Joe Rogan Continues to Spew Anti-Trans Rhetoric on His Spotify Podcast
an estimated 11 million listeners per episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast — to spew harmful anti-trans rhetoric and false information while platforming bigotry.
On his January 25 episode, Rogan hosted Jordan Peterson, a retired Canadian psychology professor turned right-wing provocateur who posited that being trans is both a “sociological contagion” and similar to the now-debunked “satanic panic” of the 1980s.When Rogan steered the discussion to the subject of transgender people, Peterson explained his opposition to Canadian federal Bill C-16, which amended the country’s human rights protection to include gender identity. “I knew full well as a clinician that as soon as we messed with fundamental sex categories and changed the terminology, we would fatally confuse thousand of young girls.
I knew that because I knew the literature on sociological contagion,” Peterson said. In response, Rogan said it was similar to the work of anti-trans author Abigail Shrier, who also claimed that trans people are a contagion, and who had previously appeared on his podcast.
In her work, Shrier discusses the concept of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” which comes from a since-corrected study by Brown University researcher Dr.
