Bonus Sample: Jordan Peterson, Derrick Jensen, and the Anti-Trans Laugh Emoji
An audio essay from Matthew about how anti-trans ideology can so curdle the soul that an otherwise progressive eco-activist—Derrick Jensen of Deep Green Resistance—can blow up his entire career over it, disrupting the very thing he says he lives for, and destroying the movement he spent years building up.The story starts more than a decade ago, but comes to its peak absurdity, for Matthew at least, on Facebook. He posted some thoughts about Jordan Peterson freaking out over that woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated. And then Jensen visited his page.
Show NotesThe New Age / Medieval Mortifications of Jordan Peterson | by Matthew Remski | MediumThat FB post about Peterson and Yumi NuYumi Nu cleverly responds to Jordan Peterson's 'not beautiful' comment' | indy100Simulacra and Simulations — BaudrillardGovernment Bill (House of Commons) C-16 (42-1) - First Reading - An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code - Parliament of CanadaCanada's gender identity rights Bill C-16 explainedFour years on, past critics are silent on whether fears around transgender human rights bill were foundedAn Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal CodeJordan Peterson: The right to be politically incorrectI Was in the Room While Jordan Peterson and Senators Debated My Human RightsLies of the land: against and beyond Paul Kingsnorth's völkisch environmentalismWhat Speaking Like Jordan Peterson Probably Feels LikeJ
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Thank you.
Hey everybody, thank you for your ongoing support.
This is a bonus episode about how anti-trans ideology can become normalized in strange spaces.
In this case, it's about how it can so curdle the soul that an otherwise progressive eco-activist can blow up his entire career over it, disrupting the very thing he says he lives for and destroying the movement he spent years building up.
So it's a little bit of a unique topic for our podcast because we mostly cover right-wing conspiracy theories, and that's because we haven't actually seen a single conspirituality influencer track towards the left.
But today, we've got a rare example of conspiracism from the left, which centers on a fiction about trans people, trans women in particular, and what they purportedly really want and are trying to get with the support of the quote-unquote elites.
The activist writer's name is Derek Jensen, and my story with his writing begins in 2010, but I'll start with a current incident.
Now, you might remember Jordan Peterson's insane Twitter post about 25-year-old Yumi Nu, who appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in a black bathing suit.
Peterson needed to tell everyone on Twitter that not only was he not attracted to her body type, but that nobody should be.
He wrote in his tweet, Sorry, not beautiful, and no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.
And so I wrote a thread about this and then exported the thread to Instagram and Facebook.
It started, Jordan Peterson projection confesses to hating his body and the authoritarianism that compels him to purify and desiccate it with radical diets and 10 mile walks.
Okay, so that was jumping in a little bit at the deep end, so, you know, people asked me to clarify it.
What it means is that simply the most parsimonious explanation for why Peterson would bother to post this.
To risk humiliation by being that multi-millionaire 60-year-old trying to diss a 25-year-old woman is that it must have triggered something internal.
And given that his sentiments are about her weight, his own purification obsessions with calorie reduction, carb elimination, excessive exercise are very much in play.
So I'll post an article that I published last summer about all of that in the show notes.
The thread went on.
He disowns the feelings by lashing out at someone whose image, not her personhood, makes him feel even less substantial.
Coming out with an ableist, fatphobic, misogynistic attack underlines the fragile body fascism that seethes beneath his entire opus.
And I'll just take another pause here because people asked about the intersection between ableism and fatphobia.
It's this.
Peterson is shaming Yumi Noo's weight, but his whole culture war evo-psych background and context signals to his followers that he's also talking about her reproductive fitness.
So, Sports Illustrated is heralding her by putting her on the cover, and his response is that no one should want to have sex with her.
The deeper meaning of that is that he believes the desires of the natural order are being manipulated and perverted by mass media and wokeism.
So saying that people should not want to have sex with Yumi Nu is also saying that they should not want to have sex with fat people more generally because they will not reproduce adequately.
So that's the ableism.
It's also a form of soft eugenics and just utter hatred.
Now the thread goes on to say Peterson is only here because of trans bigotry.
He preaches cleanliness, health, and sobriety while over-medicating, associating posture with virtue, Runwaying a wardrobe of reactionary fashions.
Maybe he has hair plugs.
He has his photo taken infinite times.
Young men are attracted for all of the fashy reasons, but also because he validates both their bodily awkwardness and the standard overcompensations.
Under the cover of self-confidence sermons, Peterson gives them permission to hate themselves, but then also sublimate that hatred by never shutting up, into pretentious aggression.
And with today's outburst, he merges with those who made him viral.
But he also reveals he's a paper tiger, that his principles are hang-ups, that he gives advice on what he cannot do, like look in the mirror, that his angst is more adolescent than existential, that all of his criticism of consumer emptiness and the tyranny of social norms is an elaborate snow job.
And the irony is that New is pictured as standing up straight with her shoulders back, facing the world directly, projecting a secure sense of self, being at home with who she is.
She seems to be doing for herself what he's telling boys to do.
She replaces him.
So that post, when it got to Facebook, went a little bit viral with 671 shares the last I looked and almost 600 comments.
And it's always odd to have something go viral like that.
And in this case, I suspect it was partly by virtue of Yuminou's image, which I posted in a screencap of Peterson's original tweet.
And so, it's a little bit of an irony rabbit hole, because Peterson is showing his body-judging, misogynistic ass in his tweet, which attracts a lot of attention, because he posts her image, which of course people love.
Then, in commenting on his politics, This image gets reproduced countless times by those calling him out.
And the end result is that countless viewers who otherwise would never pick up or see Sports Illustrated on the rack at the drugstore see this image of New, who then goes on to laugh about it all on TikTok, showing off the Peterson tweet and the magazine cover and lip syncing to Nicki Minaj's itty bitty piggy.
I mean, I don't even know why you girls bother at this point.
Like, keep it up.
It's me.
I win.
You lose.
So of course, that goes mad with over 2000 comments.
The whole arc is like Baudrillard's passage from simulations where he says, these would be the successive phases of the image.
First, it's the reflection of a basic reality.
Second, it masks and perverts a basic reality.
Three, it masks the absence of a basic reality.
And four, it bears no relation to any reality whatever.
It is its own pure simulacrum.
He writes, "In the first case, the image is a good appearance.
The representation is of the order of sacrament." And this would be the original Sports Illustrated cover, put together with ritual care and devotion towards presenting Yumi Nyu as somebody real in the world with her own dignity.
In the second, Baudrillard writes, it is an evil appearance of the Order of Malifice.
And that's Peterson's take, that Sports Illustrated is conspiring with Newt to tell him to have a boner that desecrates the natural order of things.
And this is also the realm of libs of TikTok when they make fun of LGBTQ people.
And it's also the realm that we'll see Derek Jensen is stuck in as well, in very rigid ideas of natural order, although his position is rooted in a kind of primitive Marxism.
In the third, Baudrillard said, the image plays at being an appearance.
It is of the order of sorcery.
So then comes the deconstruction of the Peterson response, with commentators discussing what his hang-ups mean and what kind of power they wield.
That's where my thread came in.
And in the fourth, the image is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.
And in endless reproduction, New takes it to wash and rinse out on TikTok and the whole thing evaporates like a dream.
Or rather, it moves aside to make way for the next surge of spectacle.
So on one side of Baudrillard's presentation of dissolution is the laughter of new as it all blows over, but on the other side there's something more eerie, which is a kind of dissolution of meaning.
And I think that this is what we see as well in the descent of Derek Jensen's work from in-real-life paper and ink, making strident in-the-world arguments about ecology throughout the aughts, but then winding up yelling into the social media void in the 2020s.
