After being banned from Twitter over railing against actor Elliot Page, psychologist Jordan Peterson has continued to debate Page's transition on Kyle Kulinski's podcast 'Krystal Kyle and Friends'.
"I would’ve left Ellen Page alone if she hadn’t been parading her new abs in a fashion magazine,” he said, referring to Page's recent Esquire feature where some of the pictures show the actor boasting his physique with a bare chest. “How many kids do you think she convinced to convert? One? A thousand?”
According to Peterson, the 35-year-old actor has "the responsibility not to entice confused adolescents into a catastrophic decision before they have the maturity to make that decision."
The tweet that led to the controversial academic being suspended on Twitter claimed that the actor “had her breasts removed by a criminal physician” - something that the platform deemed to be “hateful conduct”. Peterson is not allowed to post on Twitter until he deletes the tweet, but he has said that he would "rather die" than remove it or apologize.
According to Peterson’s podcast comments, Page's transition is fuelling what he believes to be “social contagion.”
“Often, when you introduce social confusion, you can produce a psychogenic epidemic. Generally, its adolescent females who are more susceptible to it,” the academic said. “It’s absolutely and definitely the case that we’ve doomed thousands of kids to brutal, mutilating surgery and premature sterility and we’ve done that on the altar of our hypothetical moral virtue and compassion.”
The drama around Page and Peterson has had the actor's names - both the former, which is also referred to as a "deadname", and the current one - trending on Twitter. Many prominent conservatives, including Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro and Greg Price, have sided with Peterson. Another, no less massive, camp has lambasted the academic for misgendering Page and referring to him by the wrong name.
Elliot Page himself has notably stayed out of the conflict, remaining active on social media but never commenting on Peterson's attacks.