Jordan Peterson on law: what the evidence says · JRE #877

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

By the time this episode aired (2016), the EEOC had taken the enforcement position, in federal-sector rulings such as Lusardi v. Department of the Army (2015) and in lawsuits like EEOC v. Deluxe Financial Services (filed June 2015), that intentionally and repeatedly using the wrong pronoun for a known transgender employee could constitute sex discrimination or harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That position did not create a rule requiring employers to use invented or neo-pronouns (such as "zhe" or "ze"); it addressed refusal to use pronouns matching an employee's stated gender identity, generally he/she/they. The EEOC's guidance on this point was formalized further in April 2024, a federal court in the Northern District of Texas then vacated key portions of it in 2025, and in January 2025 the EEOC itself, under new leadership following Executive Order 14168, began rolling back its gender-identity enforcement guidance. Peterson's claim that the EEOC had "ruled" on the subject was broadly accurate for the pre-2016 posture he was describing, but it overstated the scope of that position: it covered use of established binary pronouns for transgender employees, not a legal requirement to use invented pronouns. Current status: misleading.