Spotify's Joe Rogan and guest Jordan Peterson suggest trans people are a sign of “civilizations collapsing”
Peterson compared being trans to undergoing “satanic ritual abuse,” referring to bogus satanic panic of 1980s
Written by Alex Paterson
Published
Spotify’s Joe Rogan once again peddled harmful anti-trans rhetoric during his January 25 podcast, suggesting that social acceptance of trans people is a sign of “civilizations collapsing” while his guest, right-wing provocateur Jordan Peterson, equated being trans to a “sociological contagion” comparable to “satanic ritual abuse.”
Rogan has frequently used his platform to promote smears against trans people, spread conspiracy theories, and espouse COVID-19 misinformation. His show is streamed exclusively on Spotify and is the most popular podcast on the platform. As The Washington Post has noted, “With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, Rogan reaches nearly four times as many people as prime-time cable hosts such as Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.”
Peterson is a former Canadian psychology professor who rose to prominence in far-right circles by promoting extreme misogynistic and anti-trans rhetoric. Peterson largely disappeared from the public sphere in 2019 but has recently returned to his role as a darling of the right-wing propaganda machine, with 4.5 million subscribers on his YouTube channel alone.
Peterson claimed that being trans is a “sociological contagion” comparable to “satanic ritual abuse"
During the podcast, Rogan and Peterson speculated on what causes a person to be trans. Peterson asserted that the answer is a “sociological contagion” comparable to “the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s,” referring to the “rash of false allegations” about supposed occult child abuse that fueled the “satanic panic” during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Peterson repeated his opposition to the Canadian federal Bill C-16, which amended the country’s human right protections to include gender identity, and baselessly asserted that amending “sex categories” in nondiscrimination measures would “fatally confuse thousands of young girls.”
Rogan also cited the work of anti-trans author Abigail Shrier -- a previous guest on his podcast -- around the inaccurate concept of “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” Rapid onset gender dysphoria comes from a flawed and since-corrected study by Brown University researcher Dr. Lisa Littman which suggested that trans youth -- primarily trans boys -- are rapidly identifying as trans due to “social and peer contagion.” Littman’s study has been described by a colleague as “below scientific standards,” as it relied on “survey responses from parents who had visited sites promoting anti-trans views,” and it did not actually survey trans youth themselves.
Citation From the January 25, 2021, edition of Spotify's The Joe Rogan Experience
JOE ROGAN (HOST): What do you think it means when someone is so attracted to the idea that they were born in the wrong body -- it means so much, they are so compelled that they are willing to go through surgery to change it?
JORDAN PETERSON (AUTHOR): God, it means all sorts of things. I knew a kid in Toronto who was on the autistic spectrum, and a lot of the people who are manifesting serious issues with gender identity are on the autism spectrum --
ROGAN: This is like Abigail Shrier’s work and rapid onset gender dysphoria amongst women.
PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s a different thing, the rapid onset. Part of the reason I objected to Bill C-16 to begin with was because I knew full well as a clinician that as soon as we messed with fundametal sex categories and changed the terminology, we would fatally confuse thousand of young girls. I knew that, because I knew the literature on sociological contagion. And it stretches back like 500 years that literature -- 300 years.
...
And so psychological contagions are very common. And so one of them, for example, was the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s. And that was a consequence of women going into the workforce en masse, leaving their children with strangers and starting to have pathological fantasies about it, especially if they were borderline schizophrenic. And those fantasies propagated into the population.
…
ROGAN: So you think that a lot of what’s going on with people that want to change gender is creativity?
PETERSON: No, I don’t think so.
ROGAN: So what do you --
PETERSON: I know so.
ROGAN: You know so.
PETERSON: Yeah, but that's not all of it, but that's definitely part of it.
ROGAN: But there are for sure a lot of people that transition -- and there has been work on this that shows that if they didn't transition, they wanted to transition at one point in time and then they eventually wound up becoming gay men. This is males to females, right?
Rogan and Peterson also suggested that trans people are a sign of “civilizations collapsing”
Later in the same episode, Rogan and Peterson suggested that the acceptance of trans people is a sign of “civilizations collapsing.”
This bizarre theory has been an ongoing fixation for Rogan. In September 2020, he discussed this claim with The Spectator’s Douglas Murray, who asserted that trans issues “will be seen to be a late-empire, a bad sign of things falling apart.” Notably, Rogan has repeated this claim in several episodes of his podcast since, including on September 24, 2020, September 15, 2021, and January 20.
Citation From the January 25, 2021, edition of Spotify's The Joe Rogan Experience
JOE ROGAN (HOST): I'm sure you're familiar with Douglas Murray’s work?
JORDAN PETERSON (AUTHOR): Yes. And Murray -- who’s very funny, who I like very much, and who’s one of the most courageous people I’ve ever met.
ROGAN: Yeah, he’s brilliant. And he had an amazing point about civilizations collapsing, and that when they start collapsing they become obsessed with gender. And he was saying that you could trace it back to the ancient Romans, the Greeks.
PETERSON: Yeah, Camille Paglia has made much of that. I think probably it's not so much an obsession with gender, it’s a disintegration of categories as a precursor -- like so it’s a marker for -- if categories just dissolve, especially fundamental ones, the culture is dissolving because the culture is a structure of category. That’s what it is. So in fact culture is a structure of category that we all share, so we see things the same way, so that’s why we can talk. I mean, not exactly the same way, because then we would have nothing to talk about, but roughly speaking, we have a bedrock of agreement. That’s the Bible, by the way.
Despite Rogan repeatedly espousing misinformation and bigotry to his large audience, Spotify has refused to take any action to quell his harmful commentary. On January 12, 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators published an open letter “calling on Spotify to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform.” The letter has since gained over 1,000 signatures.