Jordan Peterson explaining how 'identity' isn't something you can impose on others...its a negotiated position

[mooncuplanding]

Love him or hate him, this is great at articulating the pysc issues around the trans agenda

I agree with Peterson on a lot about trans issues, but I don't see him as a friend of women

I would assume Peterson supports equality of opportunity for women, education for women, women working or being promoted . He has spoken out against pornography (Yes. Young men: stop using pornography. There is nothing about it that is good)

I agree with Peterson on a lot about trans issues, but I don't see him as a friend of women.

I don't think he tries to be a friend of anybody. But that said, I think he adds positively to gender debates because he never argues against opportunity or against individual capability. He only argues large scale social effects. For example he'd argue why you see fewer women heading up Fortune 500 companies but he'd also be the last person to argue against any individual woman who did. The reverse if anything.

He is really complicated on women's issues. His trans stance is nothing about women, it's about truth and logic only and this is probably the stance that has wide appeal.

I like what he has to say.

That was an interesting watch and Petersen made some excellent points.

I also watched the super-polite Canadian TV debate with JP, Theryn Meyer and a Gender Studies academic from UoT a couple of links below. JP is impressively calm. The gender studies academic’ opening gambit was that biological sex does not exist. I suppose if your whole academic career is built on this pomo cobblers, you have to hold the line and repeat its founding tenets forcefully and often.

I liked what he said, whatever his beliefs may be in other areas. Just that the triple idea (sex, gender (identity), and social, interactive gender), rather thsn the simple sex/gender dichotomy has been talked about elsewhere. Seems quite common in academic feminism/philosophy/psychology and not all Judith Butler pomo nonsense. And reduces to the be nice and push down the conflict with sex and the conflict with social aspects (like not mentioning that a transwoman 'mother' can't chestfeed without major possibly harmful intervention not actually being female, but let's not mention all that! Or that we can spot a male, however they identify, or the many transwomen who not just look but act like men). Whereas with gay folks, the idea is treat me socially the basic way you did before you knew I was, and I don't require you to believe it's not a sin. Behaving decently to folks with a range of sexual orientations or a range of 'gender' presentations isn't the believe what you know isn't true and don't mention the facts mindfuck that TRAs require of their devotees and handmaidens.

Need to watch this later.

Yes thanks for these. I am finding him very intelligent and articulate.

I was reading 'The Metaphysics of Gender' by Charlotte Witt (OUP, Studies in Feminist Philosophy). Which like a lot of this academic feminist stuff is fairly dense (but unlike Judith Butler not totally incomprehensible!). And the same basic separation talked about, I think, between biology/material reality (i.e sex, and what bits and bobs you have, for example), your 'inner' sense of who you are (which may or may not include a strong sense of 'gender identity'), and then your 'social gender' (which is all about how others treat you and where you fit in socially).Trying to impose your inner sense on gender on others (i.e force them to treat you differently in terms of your social gender), and ignore biology in the process, really does begin to seem quite mad when you view it like that. Why should your personal, subjective, internal view of yourself override everything else?

It shouldn't, and more importantly it doesn't. I think a person has to have a certain level of narcissism to even contemplate making that kind of request, much less to press ahead with it once it's clear that other people aren't having it.

His trans stance is nothing about women, it's about truth and logic only and this is probably the stance that has wide appeal.

It is this exact approach that is going to protect us - the truth and logic approach.

Whilst it is seen purely as the privileged women with vaginas being meanies and unkind to the less privileged women with willies we are not going to get anywhere.

I'm happy with him not being a friend to women, I can take that; I don't expect everyone to be my friend.

I agree The GoldenBough

I have watched Peterson bring up this argument against trans on multiple occasions now and no-one is able to defend against it. AND I hear men saying openly "yes this is rubbish"

The reality is this is the only way to engage men in this debate, and it is the crux of the debate anyway, the women's rights part of it is a consequence but not necessarily a moral stance that many people can get behind.

That's a really good point golden and mooncup. Some men will actually be far more concerned by the lack of logic than about women's rights.

It's not some genuine moral dilemma of women's rights versus perfectly reasonable trans rights: the 'transwomen are women' argument lacks logic, it is not based in biological reality. It is not honest.

"This nonsense is an insult to our intelligence" is a tack I've found to work well with men.

Yeah, the 'changing room' is open to counter arguments because you have to stereotype to 'win' the argument which turns most men off.

This argument is at the base level and cannot be broken down with anything other than delusion

Yes. Talking about some men being a risk to women shuts men off to the argument because NAMALT and they feel personally 'got at'. Which I can understand.

How TIMs are a subset of men and no kind of women has passed most people by is something that baffles me completely.

I downloaded the Kindle sample for Peterson’s ‘Twelve Rules for Life’ out of curiosity. Norman Doidge’s foreword is so long it accounts for about 87% of the sample and you get barely any Peterson, but it is an excellent insight into why Peterson is sticking to his guns on this. I recommend reading it, even if you only read the foreword. I wanted to bookmark some quotes to include on this thread, but you can’t highlight or bookmark the sample. I will be buying it to read this weekend so will post in due course.

Thanks for that. I think he's great, but I would recommend jumping past the interview with the idiotic guy to around 4 minutes, when it's just him. Apparently he'll be touring in the UK again, and I'm really hoping to get a ticket.

I completely agree. You wouldn't very well consider someone by their own opinion of themselves, but by their actions. Someone could tell you they are "honest", and they identify as an "honest person" but if they are also a burglar then you might not agree.

I'm binge watching Peterson since I listened to Russell Brand's podcast with him. His main thing is truth, logic, philosophy and social science statisctics so I think that is why his detractors haven't been able to make any of the slanders stick because all you need to do is listen to what he says. I think he's not anti or pro women because his main thing seems to be personal growth at spiritual/human level. The Cathy Newman C4 interview was interesting as she was trying to catch him out and he was trying to present the evidence as opposed to the possibilities.

I'm sure he'd love me.

I psychologically am pretty much going nuts over being constantly told that black is white.

Its not just about my sibling's identity when they go 'Oh actually I'm a woman'. Its also about mine and how I relate to others.

When I am told that I have a sister, when I grew up with a brother, I am robbed of a way of communicating my identity with others by the simple question: 'Do you have any brothers or sisters?'.

I find this a really hard question to answer. People are asking me this because they want to see if they can relate to me in some way. Eg 'Yes I have a brother too!' or 'Yes I have a sister too!' etc etc.

But because I didn't have a sister growing up because I had a brother, this is problematic to me. I don't want to answer 'I have a sister', because fundamentally its not true. My identity was formed around having a brother and my experience of life was around being a brother / sister pairing. I can not relate to people who reply 'Yes I have a sister too'.

My identity is somehow removed from me, when some else moves the goal posts of the experience of my life and how people relate to each other.

I don't want to lie about my experience because it affects how I relate to others, and my own identity.

Its about a removal of power in my own self worth and identity which has been taken by someone else at my expense.

When people are making polite conversation, they don't want to be thrown a curveball with 'actually its complicated' because they aren't really that interested in how fucked up your family is. They just want a nice safe conversation which is uncontroversial and not political. They want to talk about their kids and how they interact as boys / girls with each other.

And that's why I think, they'll be a lot of very fucked up sibling of trans people out there. You can not just switch your brain off, and use different pronouns, because its not just about pronouns. Its about your lived experience and you relate to others through your identity which is a collective set of markers. Other people might be happy removing those marker points for themselves, but in doing so they remove them for others whom they share that particular marker point with too, which isn't just uncomfortable, its destroys their own identity.

I'm probably saying something that no one understand and can't link with the video and what Peterson says, but I'm just trying to rationalise it and explain it out.

If people like what Peterson has to say on these kinds of topics, they might also like the husband / wife couple of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying.

They're a pair of evolutionary biologists who worked at, and then resigned from Evergreen State College in the US over a proposed 'Day of Absence' for anyone who wasn't a person of colour.

They are fairly typical left-leaning biology academics whose personal experience with the extremes of various advocacy movements have pushed them through the looking glass somewhat, and they have a very interesting take on a huge number of issues, including what evolutionary biology has to say about trans issues, #metoo, relations between the sexes, the concept of gender etc.

It's a really lengthy podcast, but some really enjoyable and interesting stuff in there.

Everyonematters
I agree with Peterson on a lot about trans issues, but I don't see him as a friend of women.

I agree - same with Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris - Harris at least talks about the systemic subjugation of women which the other two don't. Peterson's descriptions of women are classic male views - the virgin, mother or whore. I wish they all would stop talking for women and learn to listen to them. Harris is the best of the 3 re women but he goes way off track around sexual assault and rape - here's a 10 min video of his on feminism (). Starts well…but ends badly. Here's some extracts:

Men shouldn’t ignore violence against women…However, the conversation swings way too far the other way - all men cast as potential creeps and rapists - ways of demonising all men online. Weinstein stories run in one direction - men don’t get sexually victimised and preyed upon by rapacious women in positions of power above them. ..Women uniquely vulnerable to this sort of predation - seen through lens of self defence (advocates guns for women living alone). Men need to acknowledge the capacity in general for men to be creeps. However now seemingly innocent flirtation cast as sexual harassment in the workplace.

It matters what the intentions and character of the person committing the offence are. Thus it’s bad to relax definitions of rape so you can't distinguish between rape/rape and something like sexual harassment or even something like sexual assault that isn’t a rape. Being groped is not the same thing as being raped. And the kind of person who would grope a woman on a subway isn’t precisely the same person who would rape them at knifepoint. There are gradations even to the most pathological behaviour. All the details matter and I worry that in talking about these things, we are showing more and more a susceptibility to a kind of moral panic and sloppiness where words are becoming meaningless.

He has no idea about the impact of any sexual assault imo - it's not user centred but "dad knows best what's best for women"

SomeDyke's post was most clarifying for me, where she summarised 3 aspects of identity (from 'The Metaphysics of Gender' by Charlotte Witt):

1. biology/material reality (i.e sex, and what bits and bobs you have, for example),
2. your 'inner' sense of who you are (which may or may not include a strong sense of 'gender identity'), and then
3. your 'social gender' (which is all about how others treat you and where you fit in socially).

And also her discussion of "men who had sex with other men (hence objectively would classify them as either gay or bi), yet they did not 'identify' as gay. But when it came to safer sex advice and the AIDS crisis, it was rightly realized that however they identified, their needs had to be addressed, hence the 'men who have sex with men' phrase appearing. Their subjective 'identity' (or refusal of one) was not allowed to override their own objective risks to their own health and that of others.

Thanks, SomeDyke!

H'm, got to say I don't like him. Yes, I agree with him over language and logic, but there's a relentless, rather superior air about him which doesn't fit neatly with the idea of him as a feminist.

Speaking of Heather Heying and Evergreen State College, there was this ruckus at a talk at a Portland college when a group of students protested threw a massive toddler tantrum when she mentioned the biological differences between men and women:

https://twitter.com/binturner/status/969028893775720449

Has to be seen!