Jordan Peterson on bill c-16: what the evidence says · JRE #877

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Peterson asserts that Bill C-16 and New York City pronoun rules have the idea that gender identity has no biological foundation written into the law itself. The enacted text of C-16 (S.C. 2017, c. 13) does two things only: it adds "gender identity or expression" to the prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act, and it adds the same phrase to the Criminal Code's definition of "identifiable group" for hate propaganda (s. 318(4)) and to the hate-motivation sentencing provision (s. 718.2(a)(i)); the statute says nothing about biology. Canada's Department of Justice states that "gender identity" and "gender expression" were intentionally left undefined in the bill, to be as inclusive as possible, so no theory of identity, biological or otherwise, is codified in the Canadian statute. In New York City, the Commission on Human Rights' enforcement guidance under the NYC Human Rights Law (Admin. Code s. 8-102(23)) requires covered entities to use the name and pronouns with which a person self-identifies "regardless of the person's sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the person's identification," which does make self-identification controlling for anti-discrimination purposes. That is the kernel of truth in the claim, but treating self-identification as legally protected is not the same as a statutory declaration that identity has no biological foundation, and no such statement appears in either jurisdiction's text. The claim is misleading: it attributes an explicit ideological proposition to laws that contain no such language, and the subjective-identity framing he cites comes from definitions in human rights commission guidance rather than from Bill C-16.