Jordan Peterson: ‘Gay kids are being convinced they’re transsexual. That’s not so good for gay people, is it?’
telegraph.co.ukYouTube videos on his interests in ethics, theology and myth. All that changed in 2016 when he challenged, on free-speech grounds, a proposed Canadian law, C-16, which he argued would legally compel him to use transgender people’s preferred pronouns. (It became law in 2017.)When I met him, he had recently appeared on Channel 4 being interviewed by Cathy Newman – a famously combative encounter on subjects including the gender pay gap, relations between men and women, and the rise of identity politics – that quickly went viral and has since had more than 38 million views on YouTube.In the years since, Peterson has become the most visible, outspoken and certainly the most polarising figure in the ‘culture wars’ between Left and Right, challenging the new orthodoxies of political correctness that have permeated academia, education, and political and cultural life.His book 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos, has sold more than five million copies in English and been translated into 50 other languages.
Through his talks, podcasts and videos – his own YouTube channel has five million subscribers – he has amassed a devoted army of followers, many proclaiming, dramatically, that he has saved their lives, bringing them back from the brink of depression, alienation and despair.
He has also galvanised an army of critics. Added to which, in 2020 he almost died after undergoing a prolonged and, to outward appearances, bizarre, treatment in which he was flown to Russia and put into a coma to free him from physical dependence on antidepressants, which was itself the culmination of a medley of ailments that boggle the imagination.It has been a period that he readily describes as ‘insane’.
