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I have just endured the sobering experience of watching the always very intelligent and professional Steve Paikin chair a panel about the trans-gender controversy that centres on University of Toronto professor Dr. Jordan Peterson. I had vaguely followed the story as it percolated up in the press, much of the frothings in which must usually be taken lightly. It was, I fear, a piercing glimpse into what great and venerable statesmen of my youth such as Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Louis St. Laurent called “days that I shall not see.” I did not, until now, grasp the fine balance between gratitude and wistfulness in their invocation of that phrase; as a young person, I thought it the license of the great to engage in histrionics, and I now claim it as the right of lesser yet aging people, such as myself.

For those who have sagely ducked or otherwise been spared exposure to this controversy, Dr. Peterson rejects the right of his students to require him to address them, if they are trans-people (i.e. in some state of flux between the male and female poles of gender identification — not their orientation, whether they are homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual or asexual has nothing to do with it), otherwise than in a way that consigns them to the claustrophobic confines of being male or female. “Ze” for he or she and “Zir” in place of his or him are the sticking points, but what is accumulating behind these imbecilic distinctions is quite sinister. The tape Steve Paikin ran of Dr. Peterson being reviled and shouted down and physically intimidated at the University of Toronto was distressing and we may be on the edge of a defining moment in our jolly and progressive Canadian civilization. Dr. Peterson sees it as a matter of freedom of expression and believes that others do not have the authority to require him to address them in a newly-hatched vocabulary devised to oppress the “gender-binary” conventional practice, while his opponents profess to believe that in refusing to do so, he is committing a hate crime punishable by human rights commissions or tribunals.