boy in this situation.
Would this solution means that their biological sex and gender identity align and they are leading the life they want to lead?
The EPIDEMIC of young girls saying they “feel” like boys is obvious for anyone who has eyes. You can keep the gaslighting all you want, but influencing children into this collective delusion is criminal and in a few years it will definitively cause a colossal backlash. Especially from working class people.
"Obvious for anyone who has eyes" is not the evidence you think it is. I remain unconvinced.
Colossal backlash. Sounds like alarmism all over again. Sorry, my politics are not based in a gut feeling that there's an impending backlash or that a buncha transphobes and TERFs are going to be triggered. Also, LGBTQ people, on average, have a lower SES than the rest of the population so typically the people protesting the advancement of trans rights tend to be of a higher SES than the trans people they're protesting against.
Just because you can't fathom the idea that the brain can produce congruent and incongruent experiences of gender and sex doesn't mean it is fictitious or implausible.
Ask any working class person from any culture or country why they think about of children changing genders and you’ll have an idea of the backlash that is coming.
On average, most people across the world would react badly to having a kid who is part of the LGBTQ community. I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I'm well-aware.
No one's forcing anyone to do anything. If the mere removal of barriers is enough to piss people off, so be it. Not the first time and it won't be the last.
It's frustrating to hear people talk about "the working class" as if LGBTQ people aren't disproportionately part of that societal class. It may seem nitpicky at first but queer identities are often painted as a phenomenon ("mass hysteria" in the words of Peterson) that has been spread by elites when, in reality, queer people have always been disproportionately poorer. So really, on average, people who are queerphobic (e.g., transphobic) tend to be from higher socioeconomic crusts of society than the trans people they're excluding. We are better off NOT framing this issue as queerness = a thing peddled by the rich. It's simply not true and is pretty bad Comms lol. Sure, some elites have been exposed to more diverse groups and have thus become more inclusive of queer people. But our allies are not us. This is yet another instance where people are looking to non-LGBTQ people to understand LGBTQ people. Talk to us. We are here. Hi. It me. I gay.
You and everyone that takes the same position as you seems to warn of an IMPENDING threat, a COMING backlash, a contagion GOING OUT OF CONTROL etc. Queer people have been facing puritanical resistance for eons. We're not going to be intimidated by more. Nor should we. The prospect of more conservative resistance is no reason for us to short-change the trans people within our communities.
I'd rather be principled yet adaptable in the face of evidence rather than being a reactionary.
... since this is extremely removed from my wheelhouse and seems like people are arguing from different universes, I'm curious. Have you looked into Abigail Shrier what evidence she cites in her book? This is one I tend to lean more one way than another, but I honestly can't tell what's actually happening, because both side seem to dismiss the other's claims out of hand.
Respect. If you want to talk to Jordan again, tell him you want to drill down on this question of when the Left goes too far. And also I think if you have a conversation with him beforehand about wanting to be succinct on issues and get to the next one, and that you are going to have to interrupt him, that he will be man enough to understand his failing when it comes to ranting and rambling. Even huge fans of his are frustrated by his inability to stick on the point and be brief. He also doesn't let other people talk, and again he's had this criticism from his supporters, so I think he'd take that well. Also, he needs a smart, sharp person of good will from the left to have reasonable rational conversations with him. You'd actually be doing him a favor - he can be his own worst enemy - and I say this as a huge supporter of his.
Sometimes Jordan rants and rambles to the point that he'll contradict himself, the Jim Jefferie interview was pretty funny. The problem I have with Jordan, is that he'll never just agree with anyone he has to input his own 2 cents into everything. You can ask him, do you think everyone deserves to be happy? And he'll respond, "Being happy is bad for you blah blah blah blah!"
It’s even worse than that, he will take something simple and turn it into an over complicated response, usually he will start with “what do you mean by that?” or “what does that mean?”, you know a bunch of circular reasoning is coming after that and when he can’t really articulate what he wants to say without getting defensive he usually resorts to “it’s complicated” and cops out.
In answer to Peterson's rhetorical question related to the prevalence of conversion therapy: "How many times did that happen in the last 20 years?" researchers have found that approximately 698,000 LGBTQ2 adults in the U.S. have received conversion therapy at some point in their lives, including about 350,000 who were (mostly) coerced into receiving it as adolescents. (This data is from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law and their methodology is explained in detail on their website.) No one who grew up in an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian environment would question these numbers....I'm 71-years old and I remember hearing testimonials from gay man who had been successfully converted back when I was in my early twenties (of course, what got less attention is when these conversions failed). It's common practice in evangelical Christian circles and has been for a very long time. Admittedly, this is a small number given the total population of the US and I'm not sure that I'm comfortable legislating something like this despite the harm it causes...I just don't know. Finally, without offering an opinion on anti-conversion laws, I'm confused about why Dr. Peterson asserted that these laws forbid therapists from discussing a client's identity during the course of their therapy. Is he unhappy that a therapist can no longer use talk therapy to facilitate a conversion in their sexual orientation? Not sure, but it seemed to me as if he was confusing the issue.
All of those LGB figures are extrapolated estimates from a sample size of 1,345. Of that sample, the survey asked the following:
"Did you ever receive treatment from someone who tried to change your sexual orientation (such as try to make you straight/heterosexual)? If yes, please make all that apply.
-No
-Yes, from a healthcare professional (such as a psychologist or counselor who was not religious focused)
-Yes, from a religious leader (such as a pastor, religious counselor, priest)"
The WI@UCLA paper claims that "we started with
the proportion of LGB adults ages 18 to 59 who report having received treatment to change their sexual orientation (6.7%) from the Generations Study."
Then that means 90 LGB people reported receiving conversion therapy at some time(s) over the span of 41 years.
Beyond that, the WI@UCLA paper does not clearly indicate the composition of healthcare professional vs. religious leader conversions of those 90 people.
They mention 95% confidence interval with no mention of margin of error. Although it is probably around 2.5% with a 1.5k sample vs a 10mil population.
Ok, now to what JP was saying:
"...virtually no one from the mainstream psychotherapeutic community would ever do that. And so, you hand a handful of fundamentalists, perhaps, who were doing this now and then in some situations and we made laws everywhere that made it impossible for everyone to have an honest conversation with their caregivers."
That study is vague as it does not clearly indicate the source of conversion therapy for the LGB community specifically, excluding the T+. JP specified what he meant: a tiny minority of people, maybe about 0.2% of the US population (700k), was the target of conversion therapy over a span of 41 years at the hands of religious institutions.
JP is unhappy that a therapist is now coerced to affirm their patients stated identity, which undermines the therapeutic process. There is nothing wrong with exploring one's own identity in a therapeutic setting and realizing they may be in error. There is everything wrong with shock or other pain treatment to force an outcome in identity, which is the worst in what conversion therapy was implemented.
This was both enlightening and sad. Peterson used to be a voice I gravitated towards. What he's turned into post addiction and rehab is much different but sounds just similar enough to be considered the same.
Dr. Peterson, the reluctantly famous academic usually struck to his field of study, wasn't afraid of new information, would come up with new ideas on the fly, and was fun to watch debate people. Jordan Peterson the left bashing pundit moves the goal posts a lot and seems to have forgotten how to say"I don't know".
I disagree with your claim and can provide evidence as to why you are wrong. JP is much more humble than you give him credit. You must not have been listening very where to the several times when JP explicitly said with gravity and pause, "I don't know." Let me help you out with that.
I do think Jordan Peterson has become more 'forthright' with his language in his opposition to various things. However I view this as understandable with the relentless demands to 'identify', to censor your opinions/speech etc etc. I also agree with other people comments, that with what has been happening across our western societies...its past time for being an academic sitting on the fence. 'We' are being forced to take sides on many issues, as extremes are being pushed.
He’s not wrong about the trans issues with kids and the surgeries though, it’s a slippery slope and I don’t think a child feeling they are another gender is a valid enough reason to go into something as drastic as surgery for a child that’s brain hasn’t developed enough.
No surgery is being performed on children. All you can give to someone under 16 is puberty blockers which delay puberty and are given to children for other health reasons already.
Wrong! Double masectomies are documented to occur as young as 12-13 years old in academic literature,
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FVo6FOtXsAAfSvv?format=jpg&name=large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FVo6FOtXEAII5Mp?format=png&name=small
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FVo6FOvWYAEyL30?format=png&name=900x900
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FVo6FOxWIAAQ0eb?format=png&name=small
And you can find many documented cases of minors getting double mastectomies online, whether as testimonies or on social media.
Hope you retire this talking point.
Puberty blockers for healthy puberty is not FDA approved and the UK's NHS says there is no data to justify the claim that they are reversible when used against healthy puberty. They are largely unmonitored experiments.
Almost all who take puberty blockers take cross sex hormones; when combined this results in infertility and loss of the ability to orgasm. More unmonitored experiments. I am sure 11 years olds know the implications of that /s.
You just linked tables with no context or references. Link your source.
The charts/tables are clear. Do you need help understanding them?
Here are the sources:
https://journals.lww.com/annalsplasticsurgery/Abstract/2022/05004/Gender_Affirming_Mastectomy_Trends_and_Surgical.4.aspx
https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2017.1349706
https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.5440
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2017.02.007
So when are you going to admit that your taking point is wrong?
Oh yeah let’s just trust the anal plastic surgery journal. (I’m kidding and I’m an idiot)
*weeping*
It's absolutely catastrophic that children are being subjected to reading anal plastic surgery journals in school, and it's driving so many young men into the arms of the feminine dragon of chaos.
The study also showed that of the 200 adolescents who got the mastectomy, only 2 regretted it. I definitely hope that they find a way to bring that down further, but the 99% success rate very strongly contradicts what JP was saying about for every successful transition, there's 1000 catastrophic ones.
I'm very curious what he was looking at where he can comfortably say "I know the literature and the literature is clear on the topic".
Not true. Mastectomies are being performed on thirteen year old girls — many of them gay or autistic. This is not ok.
If this is accurate, it's a mastectomy, it's not removing a persons ability to become pregnant. Breasts can be replaced.
This seems fine to me if that's what the person wants.
Also, upon research, I can find no reliable sources that even support this claim.
They also give hormones,hormones can cause serious health problems, and the blocker lupron they use has caused serious health problems.you can google it.and they can also cause sterilization
You are correct on bottom surgery in the US specifically, for the most part. Although that is besides the point.
From the Boston Children's Hospital on who is eligible for phalloplasty (bottom surgery):
"People who choose to undergo phalloplasty usually do so after taking other steps in the gender affirmation process, such as taking supplemental hormones and undergoing chest surgery. "
As for top surgery, you only need parental consent to perform on a minor, along with meeting the other criteria. (hormone treatment for 12 months, referrals, etc.)
https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%20v7/SOC%20V7_English.pdf
As it currently stands, the level of social pressure, forced affirmation, and incentive to coax children down the path of bottom surgery by the age of 18 is massive. The procedures that are allowed to children before the age of 18, including the ones considered "Fully Reversible Interventions," can very well sterilize them and deform their development forever. The further down that path they go, the more it sets like cement.
The slippery slope comes in as it does and as it always has, where bottom surgeries are not generally permitted for those under 18 in the US, until the day they are permitted with parental consent, just like top surgeries. After all, the financial incentive to expand the practice under the guise of "medical care" is ever present. The slope is slicked in the glitters of profit and an insidious ideology.
Irreversible genital mutilation is being carried out on babies within days of birth legally at the direction of their ideologically or religiously driven parents. Grotesque and horrible as it may be, it's performed daily in every hospital in America and the individuals affected have no opportunity to consent to this life altering surgery. Hard to make the case that adolescent minors wanting gender affirming surgery, with the consent of their parents, should be denied. Especially when we don't bat an eye cutting off foreskins, forcing boys into a lifetime of diminished sexual pleasure.
You see what’s happening and you’re turning mental gymnastics to try to avoid understanding it for what it is. This is one big medical experiment in let’s see what happens if we try to put a child through opposite sex puberty, with a side order of infertility and castration. It is not “affirming” anything except the medical community’s bottom line as it creates lifelong medical patients who will require expensive hormone treatments for the rest of their lives.
By all means try to conflate this with circumcision. You might be able to fool yourself for a little while longer, but it will get harder to justify. At some point society will acknowledge the parallels with that time when the medical community thought lobotomies were a fab way to treat mental illness.
Kids aside, Peterson admitted he's not even sure that consenting adults should be allowed to transition legally. He even inferred that broadly accepting gay people in society was a mistake. If that's not an authoritarian bigot I don't know what is.
What’s that got to do with anything? I don’t care what he thinks, I care what’s happening to our young people and the fact that the instant I ask a question about whether a 14 year old can give informed consent to the removal of healthy breasts, I get called a bigot. Shut up TERF, they tell me. Which means we never take an honest look at whether youth transition is necessary or even ethical. Is there a better way to help kids who feel like they’re the wrong sex? Should we start by going straight to the use of powerful hormones, followed by experimental surgeries? Or should we be damned careful because these are kids?! We never get to have this essential conversation. Ever. In any forum.
Sadly, the growing number of detransitioners will be forced to speak for themselves after the damage is done since those of us trying to raise concerns to prevent the damage have been silenced by activists, who are enabled by the “be kind” lot.
While there are undeniably some cases where people regret transitioning the vast majority do not.
How do you know? Are there any longitudinal studies measuring satisfaction with transition over various periods, say 2 years to 5 years, to 10 years… spoiler alert - no, there aren’t any studies like this. Which is odd, as you’d think there’s quite a big population to sample at this point, with such a booming gender transition industry.
How do I know there are no studies? Wouldn’t the ACLU and the Trevor Project and HRC have all this proof posted front and center on their websites? It would surely shut every naysayer if they just pointed to the comprehensive peer reviewed studies that have actual control groups and account for participants who drop out. Like science and stuff. Go look. Seriously. I can’t find anything that covers a period of time with a reasonable sample size and a control group. If you find some let me know!
Why not be against both? What kind of logic is that? "Society already accepts X which I consider bad so why would it not accept Y which is also bad?"
It shouldn't concern you what other people want to do so long as it doesn't harm you directly. That's how freedom works
Kids want to do a lot of crazy reckless shit. It’s a parents job to keep them safe and make sound judgement on their child’s behalf until their brains are fully developed and they can make sound decisions for themselves. I agree at 18 your legally considered an adult (maybe not a mature one considering your brain is at the tail end of development) and that’s your decision to make. Doesn’t mean they won’t regret it.
At age 16 you are a child.
I'm much older than that.
In her own words. This 17 year old girl was put on testosterone at 13. She’s had a double mastectomy and since regretted the transition.
https://mobile.twitter.com/FLSurgeonGen/status/1546164557072187398
We all make choices we later regret. Some are worse than others. Consider how many people have benefited from that choice. It was theirs to make.
That’s not true. Fourteen year olds are getting mastectomies.
This was awhile ago Im still angry about it. If there are more people like this in this world they dont deserve to live.
https://summit.news/2019/06/13/brazil-lesbian-couple-who-tried-to-force-transgender-surgery-on-9-year-old-boy-stab-him-to-death/
They also give hormones,hormones can cause serious health problems, and the blocker lupron they use has caused serious health problems.you can google it.and they can also cause sterilization
Not yet anyways.
Not yet is in contradiction to your comment. It's not happening. The slippery slope is a logical fallacy.
It’s not happening legally that we know of and yes, it’s a slippery slope, e en hormone therapy for a child is.
Again, no. It's not happening legally because that would require a law to pass permitting it that would be on public record. If it has happened at all "that we don't know of" it would be illegal under current law. "Hormone therapy" is not "giving kids hormones", it's giving them a medication that blocks the release of puberty inducing hormones... when you stop taking that medication, you go through puberty.
AND
The Slippery Slope Argument is an argument that concludes that if an action is taken, other negative consequences will follow. For example, “If event X were to occur, then event Y would (eventually) follow; thus, we cannot allow event X to happen.”
Reactionary conservatives like Peterson love the slippery slope.
I know what hormone blocking therapy is, that’s a slippery slope for a child that “feels” they are another gender, they aren’t developed mentally that “feeling” something of that nature would immediately lead to hormone suppression therapy. What I meant bout surgeries is it could be happening, just not legally, we do t have the data if there is any. Nothing I’ve said is incorrect or a logical fallacy just because you misunderstood.
It’s you that has the bias, just by labeling Peterson as a reactionary conservative, I don’t agree with him on many issues, but he’s definitely not just reactionary, he thinks things through and he’s right with what he’s said here about the trans issue, specifically whtn it pertains to children.
Do you know what some of the research that goes back 300 years that he refered too as far as pyshcogenic epidemics is actually about? Him saying young girls are particularly suceptible to mass hysteria makes me think of boy bands or like Kpop. I just don't think thats what being trans and having surgery is going to turn into.
He is talking about mass psychogenic illness, also known as mass hysteria events and peer/social contagion:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
An interesting analogy is that tic attacks (involuntary movement or utterance of phrases) was almost exclusively recorded in prepubescent children, but due to social media such as TikTok most Tourette-like cases now are now first appearing in teenagers.
Twitter thread with article on that:
https://www.twitter.com/helenlewis/status/1498274668318539776
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/social-media-illness-teen-girls/622916/
Gender dysphoria was mostly first appearing in very young adolescent males. Before 2012 there is no literature about it appearing in ages of 11-21.
Teenage admission overtook prepubescent admission in gender clinics, and in the mid 2010s the female adolescent admissions suddenly exploded so now they outnumber males by 2:1; this is consistent throughout multiple gender clinics in Europe and North America.
We have no long-term data on how this develops, yet we have double mastectomies as unmonitored experiments.
This has all the signs of social contagion, and the literature doesn't support that the older generations has a disproportionate number of females with gender dysphoria.
This is an extremely short leap. Teenage girls with body image issues can get into all sort of weird trends: cutting, claims of being demonically possessed, witchcraft, anorexia, bulimia, etc.
When we change the definition of gender so that if a girl doesn't have certain personality traits or doesn't adhere to stereotypes then she is not really girl, transition can likewise be a trend.
Reading through some of this and arriving at the conclusion "due to social media such as TikTok" is what caused the age shift is inaccurate. The triggers are actually attributed to an increase in stress and anxiety, ranging from a climate change crisis, the COVID19 pandemic and lockdowns in responce to that, and other more personal things like PTSD events. Its not monkey see monkey do, and thats not what any medical professional that gives a dam about the people affected by mass psychogenic illness wants spread as a message. A new method of transmission is not a cause of an illness.
You wouldn't ban tourette's-like behaviour from social media and say there we go problem fixed.
Making it seem like if we just see more transgender people as influencers there is going to be a mass hysteria event of copy cats seems more like a person fear being projected from some bias towards a minority group of people. Not something based from reading and understanding the objective research. "Moral panic" as Kyle put it.
I'm a trans man, and I've felt this way all my life, since I was 3 years old. I am 35 now, and so for most of my childhood I knew this about myself but because back then there was no information out there, I thought I was the only only in the whole world that felt this way and had this secret, which caused a lot of shame. I didn't learn of transgender people until much later, around 18 years old, and I transitioned in my 20s. Almost all trans people I have met over the years, have the same story. They felt this way all their lives. No one told them to feel this way. I didn't need to see other trans people to identity as male, because there are literal MALES everywhere, which I have seen all my life, and I identify with THEM. What can you do about that? Hide all females from all males all the time until they are 18, because if they are around males they might become influenced to want to BE male? Your logic makes no sense. It's the same as saying you can make someone gay by allowing gay people in society.
I thought about writing something similar to what you point out with, we are surrounded by masculine and feminine role models our whole lifes and will identify with one more than the other, neither, or both as we grow up. Heck it might even shift at different points in our lifes. Its just a hard position to defend when you have research put out by qualified doctors, that compare it to mental illness and think it might have specific triggers like the tic attacks stated above. I think even in the professional mental health fields theres a lot more to be worked out before gender will truly be recognized as a spectum and where someone is on the spectrum supercedes the biological binary when it comes to mental health.
There definitely seems to be a lot of confusion about gender in our society, I think on both the left and right to be honest. I actually think there needs to be MORE public discussion with trans folk who do NOT regret their transition (most don't), but who are honest about the risks and the experience. (For example, most trans men do not want and never get bottom surgery (genital surgery) for a variety of reasons like risk of complications, but people who are not trans assume most trans men do want that surgery which is not true. ) There are trans people who are successful productive people in society, like Ben Barres, a neurobiologist at Stanford who was a good friend of Andrew Huberman. Before his death he said that, "I have zero regrets and I’m ready to die. I’ve truly had a great life." We are not really hearing that perspective. To actually try and understand. They just want to label us crazy. Freaks.
All these NOT trans people guessing what our experience must be like, some even flat out say they don't get it. WELL ASK. LISTEN. lol. You'll watch popular podcasts that discuss trans issues like it's one of their favorite topics (Joe Rogan), and yet, they have not had any actual trans people on their show (Joe had 1 trans porn star on his show like 10 years ago), to actually learn from someone who have lived through the experience. Truth will set us all free. The ones confused about their gender, will see, "Oh actually now that I have heard what the trans experience is fully like from a trans person WHO IS TRANS, I realize now that has not been my life experience." Not a de-transitioner that everyone tries to find to interview who is NOT trans and so their understanding of the trans experience is different. A person who is confused about their gender and sees an interview with an actual trans person, might then think, "I'm glad I listened to an actual trans person who was happy with their transition, so see I do not relate to their life experience. Trans people exist but I don't relate to that. I am just a girl that likes hockey."
I notice that the right likes to contradict themselves when talking about gender constantly, and I think it is because deep down they really don't know what to do with trans people. They will say on one hand, just because you like sports and are a bit of a masculine female, it doesn't mean that you are a man (this is not what makes you trans anyway, btw). But then on the other hand if they see a super butch woman, they will make fun of her and say she is trying to be a man. They will act like sex and gender are the same thing when it is convenient for them, then later even acknowledge they are different and the relationship with gender and sex when it makes sense for them, like how it is natural for most men to like more masculine things, like masculine clothing, masculine jobs, hobbies. But when it comes to trans people, they will act all confused like, well if you say your gender is male even before you transition, why do you have to change your body? It's really not that different then a cis man who has a masculine identity, and wants to become a body builder or really fit. In his mind he sees himself a masculine strong man and has that goal and eventually he achieves it, even if at the start he weighed 115 pounds and had noodle arms. Doesn't make him crazy.
No one can make you identify with something or like something that you don't like. Everyone can tell you that you should like vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate ice cream. But if you really dislike vanilla and really like chocolate, no one can change that. They can bully you into pretending to like vanilla. They can even say liking chocolate is illegal you must like vanilla only. It will still not change it. That is how gender identity and sexually work. That is why trans and gay people still exist in countries where they are even killed for who they are.
That’s an interesting comparison lol. I can see that.
More specifically, he means Henri Ellenberger's "The Discovery of the Unconscious", where Ellenberger has a whole section about psychogenic contagion.
He’s completely and utterly incorrect.
yes he is, all those studies if you looked them up are wrong
I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Hearing other lefties is great but I love hearing the other perspective especially when it comes with rationale and data. Didn’t agree with everything but thought it was fair. Learned quite a bit.
It seems like jordan has some lefty tendencies but he’s so focused on hating the crazy lefties that he ends up saying some shit i dont think he even believes. Him and kyle probably agree on a lot. Jordan is like a smarter rave dubin. “The far left is so crazy, i guess I’ll just be a right winger even though i disagree on most of the issues”. I’d like to see jordan talk to more “anti-woke” lefties like big dick kyle
I don’t consider Jordan’s ideas right wing at all. They are quite liberal in my opinion. Just based in evidence and inquiry not blind affirmation. They used the be the left’s way. They lost it
Agreed. My point was that some of jordan’s views are left wing, but he seems to identify all economic leftists with woke leftists(jordan’s biggest detractors), so he sees people like kyle(and all lefties) as his enemy, and ben shapiro as his idealogical ally, when in reality that might not be true. For example, I feel like jordan was a little too defensive when trump came up, bc he just hates certain people on the left so much that he won’t give an inch, even in the face of facts, which makes him come off as a right winger.
Why is JP so focused on the crazy lefties?
JP is a scholar that has dedicated a lot of his studies on the atrocities of the 20th century, with a particular question burning in his mind: how the hell could people commit such atrocities upon one another? How could people become such monsters?
After years of studying the matter, he has learned to recognize the patterns of tyranny and authoritarianism that have lead to the deaths of millions of people. He sees those patterns in the crazy lefties and he sees them eroding the western values that fought so hard against the tyrants of the 20th century.
I'm sure many can make arguments of the authoritarian tyranny capable of the far right and I don't think JP would disagree. I'd imagine he would argue the far left is posing a more credible threat in the present day based on the lessons of recent history.
All-in-all, JP has made it clear that he stands for libertarian values far more than authoritarian values of both the left and right variety.
I don’t think Jordan has ever claimed to not be leftist, in fact I have heard him say that he has a leftist temperament. I think that he values leftist ideals so, that he is defending the virtue of the ideals.
It's more simple than that. He's petty, vindictive, and sociopathic, as with anyone who spends their lives in political or online discourse.
He knows that leftists have reasonable stances, but he wants to deny that because her PERSONALLY likes right wing *people* The problem here is everyone's insistence that ideology and policy dictate preference. The opposite is true here. This is the same issue with Elon Musk, and Tucker Carlson. He feels personally offended by the sentiments of left-wing people, and he is actively trying to ascribe a sense of evil authoritarian dictatorial power to the left, all of the left, and as such he uses scathing and contemptuous descriptors at any chance.
However, he likes the right, so he doesn't want to seem as though he is being unfair, so he also glosses over the right as "Also having a fringe" yet never being personally and emotionally invested in criticism of the right, because he ultimately wants the right to change for the better and the left to fail. He wants the right to be the people's party, the party that has the best stances. He has no intention on destroying the right over their authoritarian tendencies as he does the left.
The same exact things can be said for Tucker Carlson who has repeatedly called for left wing, even radical left wing policy, while simply forcing the narrative that it's always been the right who wanted it, and the left is the enemy. Politics isn't always about ideas, sometimes, many times, the human aspect is involved, and it is increasingly about sentiments - especially as debate happens more online and becomes more vitriolic and showy.
I think you hit it on the head. I just saw a video of tucker talking about john bolton and he goes, “John bolton is a progressive. Don’t let the mustache fool you. He wants big government to solve all the world’s problems.” He loves to jump when democrats or even progressives slip up on a left wing issue( snowden, ukraine, free speech), but you rarely hear tucker criticize republicans for fucking up on these issues. When he does, he just frames it how he likes; “Look at this republican holding a pro war, left-wing position.” He likes republicans so he just asserts they have the correct positions and hopes they adopt them. I remember kyle saying he hoped for a bernie vs trump race to see how tuck would dance around claiming trump is the real anti-war, anti-corporate candidate.
Exactly!
He's done so many episodes like that. Just like when he talks about amazon abusing its workers he describes them as "Progressive" lol
The level of petty personal vindictiveness in politics, especially on the right against "the woke radical left", has made a class of politics where you have people who are intelligent and can understand what's happening in reality, but whose primary concern is the political marketing around fixing it; Who gets the credit for being the good guys.
That becomes more important than allowing the people who want to fix the problem to fix it. but to truly help, it requires the problem to be more important than one's thin-skinned posturing.
How dare you compare him to Lord Raveouleus Dubious!
Great job from both of you, well done Kyle & Jordan.
Psychology is his wheelhouse, but philosophy no, plus he injects too much religion into his philosophical discussions, he’s also a gish galloper and uses circular reasoning to sound like he is making a point and a good majority of the time he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about outside of his wheelhouse, especially when he talks about Marx and uses the phrase “Cultural Marxism”, it’s cringeworthy, that doesn’t have anything to do with Marx, he keeps talking about free market capitalism, but a truly free market has never existed, that’s a myth.
*he injects too much religion into his philosophical discussions*
disagree. he talks about religion as a structure of values via timeless stories. he is actually not that religious, as he didn’t raise his kids religious.
That’s not true, he became more religious as he’s gotten older and many of the values from stories in the Bible predate the Bible like the golden rule which dates back to Confucius and most likely before.
well my point is that he doesn’t promote religious dogma. don’t know how u define ‘religious,’ but he is absolutely not a theocrat.
He definitely promotes theocracy in what he believes is a crafty way and I’m saying there is nothing crafty about how he goes about it. He definitely leans towards theocracy in his diatribes.
I agree, religions are essentially ossified philosophies, they will always share the same cart.
Being a scholar is JPs wheelhouse. Ideas are his wheelhouse. The only useful way to approach the statement "he injects too much religion" is to take the use of religion and faith/belief interchangeably. Of that notion, I disagree completely. JP is a proper critic of religious faith, as a good philosopher would be. He also derives the value in the meaning of religious traditions and stories. He has spent a a great deal of focus in making meaningful and pragmatic connections with the stories that have been with humanity for hundreds of years and day-to-day life in modern times. He brings relevancy to lessons of old for those who don't want to fuss about the faith and belief part of religion.
You can paint his way of speaking as gish galloping, and I think that is a fair assessment because JP is just as fallible as any man. But the majority of the time he gets his points across in an impactful and thought provoking way. You cannot deny his skill of words and reasoning while pointing out his faults.
Criticizing the concept of cultural Marxism is ol' Slavoj Žižek's line and has been glommed onto by the far left as a far-right conspiracy theory pejorative to protect the instruments of its authoritarian movements. If you want to hear someone with more scholarly expertise on the matter, check our James Lindsay's work on Race Marxism and Identity Marxism, where he more succinctly and deeply explores the authoritarian ideologies that have evolved through a Marxist lens for over 100 years.
A truly free market is not a myth, it is an economic model used in market theory. Referencing a free market does not imply support for free market fundamentalism and JP affirms that when he mentions regulation is necessary to some degree. Generally, referring to a free market implies minimal regulation needed to address market failures. Whereas coordinated markets require regulations that go well beyond addressing market failures, to the point of requiring a centralized authoritarian state in the attempt of forcing a vast array of outcomes.
The argument is generally centralization vs decentralization while considering scalability. JP leans on the side of the latter as the scale increases.
Jordan stated that capitalism must be regulated. Are you stating that there should be no capitalism? If you are stating that an economy adhering to capitalist ideals as well as a socialist ideal and to be regulated, you are agreeing with Peterson.
We're not advancing much in this world with Jordan Peterson's views. He's old school to the point of being painful. He almost posits that capitalism is the ultimate way of being and nothing else matters. So all in all his take on 'free market' is the only way. It's more complicated than that. There are other ways between State and pure Free market. There is a possibility of coops and other ways of organizing a society.
Did you guys listen to the interview. Jordan’s main point was that capitalism must be regulated and that it was not a “fair” system, but demonizing it and manifesting it as a pejorative is not useful.
Of course I listened to the article, he also uses the word “free market” like libertarians use it which is in the pure sense, but there has never been a pure free market, it’s never existed, markets are all subject to regulation, tariffs, currency differences, customs laws etc...
When people like Peterson and libertarians talk about the free market they might as well be talking about unicorns, there has never been a pure free market, there have always been regulations, currency differences, customs regulations and tariffs of some degree, so when he goes on about free market capitalism he just regurgitates the same thing libertarians do and it’s a myth, what free market is there when everyone else doesn’t have access to quality healthcare and only the wealthy can go to another country to pay for that treatment? I also think he started using circular reasoning when he went on his diatribe about healthcare not being a right. I think if you are participating in a functioning society it should be a right for citizens of that society.
Jordan’s point was the term “right” and what that means. He did not disagree that healthcare was of the highest priority.
But it is a right for citizens in countries that have it, I live in one of those countries. Now, if he were to use entitlement then that would be more appropriate, but healthcare should be a right under a society that you participate, pay taxes in and benefit from and that’s the basis of the countries with universal healthcare, now if he said you are not entitled to healthcare then that would be a more logical discussion because having a right to it under a system you participate in is different than being entitled to it. What he did with the word “right” is what he always does, he tries to wrap some kind of discussion around the use of a word then tries to convolute the discussion with circular reasoning by defining it and making it far more complicated than it actually is and that’s how he fools people that he’s being philosophical when he’s actually just making a straw man argument.
But it’s always strawmans with advocates for both fully public and fully private healthcare systems. I’m from the U.K., we are one of the only countries in the world with a fully nationalised healthcare system and I assure you it’s not the land of milk & honey I often hear Americans claiming it to be. Is it preferable to what you guys have in America? I’d say absolutely but the great irony is that both the US and U.K. healthcare models are held back on the same grounds and that’s dogma. There are plenty of countries in Europe who put the U.K. to shame in this regard and they aren’t fully nationalised healthcare systems.
What countries should be aiming for is universality. That doesn’t necessarily mean the government has to own it from top to bottom.
Such a bad faith representation. He almost posits? How about we talk about what he actually posits, where he argues that capitalism is the best economic order that mankind has ever implemented on a massive scale when considering the overall level of upward growth and enrichment of millions of lives. Comparing to other economic orders paints a contrast so stark and severe when the result is the wretched death and despair of hundreds of millions.
He does not argue that it can't be improved. He does not argue for zero-regulation free market fundamentalism. He has always considered the scalability of economic systems. Coordinated and cooperative markets with positive liberal results are possible, but only on a limited scale.
The problem would be … how do coops drive innovation? Coops are great with maintaining the Status Quo
I don't think we should care too much about someone's views as long as they meet the minimum quality of logic and reason. Let the best ideas win! Having tough opposition in this space is good for everyone.
Good lord this guy has no understand of Marx. Also "we hold these truths to be self-evident... all men are created equal" was in opposition to the concept of the divine right of kings. It was a rebellious, secular notion at the time.
He has zero appreciation for all the rights and freedoms he has because of Marx's ideas. From the west passing reforms to prevent revolution, to free speech precedents, to the existence of the weekend, accessible schooling, to racial equality. From the 1890s to the 1960s, a huge amount was accomplished by activists, movements, court cases, and strikes whose ideas were shaped by 19th century socialists, including Marx. In the 1930's there was a word in America for colorblind people who treated people of any race as adult individuals, as Peterson recommends - that word was communist. The most anti Jordan Peterson group of all time, the anti-capitalist anti hierarchy IWW, was conducting "free speech fights" over 100 years ago in the US.
Yea separation of church and state is a big give away. Still many founders were openly Secular Even if the opposite was the case. Is it self-evident if someone else makes the truth evident..I don't think thats how it wrks. Maybe i'm wrong, However is it funny how God is "Self-evident" In lack of any evidence for God. Also Thx Kyle! Great Ep!
the full quote is "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.", kinda hard to say religion doesnt take place at all in that
It is and isn’t, when you realize that many of the forefathers were Deists and held the belief that religious truth should be subject to the authority of human reason rather than divine revelation and that God doesn’t interfere with the day to day lives of humans and the world. I think that if the forefathers who were Deists were alive after Darwin’s studies and development of evolution they would either be agnostic or even atheists.
Yep, he pulls that stuff a lot, it’s cringeworthy.
JBP thinks Marx was complaining about inequality (that's false), and that capitalism was criticized by the gospels- 1400 years before capitalism even existed. The man is so arrogant, he makes loud proclamations without basic information.
He has developed this idea that the stories in the Bible answer just about every moral dilema and that always make me cringe.
I haven't stopped laughing ever since he went on stage to debate marxism with Zizek and proclaimed that he only read The Communist Manifesto in preparation. A book that was written to deliberately dumb down the theory to the level of understanding of a 19th century factory worker. Man, did the bar for being recognized as an intellectual drop worse than the crypto market...
He's still using, he never became clean.
None of these two people ever read Marx and yet they proceed do evaluate his ideas as if they know what they're doing. That's American intellectual culture in a nutshell for you.
I never realized that bundling mortgages of different risk levels into one tradable security was a genuinely well-meaning – although not completely well-thought-out – attempt to provide more not that well-off people with access to quality housing that unexpectedly backfired. I was under the impression that it was all about leveraging financial speculations beyond any limits without raising any red flags from a risk management standpoint. And that was the case from Day 1. Would anyone with actual knowledge in the field and practical experience in financial and real estate markets – who additionally happens to be a person of integrity :) – be able to validate Jordan’s interpretation?
It’s also a little surprising that Kyle didn’t press his guest on the Assange case with regard to the freedom of speech topic. Jordan talks about this issue all the time but I don’t think he mentioned Assange even once. Moreover, he posted his another teary-eyed video where he praised the situation with freedom of speech in the UK right in the middle of the “legalized lynching” (as Chris Hedges put it) of someone who is probably the most relevant figure in modern history as far as the issue is concerned…
But Mr. Peterson is right about one thing – decentralization is key…
Krystal and Kyle did an episode where they interviewed the guys that produced the phenomenal documentary "The Con" on the 2008 crisis: Patrick Lovell and Eric Vaughan. After watching the documentary, listening to their interview (Episode 48), reading Matt Taibbi's books and articles on the subject, and listening to Paul Jay's interview of the forensic financial investigator, Bill Black, I have to say that this is a subject that Dr. Peterson should not be discussing. I can't help wondering if people like this, who are held up as intellectual giants by so many, feel that they have to pontificate about anything...even subjects upon which they are woefully ignorant.
I’m not sure if it’s ignorance, though. Jordan might be not as smart and knowledgeable about all sorts of things as he thinks he is, but he’s hardly an idiot. However, despite the fact that he likes to emphasize that he is not an ideologue and being totally genuine in his investigations of reality, he seems to have a pretty rigid outlook and can be quite defensive about his views – like he was during this conversation, for instance :). It surely takes a certain amount of special knowledge to figure out the truth with regard to some intricate financial affairs. But it doesn’t take an Einstein to understand what’s been happening in the case of Assange. However…crickets. Our champion of free speech opted for silence. So it looks more like a deliberate choice to me...
All good questions, I think you are on the right track on the mortgage bundling, I do believe it was more complex like Peterson said and people were taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford too, so there was a lot more to it and got out of control. Regarding Assange and free speech, Peterson has never discussed that issue and oddly, nobody has ever pressed him on it, he whines about being blocked from Twitter, but Assange has lost his health over utilizing free speech.
yes, the initial intention was to minimize risk. The problem was that financial institutions and hedgefund types wildly mispriced the risk premia of the securities, in order to sell more and therefore make more money in bonuses, and when they ran out of prime mortgages, they pushed sub-prime mortgages to keep their volume (and bonuses) high. Then they paid the rating agencies to look the other way and rate all their crappy securities as safe as a goverment bond.
This all was allowed to happen due to de-regulation from the goverment
Who came up with the original initiative? That is, the sound version of the idea?
government agencies invented it. but once private firms started created their own without regulation, its when the conflict of interest started
Longtime follower and fan of both of you, Krystal and Kyle. New subscriber though. So excited to finally be here and support your phenomenal work! <3
I hope this long ass post doesn’t come across as a gotcha or anything of the sort. I’m just a leftie gay guy who attended the University of Toronto and always found Peterson to be a skilled orator who cloaks his reactionary politics in sophistry. As a behavioural neuroscientist who now teaches at the same university, I find his use of the DSM and clinical frameworks as a tool for gatekeeping people’s identities to be intellectually lazy and/or dishonest.
Some of my immediate thoughts regarding the interview:
1. Kyle, you had a very admirable degree of patience throughout the interview. Not surprised by this but still worthy of note. Mad respect to you, man.
2. At some point, Peterson said: "For every one person of that sort that we hypothetically save, we doom a thousand more as a consequence of confusion."
He also said: "It's absolutely and definitely the case that we've doomed thousands of kids to brutal and mutilating surgery and premature sterility."
Peterson speaks of a so-called social contagion/mass hysteria of gender confusion. You rightly called this a moral panic. Where is the evidence that anything resembling a catastrophe is occurring? That there's more people (openly/publicly) identifying as LGBTQ nowadays? That there's more people getting gender affirming surgeries than ever before? Those are the only pieces of 'evidence' Peterson cites to support his argument that gender affirming surgeries cause much more harm than good. He's basically saying that gender affirming interventions (and support for said interventions) is harmful because now there's more gender affirming surgeries. It's a circular argument: supporting and normalizing gender affirming surgery is bad because it leads to more gender affirming surgery which is totes catastrophic. In essence, it is a statement based entirely on a subjective revulsion to the notion of gender affirming surgery - or as he calls it, genital mutilation. Frankly, that choice of language/articulation is consistent with my characterization that his argument rests solely on a juvenile puritanical sense that there is an 'ick factor' to gender affirming surgery. Show me the data that warrant this high degree of alarmism...
3. "The clinical literature is clear: 80% of kids with gender dysphoria identify as homosexual when they mature. That means the vast majority of people who are being converted surgically are gay. How is that an advantage to the gay community?"
People can be trans and gay. They're not mutually exclusive. The fact that there is some overlap does not in any way mean that transness equates to confused gayness. Also, people's identities aren't static. Some people can and do question their sexuality and gender for years (e.g., coming out as a gay man and later coming out as a trans woman who is attracted to men). This shouldn't be shocking nor hard to wrap one’s head around: if you've always felt an incongruence between your assigned sex and gender identity in a society that is implicitly and explicitly telling you that you should feel no such thing, then figuring out whether or not to reconcile that incongruence is not going to be easy. In a similar vein, figuring out what conclusion to draw from that incongruence and what the next steps are for you to feel at peace with yourself is not going to be simple. In those circumstances, people's self-concept and self-identity can evolve. It's not always a linear process. To the untrained (read: cisgender) eye that may seem like reason to question the validity of people's identity (i.e., clearly you're confused and that confusion must mean that you're, in reality, a cis person in need of guidance. It is your confusion that needs addressing, rather than anything related to your gender or sex). But as you suggested, Kyle, anyone who values personal liberty and has a shred of humility would likely defer to the person since they're likely to be a better judge of who they are. Peterson made no compelling counter-argument here.
Another major assumption Peterson makes is that transness = gender dysphoria. But people can be trans and not have gender dysphoria. This is consistent with what the DSM-5 says, which one would think Peterson would take seriously given his dogmatic obsession with clinical guidelines and diagnostic criteria. Gender dysphoria is not a requisite feature of transness.
4. Peterson also says: "What used to be repressed? - first of all, they're not a community. No, neither I understand it nor you. First of all, they're not a community. That's just a catchphrase. It's a buzzword. "
The notion that there is no such thing as an LGBTQ community is laughable and honestly embarrassing. Was he making a semantic argument? I don't know but that is the most charitable interpretation I can come up with and I think that's a testament to the poor quality of his argumentation. I'd concede if his argument was that there is not ONE community but several (e.g. lesbians and gay men tend to socialize in separate circles, on average). But the notion that we have no community is so far removed from reality. Nevermind the countless subcultures, neighborhoods, establishments, art forms, vocabulary that can be directly traced to LGBTQ people. Yass hunty werq those backrolls the house down boots mawma, okurr. Unless you are part of the community or consume queer media, you will likely find the above lingo a tad foreign/novel. Twink. Bear. Chaser. Reading. Shade. Ballroom culture. Bathhouse culture and etiquette. These are all things that stem from various LGBTQ subcultures and continue to be relevant primarily to those who are LGBTQ. When people experience years of structural discrimination, they bandy together and form community. We queers may not be a monolith but our marginalization is rooted in rigid conceptions of gender and sexuality. We have a common enemy: cis-heteronormativity.
Also, I love that he started out challenging the idea that we've experienced repression and then proceeds to argue that there is no LGBTQ community. Perhaps he realized that arguing that we haven’t experienced repression was a losing battle. Not sure where he was going with that one.
5. Peterson also argues that the banning of conversion therapy is catastrophic because it has made it illegal/impossible for therapists to have an honest discussion about identity with their clients. Again, this is bullshit. People can still talk about their identities. Conversion therapy is a very specific thing and it is wholly separate from discussions with a therapist about things like gender dysphoria or questioning one's sexuality. This is another instance where Peterson promotes baseless alarmism. People defer to him because he's a clinical psychologist. It is an unfortunate case of the appeal to authority fallacy.
6. Peterson argues that the Abraham Accords warrant a Nobel Peace Prize. The same Accords that emboldened Israel to further oppress Palestinians. Who are the accords really good for? This, to me, is one of several instances where Peterson demonstrates that he isn't the heterodox thinker that he is often painted as. His positions on most issues are quite predictable. He just delivers his arguments in a manner that seems more evidence-based. But more often than not, the substance of what he's saying is textbook right winger shit.
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the episode!!! Just wanted to share my two cents. Thanks again for the great content <3
2. He may have not supported his argument well here, but he sure does elsewhere. Read Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier for the data justifying the alarmism.
Or just watch them discuss it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSKQfATa-1I
3. His point is that the inclusion of the T+ into the LGBT+ ideology is simply a product for intersectional critical theory for the sake of entrenching a victimhood ideology into western culture. It does no service to the feminist movement where a man can just become a woman or the LGB movement where we the trans movement is a gem to the fundamentalists that would find this as the ultimate form of conversion therapy.
JP has on several occasions shared his opinion on the latest renditions of the APA DSM.
Do enlighten yourself.
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/political-correctness/comment-on-the-apa-guidelines-for-the-treatment-of-boys-and-men/
4. Its not a community because the intersectional ideology that defines it and continuously grows it through the "+" will forever intersect and intersect and cut and divide until you can't determine a real connection between the people within the category and from within the category to include the marginalized you will inevitably marginalize more people. The ideology has spurned an industry in support of an endless civil rights movement in search for the next most marginalized to make money off of and add to the list. The LGB at the root of it will continue to be overshadowed by the most marginalized lesbian trans queer quadriplegic person of color.
Even the left acknowledges that it is not a community. It is an amorphous blob that serves to promote an ideology.
https://theconversation.com/why-you-should-think-twice-before-you-talk-about-the-lgbt-community-81711
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/01/have-gay-americans-outgrown-their-community/384996/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/07/28/trouble-lgbt-community
5. Bill C-4 is an absolute catastrophe worthy of alarm. Your claim of BS is false. A therapist can go to jail for not affirming a persons gender. That is the bottom line in the way the bill was written.
Check out the opinion of a lefty feminist for more info:
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2021/12/08/canada-has-passed-bill-c-6-and-it-feels-like-we-are-doomed/
Also some NYP:
https://nypost.com/2021/12/09/canada-bans-conversion-therapy-threatens-therapists-with-prison/
6. The same accords that normalized relations between an Arab nation the UAE and Israel. That is a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Although a 100+ year conflict wont be remedied so easy. It is a timeless shit show. And the Nobel Peace prize has been awarded for equally, if not more, controversial causes like Barak Obama or Yasser Arafat.
2. I am familiar with Abigail Shrier's book. It has zero evidence of anything resembling a catastrophe. It is alarmist TERF propaganda in dire need of citations. The 'studies' she relies on most heavily (and does cite) are so poorly conducted that one would honestly be generous to even call them pseudoscience. Happy to break down the specifics if you'd like but I'll keep it short for now as others have done this work already (e.g., Science-based Medicine .org). All I'll say is that the book peddles an unsubstantiated phenomenon, so-called "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" (ROGD). This is an unrecognized condition that no serious psychological or psychiatric association takes seriously. The basis for ROGD is a study that conducted interviews with unhappy/confused parents of trans kids who frequented very specific websites and blogs. Not exactly an elegant experimental design. It is not at all rigorous. In other words, the entire book rests on a false premise. So in terms of the book providing evidence of a catastrophe, I remain completely unconvinced.
Another point regarding the book: the first chapter is titled "Introduction: The Contagion". Contagion. That is a word that people associate with pandemics. If that's not alarmist, I don't know what is. The fact that most of Peterson's fans were completely unaware of there being a problem until he and other conservatives realized they could profit from their transphobic BS supports my argument: that there's no catastrophe and the vast majority of those who think otherwise do so BECAUSE of alarmist drivel from Peterson and other whiney transphobes.
Regarding your reference to Peterson's position on the DSM: I'm well aware of his diatribes about the DSM-5 and how it has become yet another horrific manifestation of cultural marxism that has produced Third Reich-like atrocities. I say this with the utmost sincerity and goodwill: ask yourself why you defer to Peterson over the scientific consensus on this matter. Science is about consensus based on a synthesis of the available evidence. Sometimes the evidence is pretty even so ideas get hashed out at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals as more evidence accumulates. It is by no means a perfect system but it yields better results than merely deferring to the positions of one individual with the right-sounding accreditations. If you find yourself agreeing with someone who you KNOW holds a widely rejected position in their respective scientific field, ask yourself (sincerely) how well you'd perform in a debate if you had to take the position of the consensus rather than Peterson's. Guesstimate how many hours you've spent watching and reading his work vs. the mainstream position that has scientific consensus. When someone tells you that they are a proponent of a widely rejected view, the burden of proof lies on them. Unfortunately, Peterson and co have yet to offer any compelling evidence to shift consensus. It is intellectually lazy to blame wokeness.
Another point regarding Shrier's book: she shows her egregious bias from the very beginning of the book where she tells you straight up that she is choosing to deadname and misgender a good chunk of the trans people she talks about ("For the sake of clarity and honesty, I refer to biologically female teens caught up in this transgender craze as 'she' and 'her'"). She repeatedly reduces people's transness to something borne out of "angst" and a drive to pursue a "fashionable cause". Please ask yourself why one should be so quick to accept Shrier or Peterson as arbiters for who is and isn't "caught up in the craze" or who is and isn't following a trend. Peterson and Shrier have peddled verifiably false information about our communities and histories time and time again. Peterson has demonstrated that he's unwilling or incapable of doing his due diligence with respect to learning about us and citing reputable sources (whether in terms of empirical research or even mere case studies). So his accreditations are immaterial at this point. I too have a PhD but if I repeatedly went on public forums, peddled harmful misinformation, cited pseudoscience, and made unwarranted conclusions, I should most definitely lose some standing in the field.
By the way, Shrier's book was published by Regnery Publishing, a self-described "politically conservative publisher" in the US that is behind other works like "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left" and "The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind". So even if Shrier's intent was not to write a book of TERF propaganda, the book is nevertheless operating as TERF propaganda.
3. Sorry, but this is ahistorical. Including the T into the LGB was not at all driven by "intersectional ideology". The T began being incorporated into the acronym before Kimberle Crenshaw even coined the term "intersectionality". As for your spiel about victimhood ideology, the reason the acronym includes the T is because, as I said in my original post, the barriers experienced by queer people are the consequence of the same societal factors: rigid beliefs on how gender and sexuality ought to be (AKA cisheteronormativity). Think of it this way: people very often conflate our identities. My trans friends are confronted with gay slurs quite often. As a gay man, I have been on the receiving end of transphobic slurs. When someone comes out as trans, they're often told they're probably just gay (e.g., case in point, Peterson in the video). In fact, in many languages and dialects, the words for gay and trans are the same. For example, in most Arabic dialects, transphobic and homophobic slurs are one in the same. There is no distinction made because they are seen as the same sin/personality flaw (e.g., weak masculinity/excessive femininity if you're a queer person who was assigned male at birth). I use this as an example to convey a simple idea: LGBTQ people have a shared struggle and a common enemy and have, thus, formed community and fought a lot of the same battles for decades. This is common knowledge and I'd be shocked if this was news to you or anyone reading this. So I wouldn't say that the lumping of our identities into one label (LGBTQ) is due to a "victim ideology" any more than the lumping of brown and Black people is. Brown and Black are broad categories of identity composed of ethnically diverse peoples that face non-identical challenges. Nonetheless, they have a shared struggle so it makes sense that categorizations that lump these diverse groups would arise over time as that can help those groups form coalitions to challenge the existing structures that marginalize them.
Regarding your point that "it does no service to the feminist movement where a man can just become a woman [sic]" - Please explain why feminism and gender affirmation are incompatible rather than just saying it like it's a foregone conclusion a la Jordan Peterson. Make your arguments and own them. What's your argument? That we should restrict trans people's freedoms due to a baseless inkling that doing so will help the feminist movement? I assume you're re-articulating the idea that doing so would be safer for cisgender women - another idea that has been peddled by alarmists. The statistics run counter to such a notion. Trans people are the disproportionate targets of gender-based violence. And there is no evidence that having, say, inclusive washroom policies, increases the risk of gender-based violence to cisgender women in those spaces. So again, not sure what that's about.
4. I'm curious, are you queer yourself? Obvi feel free to not share. I am. I have also worked in LGBTQ non-profits/charities and have dabbled in research in this area. The vast majority of us queer people don't give a rat's ass about the supposed dangers of including more people in our community. Every letter in the acronym refers to a group that is marginalized by cisheteronormative puritanism in some way, shape, or form. For the longest time, we were all so marginalized that we could only comfortably form safe community amongst ourselves. So over time, we developed art forms, instituted organizations and advocacy groups, opened up businesses, developed lexicons etc. that are unique to LGBTQ people. Communities are not monolithic. They have commonalities on one or more dimensions but nothing about the concept of community precludes it from being diverse on other dimensions.
Why does the + irk you (and many others who are predominantly not LGBTQ) so much? I'm a cis gay guy and most reasonable people will acknowledge that in this day and age, I have it easier than the average trans person. Why is it so bad for me to place more emphasis on their needs than mine? What frustrates me about this is that the loudest whiners when it comes to this topic are not even queer. To what extent does it truly impact straight and cisgender people's day-to-day to let us pivot our attention toward extending rights to our trans friends? Or for the community to recognize that it needs to be more inclusive of a subset of people who have been marginalized from within? Why are we pretending like the cost this imposes on society is so dire? Most people who are against gender affirming care have never met a trans person, have learned nearly everything they know from cishet fearmongerers like Peterson, and are actually completely unaffected by the matter.
5. You cite an op-ed and an NYpost article to argue that C-4 is an absolute catastrophe. Need I say more? I'd appreciate it if you could share a specific instance wherein a therapist of some sort got in trouble for discussing gender, gender dysphoria, sexuality etc. I am a gay guy in Canada and I have had more than one therapist for over 7 years. Never had a therapist who felt the need to tread lightly on these topics. I have a sibling and 3 close friends who are either psychiatrists, clinical psychologists or social workers. So far, 2/4 have balked at the notion that this is an issue for them. Again, I'm sorry but this is textbook fearmongering.
Go and read your post. You never point the reader to an actual harm warranting the alarmism. Instead, you make the slippery slope argument, point to potential harms etc. Let's look at some quotes:
No actual evidence articulated:
"He may have not supported his argument well here, but he sure does elsewhere. READ IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE BY ABIGAIL SHRIER FOR THE DATA JUSTIFYING THE ALARMISM."
Theoretical harms of "entrenching" trans inclusion on "western culture":
"His point is that the inclusion of the T+ into the LGBT+ ideology is simply a product for intersectional critical theory FOR THE SAKE OF ENTRENCHING A VICTIMHOOD IDEOLOGY INTO WESTERN CULTURE."
Trans inclusion as something that's bound to worsen fundamentalist queerphobia (e.g., conversion therapy):
IT DOES NO SERVICE to the feminist movement where a man can just become a woman or the LGB movement where we the trans movement that is A GEM TO THE FUNDAMENTALISTS that WOULD FIND THIS AS THE ULTIMATE FORM OF CONVERSION THERAPY."
Hypothetical harms of including trans people and others:
"the "+" will forever intersect and intersect and cut and divide UNTIL you can't determine a real connection between the people within the category and from within the category to include the marginalized you WILL INEVITABLY MARGINALIZE MORE PEOPLE."
6. Agreed that the Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless. I was merely saying that Peterson is not a heterodox thinker because he's heralding the Accords as a win that will spur more peace when in reality it has helped ease the displacement and violence of Palestinians by the settler-colonial state of Israel. As a Syrian person, I find it abhorrent when people who know next to nothing about the Middle East view the accelerated dispossession of Indigenous peoples as the path to peace. But I digress.
Anyway, I know I typed a lot. I wish Substack could do audio and video posts as that would be a much more efficient way of communication. Hope my vehement disagreement is well taken - I am expressive but I appreciate a discussion as long as it happens in good faith.
Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage is garbage pseudoscience. I'm a trans man myself who has been on testosterone for over 8 years, so I know how this hormone works, and I know a lot about the surgeries. Most of the information she provides in her book is flat out wrong and not true at all. I also know some of the people she manipulated into a interview for her book.
Your number 4 succinctly put. Thank you
I appreciate all of the info here; thanks for sharing. The only thing I found unsettling is the statement" we have a common enemy: cis-heteronormativity".
Being cis and hetero are both the statistical norm. Being L,G, or T is the statistical outlier. B is a bit vague, because as JP stated himself, there's varying levels of same-sex attraction across the board so I'm a bit fuzzy to when it would cross the threshold into bisexual territorial.
I'm from a refugee family in an ethnicity that takes up a whopping .3% of the US population, so I grew up in a very different culture from the people around me, "the norm". And in a stereotypical refugee way, I grew up really poor (another box ticked for marginalization for me I guess). There was certainly tension to harmonize the two throughout my life; to fit into either culture while having distinct parts of me being the "other" in each community.
But to make an enemy of the normativity of the 99.7% of Americans would be asinine. To expect them to take a backseat in their own lives to accommodate me because I was different is also asinine. If I'm being persecuted or oppressed, that's a problem. If others groups are, that's a problem as well. But if that's not enough, and your goal is a universal assimilation into a new manufactured culture where everyone feels "not normal", or perhaps the norm should feel not normal so you can, that's just as problematic to me.
First of all, you seem to take issue with the word "enemy". I used the term to convey that LGBTQ2+ people have a shared struggle against cisheteronormativity. I don't see why you're latching onto it and calling it "unsettling" as if I'm saying something controversial or provocative. My point was a retort to those who were arguing (like JP) that LGBTQ2+ people don't constitute a community. I'm saying that we have our own shared culture by virtue of the fact that we face the same exclusionary forces in society. Those forces can be categorized under the banner of cisheteronormativity.
Second, you misunderstand what cisheteronormativity is. The keyword is normative (rather than normal). If your existence is not factored into society, then your experience will necessarily be worse. If you cannot express your identity like others can (e.g., your gender having to fall into a binary within legal documents and in your social life, your long-term romantic relationship not being afforded the same rights as others' etc.) then you will by definition be excluded. Rejecting cisheteronormativity does NOT entail rejecting the statistical fact that I - as a gay man - am a statistical minority. That is a straw man argument. It DOES entail revisiting a lot of the structures of society that have long implemented a normative framework with respect to sex, sexuality and gender. Basically places in society where there is an assumption that everyone falls into the dominant groups. And yes, statistical minorities get to say "ummm, your client intake form doesn't have a box for me so if you don't want me to give you false info, perhaps it'd be wise to add a box for people like me."
We may be a statistical minority but we still exist in very large numbers.
Now you may say "Well, it's not nefarious. It's not like anyone's out to get you. These are just the byproducts of a society in which you are a statistical minority." And to that I say: things don't have to be nefarious to have a substantial negative impact on one's life. Cisheternormativity means that society becomes exclusionary even on auto-pilot. You don't need to ACTIVELY exclude when everything is built/designed with the assumption that you don't exist, thereby PASSIVELY excluding.
You make another straw man argument when you say "To expect them to take a backseat in their own lives to accommodate me because I was different is also asinine" - what backseat are you talking about here? Be specific. I'm over these rudimentary, grade school-level arguments. Try harder. Honestly. What are you saying? What do the things I'm advocating for take away from cisgender and heterosexual people?
You make YET ANOTHER straw man argument when you say "But if that's not enough and your goal is a universal assimilation into a manufactured culture where everyone feels 'not normal', or perhaps the norm should feel not normal so you can, that's just as problematic to me". Sorry but this is abysmal argumentation. Please try harder. At no point did I call for anything assimilationist. To call people by their correct names is not assimilationist. To recognize that gender is not binary is not assimilationist. You know what IS assimilationist? Forcing people into a binary and viewing any efforts to pushback as "unsettling" and "problematic". It is objective that people do not fall neatly into two buckets gender-wise. That is a fact. It has been a fact for eons. There is nothing assimilationist about saying "these people exist and we should probably make sure we account for that in x, y and z departments."
Affording queer people basic rights is not going to impact the vast majority of cishet people. But maintaining the status quo DOES impact queer people. So your characterization of what constitutes "problematic" and "unsettling" applies to things that would have no measurable negative impact on you or anyone. My characterization of YOUR stance as being the actual problematic and unsettling stance is rooted in the basic fact that LGBTQ2+ people face more hate crimes, violence and systemic exclusion than the cishet majority that you're so darn worried about. Your and JP's arguments maintain a status quo that objectively harms us.
As an aside, I'd ask you don't assume my intent. I'm not debating, I'm sharing a genuine thought and hoping to get a genuine response that could be enlightening. I am now doubting the value of doing so, considering how much correction I have to do with all of the "you misunderstand..." (Nothing you said there was news to me), "you make a straw man argument" (again, it's not a fuckin debate), "I'm over rudimentary grade-school arguments, try harder" (the arrogance around that statement alone is usually enough to convince me not to bother). And caps-locking definitely doesn't help. I guess we'll see how it goes.
You're correct; I take issue with the word "enemy". It's not an opponent (for which you can still have respect, empathy, and civility regarding the people on the opposing side), it's not an obstacle or impediment, for which you can. Enemy is far more incendiary, it's something you fight to conquer or slay.
That's why its more unsettling and quite valid for me to latch on to. I agreed and disagreed with a whole lot of what JP was saying. For that which I disagree, I'll oppose it in civil conversation with others and in the ballot box, but I can still feel there can be civility between the two parties. But when he went on the trans diatribe, his speech went more into a heated "I'm the hero battling the enemy" direction, which some people were obviously good with. I also found pretty damn unsettling.
The assumption that cis-hetero-normativity being the enemy is not controversial or provocative, I don't agree with at all. It's the enemy because of exclusionary forces both passive and active? Which societal or cultural or philosophical framework doesn't have that? Who successfully thought up anything practical and fully inclusive where everyone is everything all of the time? I'm straight, I'm cis, am I a part of the LGBTQA+ group too? If not, does excluding me and other straight cis dudes make the LGBTQA+ community the enemy? Should we band together and dismantle this exclusionary force?
I obviously don't think so. Which is why I was intentional in saying that I oppose oppression, not exclusion. No functional society that I've ever seen can cater to everyone, so it's a matter of who does the society serve best, and who, on balance, makes the most sense to serve better than others, and which society can best serve the people on the margins while still being functional.
Who's the "you" that isn't factored into society? LGBTQA+ is literally one of the hottest topics in the Western world right now. Do you mean LGBTQA+ affirming? In the market, there's way more elite corporations taking pro-LGBT than anti. On the private citizen level, self-identification as LGBT has, on average, doubled with every subsequent generation in the US. On the cultural level, there are leading protagonists on popular shows or movies that are in the LGBT category. The political level, I can't think of one right currently, that is afforded to straight cis folk that isn't to anyone in LGBT. Would you say the West is cis-hetero-normative? Then the "your existence is not factored into society" concept doesn't really work. Was it cis-heteronormative before, but now we moved the needle to "kinda cis-heteronormative"? Then at what point (specifically) is has the job been finished?
"Rejecting cisheteronormativity does NOT entail rejecting the statistical fact that I - as a gay man - am a statistical minority. That is a straw man argument."
Once again, not an argument, and not my position. You literally just straw-manned your own strawman here.
"It DOES entail revisiting a lot of the structures of society that have long implemented a normative framework with respect to sex, sexuality and gender. Basically places in society where there is an assumption that everyone falls into the dominant groups. And yes, statistical minorities get to say "ummm, your client intake form doesn't have a box for me so if you don't want me to give you false info, perhaps it'd be wise to add a box for people like me."
Yep, I'm aware. Which is again why my stance was, "Are they oppressive? That's a problem". Would you consider having a conversation so that a company updates a form oppressive? That's a genuine question.
"We may be a statistical minority but we still exist in very large numbers."
That's true. As a result, the statistical norm exists in even larger numbers.
"Now you may say "Well, it's not nefarious. It's not like anyone's out to get you. These are just the byproducts of a society in which you are a statistical minority."
I would not. My question is if it is actual oppression? Are you enduring "prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control"? Personally, I'd venture to say "absolutely" in some cases, in which I provide my support. The fact that cis-hetero-normativity hasn't been eradicated isn't that, as far as I've read.
"And to that I say: things don't have to be nefarious to have a substantial negative impact on one's life. Cisheternormativity means that society becomes exclusionary even on auto-pilot. You don't need to ACTIVELY exclude when everything is built/designed with the assumption that you don't exist, thereby PASSIVELY excluding."
Again, exclusions are an inevitability. Everyone experiences them in one form or another. If that's where the bar is for "we need change", that a bridge too far for me. I agree that there are exclusions that are oppressive and do have the substantial negative impact on one's life. Again, I've categorized those as "oppression".
"You make another straw man argument when you say "To expect them to take a backseat in their own lives to accommodate me because I was different is also asinine" - what backseat are you talking about here? Be specific. I'm over these rudimentary, grade school-level arguments. Try harder. Honestly. What are you saying? What do the things I'm advocating for take away from cisgender and heterosexual people?"
Barring the arrogance here, and the persistent call outs of all of my straw-manning, I'll answer. People have to categorize and use heuristics as a means of simplifying and short-handing their communication and expectations. It happens organically in any group of people that are working or living together. People don't have the mental bandwidth to consider every outlier in their day-to-day. Thus in my case, people assumed I was fully American, other people didn't know how to pronounce my full name, other people couldn't communicate with my parents due to a language barrier. I had to take time out to translate. How much of that onus was on them? Did they fail, due to their cultural normativity? I'd say not. It's not a reasonable expectation.
Some government forms didn't have enough blocks in the "Last Name" section to fit my last name. Did they fail me? Depends on what the consequence would be if I wrote past them into the margins of the paper. Was it a crisis that there wasn't a de facto affirmation of my ethnic identity? No, I survived quite unscathed. Because I didn't base my identity on whether a boilerplate form would affirm it. Again, it wasn't oppression.
For the people who subscribe to cis-hetero-normative view, encouraging them to consider the people on the margins is very much a positive thing. Demanding that they go through the difficulties of changing themselves and societal forces is a positive thing, when there are (again) oppressive consequences. Putting the onus on them to factor in all of the complexities of every kind of person in the margins, because you don't want to ever feel excluded in any situation, is narcissistic. Expecting them to only fix their cis-hetero-normative world view so you don't feel excluded in any situation because sex, sexuality, and gender marginalization is the only kind that matters, that would again, be pretty narcissistic. To be clear, I'm not assuming your position. I'm just stating my beliefs.
"You make YET ANOTHER straw man argument when you say "But if that's not enough and your goal is a universal assimilation into a manufactured culture where everyone feels 'not normal', or perhaps the norm should feel not normal so you can, that's just as problematic to me". Sorry but this is abysmal argumentation. Please try harder. At no point did I call for anything assimilationist. To call people by their correct names is not assimilationist. To recognize that gender is not binary is not assimilationist. You know what IS assimilationist? Forcing people into a binary and viewing any efforts to pushback as "unsettling" and "problematic". It is objective that people do not fall neatly into two buckets gender-wise. That is a fact. It has been a fact for eons.
How does this homogenization happen? For the person who genuinely doesn't believe that gender is not binary, how do they just organically get absorbed into the population that believes the opposite?
"There is nothing assimilationist about saying "these people exist and we should probably make sure we account for that in x, y and z departments.""
Let's check the definitions:
Assimilationism:
"the practice or policy of assimilating or encouraging the assimilation of people from all ethnic groups and cultures of origin"
Assimilate:
Sociology. the merging of cultural traits from previously distinct cultural groups, not involving biological amalgamation.
You just gave a perfect example of assimilation.
"You know what IS assimilationist? Forcing people into a binary and viewing any efforts to pushback as "unsettling" and "problematic". "
That would also be assimilation. Well done. If that's ascribed to me thinking that's a great idea, then you, again, assumed a position I don't hold.
The last paragraph would be redundant to respond to.
When I say "Is this what you meant? If so, then blah blah", I am openly acknowledging that there are blanks to be filled and that, consequently, an assumption is being made. I think that's super reasonable given the lack of detail in your post. I'm going above and beyond to engage with you. No one is assuming your intent. If you don't want people to misunderstand you or feel the need to fill in the blanks, don't respond with ambiguous takes. Be specific. I invite you or anyone reading this to ask the same of me if I'm vague at any point. Honestly.
You said: "I'm straight, I'm cis, am I a part of the LGBTQA+ group too? If not, does excluding me and other straight cis dudes make the LGBTQA+ community the enemy? Should we band together and dismantle this exclusionary force?"
You not being included in the LGBTQ2+ umbrella as a cishet person does not have the same impact on you as trans people not being able to seek gender affirming care or not being able to safely access bathrooms. In other words, you've set up a false equivalency. Trans people experience disproportionate amounts of violence and obscenely high homicide rates. That is an objective statement. The theoretical harms of cishet exclusion that you raise in your post are nothing but a thought experiment. There is zero evidence for cishet people being harmed via a system of exclusion-by-default and autopilot marginalization. Yes, there is no "cisgender" or "heterosexual" in the LGBTQ2+ acronym. But that is not the same as being excluded at a fundamental, structural level from society. Where you have to advocate for decades to get your relationships recognized by the legal system. Where you have to spend years and years advocating for your state to issue IDs that represent your true identity. Where you have to worry every time you walk down the street because you face disproportionate rates of violence and homicide. So yeah, there's no real exclusion of cishets and the fact that you're not actively celebrated within a community that faces harms precisely because they are NOT cishet is not a compelling way to make your case. I'm talking about real harms. You're talking about theoretical exclusion.
You said: "Again, exclusions are an inevitability. Everyone experiences them in one form or another. If that's where the bar is for "we need change", that a bridge too far for me."
So what are you saying? This is another instance where I genuinely feel I am left with no choice but to fill in blanks. What exactly is "a bridge too far" for you? The mere idea that some instances of societal exclusion ought to be addressed? Because that's what I'm saying. No one is saying that the world will ever be perfectly egalitarian. No one is saying that we need to rid the world of individual differences (or advocate for "homogenization", as you call it). What I AM saying is that addressing discriminatory policies is a good thing and that I have yet to see a single compelling argument for how the costs outweigh the benefits. All you've done is opine about the theoretical harms of cishet "exclusion" from LGBTQ2+ communities and draw a false equivalency between the objective harms endured by queer people with the ideological isolation a transphobe would feel as a consequence of queer-inclusive policies.
You said: "How does this homogenization happen? For the person who genuinely doesn't believe that gender is not binary, how do they just organically get absorbed into the population that believes the opposite?"
Once again, you've set up a false equivalency. The harms endured by queer people as a result of cisheternormative policies are not theoretical. You use words like absorption and assimilationist to describe something extremely innocuous: the mainstreaming of evidence-based ideas and demographic realities such as gender not being binary/trans people existing. The impact this has on people who subscribe to a binary framework is not at all comparable to the impact cisheternormativity has on queer people. There are people who did not believe in interracial marriages and still don't. Do we shed tears for them when society enacts policies that leave them/their views behind? Sorry, but unless I'm missing something, this strikes me as a shockingly weak argument.
You pose the example of having a long name as an instance of exclusion I too have a super long, hyphenated last name. One that the vast majority of anglophones can't pronounce. I don't expect people to pronounce my Arabic first name correctly either. So I go by an anglicized name. I can't fill in most forms without writing in the margins. I do not see those things the same way because there is no systemic exclusion of my identity as a long-name-holder. There is no community of us long-name-holders that is advocating for more rights. We don't have the same statistics saying that we encounter more rape and homicide because we have long names. Or that we have a shorter life expectancy. Or that we experience medical discrimination. By contrast, queer people ARE asking for more rights because the numbers are clear. Again, I'm not in theoretical la la land. I'm talking about objective realities. So yeah, no one is expecting the world to address every gripe they have. That is a BS non-argument that the JP's of the world spout to ascribe to their opponents the least charitable position. I do not expect intake forms to have longer brackets for last names just for me. It's not an undertaking that I see as particularly important or worthwhile. I do think it's worthwhile to listen to queer people when they remind the world of the indisputable fact that they are on the receiving end of disproportionate rates of violence, workplace discrimination etc. leading to significantly lower life expectancy. That our society is set up with a presumptuous, cisheternormative framework that leads to our marginalization is not a theoretical idea. Anyone having a good faith discussion would have no problem acknowledging this.
You repeatedly make the argument that exclusion is inevitable. Again, no one is arguing that a perfectly egalitarian world is possible. Yes, we cannot guarantee that no one will ever feel excluded. Duh. How is that in any way a counterargument against anything I'm saying? How is that an argument against gender-inclusive policies? It's as if you're saying: "You can't make everyone feel included! Plus, you're gonna upset the transphobes who are gonna feel ideologically isolated. So why bother?"
If I misunderstood some integral argument that you're attempting to make, don't hesitate to clarify. But that is honestly what I'm gleaning from your post. It's not compelling. No shade.
Based on the responses, I was very skeptical that you're coming at this with no shade and all in good faith, and even more so now. The unsettling feeling was actually full-on affirmed by that last response, as well as what you think is an approach that's "going above and beyond". Over the years, I've learned to identify the markers when a conversation has the potential to be worthwhile and illuminating, and when it's going to be fruitless. So I'm really not interested in your take on all of this or how you think I should behave in a conversation, and I'm opting out. Respond however you want, I won't read it.
Unfortunate. Can't say I didn't try. I'm always happy to have an open discussion about things. Even if it gets heated. Even if there's vehement disagreement on some aspects. How firmly one articulates their arguments is not an indication of bad faith. To call an argument weak or poorly thought out is also not a indication of bad faith. If you have a change of heart, try me. Otherwise, I hope you engage with the counterarguments to your position in good faith somewhere... If not with me, with someone else. Have a good day!
Thank you for taking the time to write this. You clarified some things for me related to his comments about therapists being hogtied because of conversion therapy laws. I plan to quote you on this. And, you're right. I was giving him more credit than he deserves because of his credentials. Sadly, a lot of people are doing that. With regard to his denial of a gay community, frankly, I wonder if envy entered into the equation...lots of straight folks, including me, are envious of the tightknit gay communities in our midst. He'd have to be blind not to recognize them. Finally, thanks for pushing back on the Abraham Accords...the only comment he made that made me fall of my chair!
I think JP has a habit of not fulling researching topics before forming strong opinions and taking action on them, which is not wise. He never believed diet could affect his daughters health, which resulted in her having to get many surgeries as a kid from her autoimmune disease, which she later in life cured with diet. He also though benzodiazepines were harmless, until he found himself in the middle of hell with them. It is the same with this issue. He needs to talk to some actual trans people. It seems like he is getting all his info from memes online or something. You are wrong about this too Jordan.
"...We have a common enemy: cis-heteronormativity...."
Then you wonder why there is a 'hardening' of attitudes to the politics/perceived agendas of the alphabet 'community'. When without doubt our western societies had been moving towards greater acceptance of people, whatever they wanted to be, at the level of individuals.
My recognition in my senior years after a life-time of 'left'/liberal values and being the product of 1950's radical left political father...is that natural/blood family (nuclear and extended) is a cornerstone of cohesive community. Strong cohesive community has the potential to accept outliers to a degree. The 1960's (and beyond) social changes were ultimately used by the globalist marketplace to weaken family and community and enable greater centralised controls. Basic marketplace things like a more compliant work force were produced creating a 'war at home' to weaken men inside unions, alongside literally feminising the work force...compliance wanted and achieved.
The 'alphabet community' is another weaponised devise (the more splintered groups there are the easier centralised control) to achieve a 'reset' leaving the same elite and their marketplace in charge. Good luck all, as 'we' push back and to do such 'we' need recognise who and what the enemies are. It is not the families that produced you.
I just have one question. How can anyone be genuinely transgender without gender dysphoria? The whole essences of transgenderism is the feeling of being born in the wrong body, that the sex assigned to you at birth doesn't match the gender you internally perceive, ie gender dysphoria. Please explain.
Hi, ihsahn!
First and foremost, I'm cisgender so there are certainly many trans people out there who are better equipped to talk about this.
Onto your question - gender DYSPHORIA involves CLINICALLY SIGNIFICANT DISTRESS due to the incongruence between what one is assigned at birth vs. one's authentic, experienced gender identity. Here's a relevant quote from the DSM-5:
"Transgender refers to the broad spectrum of individuals who transiently or persistently identify with a gender different from their natal gender. Gender dysphoria refers to the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender. Although not all individuals will experience distress as a result of such incongruence, many are distressed if the desired physical interventions by means of hormones and/or surgery are not available.”
Another point to bear in mind is that to be diagnosed with any psychiatric disorder or condition, (including gender dysphoria), there needs to be an impairment in functioning that impacts one's social/interpersonal life, occupation, health etc. Here's a relevant quote from the DSM-5 on what constitutes a mental disorder:
"A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above."
So to summarize:
1) Gender dysphoria involves experiencing clinically significant distress. Not every trans or non-binary person experiences this. They may experience an incongruence between their assigned sex and gender vs. their authentic, experienced gender identity without having clinically significant distress.
2) For anything to qualify as a disorder, it has to impair one's functioning in some way, shape, or form. Again, some people may feel distress about the incongruence between their assigned sex and gender vs. their authentic, experienced gender identity. But for that distress to equate to a DISORDER, it has to have a palpable impact on one's functioning. Not every trans person experiences this.
Hope this helps :)
I appreciate your long, detailed, and well-structured easy-to-read post.
I agree with your assessment of petersons' methods and goals; I see him as someone who knows what music speaks to a certain audience he is trying to court. He creates a mesh of fancy sounding words, concepts, and "facts". Conservatives embrace these "facts" because these facts reinforce their already held fears, transforming their fears into facts, logic, and science! They're not crazy, their the sane ones holding the center of an ever devolving moral landscape. And that fact, that the liberals are wrong headed, is borne out by the fact that people on the same end of the ideological spectrum are in charge of large institutions that have messed up the world in a variety of ways, including economical.
I'm not sure if you've seen it before, but there is a clip from a joe rogan interview, where peterson states that he found a way to monetize sjw's. He and joe then go on to chuckle and laugh about that. I feel that is one of the most genuine things he has ever said.
I wanted to ask for your opinion on something, and I'm probably going to come off as a total dumbass, but it's something I've found swirling around in a corner of my brain when I see this topic talked about. The topic is people who are trans and want to surgically transition to make their sex and gender the same. I have zero personal/anecdotal experience, within my social circle or anything like that, hence my relatively high ignorance. First let me state that I defer to the relevant experts in the field, and if they (doctors and psychiatrists) say this is the best option, then so be it. But I would like to ask about one thing. If gender is a construct, then is it possible to construct a gender with gender norms that fit them, instead of surgical transition. Allow me to elaborate...
...If a girl says she feels like a boy, if I understand correctly, she is saying she doesn't identify with the constructs associated with girlhood: dolls, frilly pink dresses, makeup, and dainty pursuits.
...If a boy says he feels like a girl, he is saying he doesn't identify with the constructs associated with boyhood: rough and tumble, physically aggressive, getting dirty, and associated traits.
Is it possible then for the girl in this scenario to lead a life with traits associated with the construct of boyhood: she dresses like a boy, is rough and tumble, no makeup, etc.
And vice versa for the boy in this situation.
Would this solution means that their biological sex and gender identity align and they are leading the life they want to lead?
The EPIDEMIC of young girls saying they “feel” like boys is obvious for anyone who has eyes. You can keep the gaslighting all you want, but influencing children into this collective delusion is criminal and in a few years it will definitively cause a colossal backlash. Especially from working class people.
"Obvious for anyone who has eyes" is not the evidence you think it is. I remain unconvinced.
Colossal backlash. Sounds like alarmism all over again. Sorry, my politics are not based in a gut feeling that there's an impending backlash or that a buncha transphobes and TERFs are going to be triggered. Also, LGBTQ people, on average, have a lower SES than the rest of the population so typically the people protesting the advancement of trans rights tend to be of a higher SES than the trans people they're protesting against.
Just because you can't fathom the idea that the brain can produce congruent and incongruent experiences of gender and sex doesn't mean it is fictitious or implausible.
Ask any working class person from any culture or country why they think about of children changing genders and you’ll have an idea of the backlash that is coming.
On average, most people across the world would react badly to having a kid who is part of the LGBTQ community. I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I'm well-aware.
No one's forcing anyone to do anything. If the mere removal of barriers is enough to piss people off, so be it. Not the first time and it won't be the last.
It's frustrating to hear people talk about "the working class" as if LGBTQ people aren't disproportionately part of that societal class. It may seem nitpicky at first but queer identities are often painted as a phenomenon ("mass hysteria" in the words of Peterson) that has been spread by elites when, in reality, queer people have always been disproportionately poorer. So really, on average, people who are queerphobic (e.g., transphobic) tend to be from higher socioeconomic crusts of society than the trans people they're excluding. We are better off NOT framing this issue as queerness = a thing peddled by the rich. It's simply not true and is pretty bad Comms lol. Sure, some elites have been exposed to more diverse groups and have thus become more inclusive of queer people. But our allies are not us. This is yet another instance where people are looking to non-LGBTQ people to understand LGBTQ people. Talk to us. We are here. Hi. It me. I gay.
You and everyone that takes the same position as you seems to warn of an IMPENDING threat, a COMING backlash, a contagion GOING OUT OF CONTROL etc. Queer people have been facing puritanical resistance for eons. We're not going to be intimidated by more. Nor should we. The prospect of more conservative resistance is no reason for us to short-change the trans people within our communities.
I'd rather be principled yet adaptable in the face of evidence rather than being a reactionary.
... since this is extremely removed from my wheelhouse and seems like people are arguing from different universes, I'm curious. Have you looked into Abigail Shrier what evidence she cites in her book? This is one I tend to lean more one way than another, but I honestly can't tell what's actually happening, because both side seem to dismiss the other's claims out of hand.
Respect. If you want to talk to Jordan again, tell him you want to drill down on this question of when the Left goes too far. And also I think if you have a conversation with him beforehand about wanting to be succinct on issues and get to the next one, and that you are going to have to interrupt him, that he will be man enough to understand his failing when it comes to ranting and rambling. Even huge fans of his are frustrated by his inability to stick on the point and be brief. He also doesn't let other people talk, and again he's had this criticism from his supporters, so I think he'd take that well. Also, he needs a smart, sharp person of good will from the left to have reasonable rational conversations with him. You'd actually be doing him a favor - he can be his own worst enemy - and I say this as a huge supporter of his.
He has perfected gish gallop like Deepak Chopra.
Sometimes Jordan rants and rambles to the point that he'll contradict himself, the Jim Jefferie interview was pretty funny. The problem I have with Jordan, is that he'll never just agree with anyone he has to input his own 2 cents into everything. You can ask him, do you think everyone deserves to be happy? And he'll respond, "Being happy is bad for you blah blah blah blah!"
It’s even worse than that, he will take something simple and turn it into an over complicated response, usually he will start with “what do you mean by that?” or “what does that mean?”, you know a bunch of circular reasoning is coming after that and when he can’t really articulate what he wants to say without getting defensive he usually resorts to “it’s complicated” and cops out.
You said it much better than I did! Thank you....
In answer to Peterson's rhetorical question related to the prevalence of conversion therapy: "How many times did that happen in the last 20 years?" researchers have found that approximately 698,000 LGBTQ2 adults in the U.S. have received conversion therapy at some point in their lives, including about 350,000 who were (mostly) coerced into receiving it as adolescents. (This data is from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law and their methodology is explained in detail on their website.) No one who grew up in an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian environment would question these numbers....I'm 71-years old and I remember hearing testimonials from gay man who had been successfully converted back when I was in my early twenties (of course, what got less attention is when these conversions failed). It's common practice in evangelical Christian circles and has been for a very long time. Admittedly, this is a small number given the total population of the US and I'm not sure that I'm comfortable legislating something like this despite the harm it causes...I just don't know. Finally, without offering an opinion on anti-conversion laws, I'm confused about why Dr. Peterson asserted that these laws forbid therapists from discussing a client's identity during the course of their therapy. Is he unhappy that a therapist can no longer use talk therapy to facilitate a conversion in their sexual orientation? Not sure, but it seemed to me as if he was confusing the issue.
All of those LGB figures are extrapolated estimates from a sample size of 1,345. Of that sample, the survey asked the following:
"Did you ever receive treatment from someone who tried to change your sexual orientation (such as try to make you straight/heterosexual)? If yes, please make all that apply.
-No
-Yes, from a healthcare professional (such as a psychologist or counselor who was not religious focused)
-Yes, from a religious leader (such as a pastor, religious counselor, priest)"
The WI@UCLA paper claims that "we started with
the proportion of LGB adults ages 18 to 59 who report having received treatment to change their sexual orientation (6.7%) from the Generations Study."
Then that means 90 LGB people reported receiving conversion therapy at some time(s) over the span of 41 years.
Beyond that, the WI@UCLA paper does not clearly indicate the composition of healthcare professional vs. religious leader conversions of those 90 people.
They mention 95% confidence interval with no mention of margin of error. Although it is probably around 2.5% with a 1.5k sample vs a 10mil population.
Ok, now to what JP was saying:
"...virtually no one from the mainstream psychotherapeutic community would ever do that. And so, you hand a handful of fundamentalists, perhaps, who were doing this now and then in some situations and we made laws everywhere that made it impossible for everyone to have an honest conversation with their caregivers."
That study is vague as it does not clearly indicate the source of conversion therapy for the LGB community specifically, excluding the T+. JP specified what he meant: a tiny minority of people, maybe about 0.2% of the US population (700k), was the target of conversion therapy over a span of 41 years at the hands of religious institutions.
JP is unhappy that a therapist is now coerced to affirm their patients stated identity, which undermines the therapeutic process. There is nothing wrong with exploring one's own identity in a therapeutic setting and realizing they may be in error. There is everything wrong with shock or other pain treatment to force an outcome in identity, which is the worst in what conversion therapy was implemented.
Thanks for that info.
I wish Kyle had talked to Peterson about his thoughts on climate change and what we should do.
Two legends collide.
Amazing guest.
I just hoped you'd pull him more to the left.
This was both enlightening and sad. Peterson used to be a voice I gravitated towards. What he's turned into post addiction and rehab is much different but sounds just similar enough to be considered the same.
Dr. Peterson, the reluctantly famous academic usually struck to his field of study, wasn't afraid of new information, would come up with new ideas on the fly, and was fun to watch debate people. Jordan Peterson the left bashing pundit moves the goal posts a lot and seems to have forgotten how to say"I don't know".
I disagree with your claim and can provide evidence as to why you are wrong. JP is much more humble than you give him credit. You must not have been listening very where to the several times when JP explicitly said with gravity and pause, "I don't know." Let me help you out with that.
Timestamps :
00:05:52 "I can't say for sure."
00:31:51 "I don't know."
00:42:09 "I don't know" x2
00:57:00 *long pause, thinking carefully* JP: "I don't know." K: Really? JP: "Really."
1:00:09 "When you ask me about how that should be regulated, my answer is I'm not exactly sure about that."
I do think Jordan Peterson has become more 'forthright' with his language in his opposition to various things. However I view this as understandable with the relentless demands to 'identify', to censor your opinions/speech etc etc. I also agree with other people comments, that with what has been happening across our western societies...its past time for being an academic sitting on the fence. 'We' are being forced to take sides on many issues, as extremes are being pushed.
You are a good listener. Appreciated