Treatment of him unethical, says bioethicist Moira McQueen
By Deborah Gyapong
OTTAWA (CCN)


Caption: Jordan Peterson

Efforts to silence a University of Toronto professor for refusing to use transgender pronouns are unethical, says Catholic bioethicist Moira McQueen.

The director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute and professor at St. Michael’s University College at the University of Toronto defended psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who has run afoul of both the university administration and transgender activists for YouTube videos defending his right to freedom of speech against human rights legislation and university policies that would force him to use transgender pronouns or face legal and professional consequences.

McQueen said it is “dangerous” for those pushing the transgender bandwagon to be “operating confidently” in “shooting down other people’s opinions when their “own opinions are not as rooted in the hard sciences as they could be.”

All gender theory is “relatively new,” she said. “Trying to shut down opinions at this stage, that’s why I call that unethical.”

When gender theory is examined scientifically, it is clear it has many problems based on “incomplete and inaccurate information,” she said. The kinds of methodological criteria that “should apply at the moment don’t apply.”

Of big concern for McQueen are those children, some as young as five, who are now being identified as transgender.

“We are rushing in to provide answers to what is a kid’s perceived need when the information is incomplete,” she said. The compulsion, not only in the sexual arena, but in the conscience area in general, is “a move towards totalitarian control.”

“We’re not allowed, according to them, to say what we think, to give our opinion about these studies, to look at contradictory evidence,” she said. Her approach is “not coming from a knee jerk response of right and wrong. I do believe in seeing evidence-based studies.”

The long term data on the effects of medical treatment, hormones, psychological counselling based on observable and quantifiable studies is not yet available, she said. “Only after you have adequate answers in all those areas–then you can come to some conclusions.”

She called pressure on Peterson to be silent about his opinions an “abandonment of common sense.”

“He is able to say: you can call yourself what you like, but I don’t have to call you that. That’s the dividing line,” she said.

“The element of compulsion is frightening,” McQueen said, whether it is government forcing health professionals to act against their consciences when it comes to euthanasia and abortion, or in forcing people to use language that opposes their conscience and common sense.

“One never doubts one has to respect people and to be compassionate and kind,” said McQueen. But people can differ on what being compassionate means-on how one is “truly suffering with” someone.

McQueen said she is surprised the University of Toronto is telling a professor “he has to do this, or he has to do that in the personal realm.”

“Obviously, his job is threatened,” she said.

This would not be the first time. Another psychologist, Ken Zucker of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), attached to the University, had worked with children with gender dysphoria for 30 years.

A secular Jew, Zucker had done scientifically documented work showing 80 per cent of children who experience gender dysphoria—the clinical name for those who think they are a different gender than their biological sex—revert to their natural sex later on, said McQueen. Zucker was not against gender reassignment for adults, so he approached the field from a scientific, not a religious point of view.

“His main concern was how to treat children,” McQueen said. He was not saying abandon the patients, but he questioned the wisdom of pumping children full of powerful hormones at age 11 or 12 when they were not at an age of consent.

“About two years ago he was fired from CAMH because other psychologists now on this gender wagon thought his treatments were dangerous and outmoded,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Zucker had been working in the field a long time, and had been approaching it as a scientist. Though his methods were not questioned, “they didn’t like his conclusions.”

McQueen pointed out gender dysphoria is still listed in the psychiatric manual as a condition, though she acknowledged that could change for political reasons.

“It’s not a physiological illness; it’s not genetic; it’s not anything that shows in the body at all,” she said.

Gender dysphoria is also relatively rare, she said, though media accounts make it seem much more widespread. “Much of it is propelled by activists.”

Gender theory activists have a “born-this-way” agenda, said McQueen. That view signals: “Get off my back, don’t call it gender dysphoria, this is who I am.”

“There’s a huge political and social agenda behind it,” she said.