Community members gathered outside the University of Toronto’s Sidney Smith Hall Wednesday to protest a professor’s online lecture they say was offensive towards to the trans and non-binary people, but the professor at the centre of the controversy says the demonstrators are missing the point.

In a Sept. 27 YouTube video entitled, “Professor against political correctness: Part I,” University of Toronto psychology Jordan Peterson rails against Bill C-16, among other things, which aims to amend the Canadian Human Right Act and Criminal Code to include protection for gender identity or expression.

Peterson drew the ire of some for criticizing the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s definition of “gender identity,” which is described as a person’s “sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.”

“I don’t know what ‘neither’ means,” Peterson says in the video, “because I don’t know what the options are if you’re not a man or a woman. It’s not obvious to me how you can be both because those are, by definition, binary categories.

“There’s an idea that there’s a gender spectrum but I don’t think that’s a valid idea, I don’t think there’s any evidence for it,” he continues, adding that the idea that gender is independent from biological sex is “a politically motivated and ill-informed opinion.”

Later in the video, he talks about a hypothetical situation where he would reject a non-binary student’s request to use “gender-neutral” pronouns, saying, “I don’t recognize another person’s right to determine what pronouns I use to address them. I won’t do it.”

Riven Thorne, an attendee at Wednesday’s rally, told the Star that it was “shocking that someone (who) literally does not believe in your gender and in your pronouns is teaching and is able to educate other people when they need, themselves, to be educated.” Thorne isn’t a U of T student but said felt compelled to attend the community-organized event anyway, the Star was told.

Another attendee, Arden Chow, agreed.

“People don’t seem to understand what a big effect refusing to use someone’s pronouns has on them, it can really mess them up,” Chow said, adding that, in high school, they felt unsafe and ultimately left the school because teachers and other students did not address them by their preferred gender.

Along with speeches decrying Peterson’s video, protesters also handed out leaflets to passersby with titles like “Whose gender is it anyway?” that explained gender spectrum and trans, intersex and non-binary identities.

Rally co-organizer Cassandra Williams said education was an important part of the event.

“Obviously, there’s just a lot of people who aren’t very well-informed about these things but Peterson is spreading misinformation to people to just don’t know any better . . . . We wanted to correct a lot of the information,” she said. The rally was also “calling out” U of T, she added, for “supporting and enabling individuals who have caused tremendous harm to the trans community.”

Peterson told the Star Wednesday he didn’t say that trans and non-binary people don’t exist — instead, he was critiquing what he sees and “incoherent and poorly written” legislation.

“One of the reasons for the (rally) was the claim that I said transgender people don’t exist, and I never said that . . . and I don’t believe that, so it kind of invalidates the utility of the rally, at least insofar as it’s directed at me,” he said in a phone interview.

Peterson also said he wasn’t backing down from stance on pronouns.

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“I’m not going to use pronouns that aren’t part of the standard English language corpus, and I’m not going to be compelled to do that,” he said.

“You could say . . . ‘Can’t you just use the pronoun so you won’t hurt someone’s feelings?’ It’s like, not hurting people’s feelings is not actually my paramount concern . . . . My primary ethical concern is to say what I think and to do that very carefully, and that’s partly because, lots of times, people’s feelings are hurt in the short run by all sorts of things that are good in the medium and long run.”