When I last met Jordan Peterson four years ago, he was on the cusp of what some would call renown, others notoriety. Let’s settle for prominence. Peterson, a clinical psychologist, had spent the first three decades of his career in relative obscurity, teaching at the University of Toronto, churning out academic papers, maintaining a small private practice and producing YouTube videos on his interests in ethics, theology and myth.
All that changed in 2016, when he challenged, on free-speech grounds, a proposed Canadian law, C-16, which he argued would legally compel him to use transgender people’s preferred pronouns. (It became law in 2017.)
