https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TAQlleqDgbI
Please join me in welcoming our participants. Okay, so I know everybody’s really eager to get into the question and resolution at hand and to hear from our speakers, so I will just introduce the resolution and the format. People have the legal right to decide, be it resolved that people have the legal right to decide the pronouns by which they will be addressed. And you’ll notice that we’ve drafted this resolution so that we can discuss the law as it is, as it ought to be, and various levels of law, provincial laws as well as federal laws. And each speaker will speak for 15 minutes in openings, and then they’ll have 10 minutes each for rebuttals, and then we’ll have ample amount of time for question and answers, which I’m sure many of you have for both of our participants, especially Dr. Peterson. Just one quick note about the spirit in which this evening is going to proceed. We are here gathered as jurists, as officers of the court, or future officers of the court, in a spirit of openness and inquiry about the laws that we subject ourselves to and the laws that we govern and how they shape our interactions as a society. So we are proceeding fearlessly and openly and respectfully. So Professor Party, please start in favor of the resolution. Okay, let’s have some fun. I’d like to thank Bailey and Runnymede Queens both for inviting me to this and for putting it on. You know, this is exactly the kind of thing that Runnymede was conceived for. So, you know, nice job, and I hope we have a good evening. Don’t hesitate when we get on to the later stages to speak up and say your piece. We’re here to talk. All right, so don’t be shy. I’m sure you will. The resolution as stated really, as Joanna mentioned, raises two questions. One, what the law actually is as of today. And secondly, what the law ought to be. And I suspect that Professor Peterson and I might actually agree on the first one, what the law is. I think it’s pretty clear that the law as it exists right now, as reflected in the Ontario Human Rights Code, is that this is true. Let me read it to you. This is Section 1 of the Ontario Human Rights Code. And I know you’ve probably heard this before. Every person has a right to equal treatment with respect to services, goods, and facilities. And that’s been included to include education at the post-secondary level. Without discrimination because of a whole bunch of enumerated items, including gender identity and gender expression. Now, it doesn’t talk about pronouns per se in the statute. But according to the Human Rights Commission of Ontario, that’s one thing it should include. And there are decisions of tribunals, especially out in BC, again, not directly on the point in the classroom about the pronouns, but enough to suggest that that’s a logical extension of the proposition in Section 1. The more interesting question is not what the law is, but what it ought to be. Whether or not that state of the law is good, something that we should approve of. And I’m here to argue in the affirmative that that’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be. I’m going to go through these essential five points to make my case. I’m going to talk about free speech first, and then about free speech in classrooms, the nature of gender, privacy questions, and then the nature of language itself. First, let’s talk about free speech. Because this question is often framed in the context of two opposing forces. One being free speech and liberty on the one hand, and on the other, a tyrannical government, and social justice warriors trying to shut down the ability of individuals to speak for themselves. And I want to suggest to you that that’s actually an artificial dichotomy. Let me put it to you this way. There actually is no such thing as free speech. What I mean by that is that the law is full of limits on speech. I mean, let us count the ways. Speech is limited by the law of defamation. You can’t go off and talk about your neighbor in derogatory terms if it’s not true. You’ll be sued. Speech is limited by the law of negligence. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. If there isn’t one, you’ll be held liable for injuries. We even have a tort called the intentional infliction of emotional harm. That harm being inflicted, most of the time, by speech. Speech is regulated and limited by the criminal law. We have laws that prohibit counseling a crime, suggesting to somebody or arranging for somebody to go off and commit a crime, even if all you’ve done is speak words. We have laws that prohibit hate speech, which is nothing more than speech. We even have restrictions of speech in the area as minor as consumer law, restrictions on advertising, where and when and what it can say. The proposition is this. It is not a general rule that speech is free. What we have is a starting point of freedom of expression in the charter, and then we have reasonable limits as defined by societal need. And the question is not whether or not the speech is free. It’s whether or not those limits are reasonable. And the reasonableness of the limits can be defined by whether or not they achieve a common good. So let’s get off this black and white angle. This is a matter of gray. And in the gray, I think, I hope you’ll agree with me, that the gray favors this kind of outcome. So on to point number two. We’re talking here about the ability of somebody to decide the programs by which they will be addressed. Now, that’s a general proposition, but our particular focus is, of course, the classroom. So there’s a student in the class and a teacher, and the teacher refers to that person as him or her. And that person says, well, I don’t want to be thought of, I don’t want to be referred to as a him or her. I want something to be gender neutral. A third thing, if you like. Question. Is speech more free or less free in classrooms than it is on the street? I’ve suggested those various restrictions that exist in the law in general. In the classroom, I’d like to suggest that speech is even more restrained because there are obligations. There are relationships between teacher and student and between student and institution. So, for example, this doesn’t speak to this question specifically, but just by way of example to show you, to illustrate that there are more restrictions on speech, how would you feel if you were in your classroom, you started off the semester, and the professor in question would refuse to refer to you by anything other than, you slimy weasel. Now, don’t you think you would have a complaint? Maybe not even based upon the Human Rights Code, but just on pure administrative law principles. Those principles suggest that a teacher in a classroom has at least a minimum of the responsibility to be unbiased, to apply an even hand. And if through language that even hand is clearly not being addressed, expressed, then I would have thought there is some kind of legal remedy in sight. There are lots of other examples, both in the classroom and on site. Let’s say you have earned a PhD, and a person in authority, perhaps it’s a teacher, perhaps it’s an official, it doesn’t really matter who it is, but in some kind of official capacity refuses, will not call you doctor, wants to call you mister, which is actually not the title that you’ve earned. What if you’re a woman, and you are not married, and the teacher insists upon calling you miss, and you want to be called miss, which is the neutral form. Now, once upon a time, we were having the same debate about miss. The woman wanted to be called miss, and the powers that be back at that time said, look, there’s only two, there’s misses or miss, choose one. Here we are again. We have two, choose one. Actually, there is a third choice. I want to suggest that there are also examples you will hear to object to this idea, which raise a false equivalency. This does not say anybody has the right to insist upon being called anything, because you can think of examples where that just won’t do. So if I had a student in my classroom who said, Professor, I would like you here from now on to please refer to me as your majesty. Well, I’m not going to do that, I’m sorry, because objectively speaking, you are not royalty unless you can show me your crown. So the question is not as broad as that. The question is actually very narrow and limited. It’s limited to the question of the proper pronoun to be used for a person who is gender neutral, which brings me to point number three, and that is the nature of gender. I want to distinguish between two related but different ideas, and those two ideas are gender and sex. Now, I’m not a biologist, I’m not a psychologist, I’m just a lawyer, emphasis on being the word just. But I’m going to suggest to you that the two ideas can be distinguished this way. Sex being the biological idea, and gender being the cultural idea. You might be able to determine somebody’s sex by looking at objective factors. Maybe, maybe not, I don’t know. But I’m going to entertain that possibility. I’m not sure you can do the same thing for gender, because gender is an inherently subjective thing. Unlike whether or not somebody qualifies for the title Your Majesty, I would have thought that whether or not you are a male or a female or a neither in gender terms is something only that you can tell us. So I think that distinguishes the subjective questions from the objective ones. As soon as you have a subjective question, then the choice has to be determined by the person who is being addressed. So on to privacy. Our insistence upon a binary choice, a he or a she, in a sense reflects our need to categorize. But the strange thing about that need is that it is based upon information that really is very personal. Now, much of the time you can tell through outward appearance. But if you look at the bottom line, what you actually need, I think, to insist upon that choice, aren’t you really asking after all at the bottom of it all? You’re insisting to know what that person’s junk looks like. And really, nobody else’s business but yours. If you refuse to indicate what that junk is like, and if you, and it’s not clear on the face of things, and I use that word on purpose, which way you’re going to go, why should the world care? It’s really all about you. They’re just trying to categorize. I want to see if you’re one thing or the other thing. It doesn’t matter what you are. And in fact, it doesn’t matter so much that you might be a third thing or somewhere in between. In other words, nobody has the right to try to obtain the information necessary to make the choice between he or she. And so finally, let’s talk about language, because this, after all, is about language. We may in fact be talking about a peculiar characteristic of the English language. Because as of right now, the English language has just two personal pronouns that can be used for human beings. We have a third one. It’s called it. But this doesn’t fit very well when you’re trying to talk about a human being. The English language is not unique in this, but nor is it universal. There are other languages that do have either a neutral third choice or are not gendered in the first place. One might be inclined to resolve this debate by looking to the dictionary and saying, well, I’m sorry, there’s only two in there. There is no third. The third that you want me to use, I can’t find, and therefore it’s not part of the language, and therefore I’m not going to do that. But the thing about language, both English and all the others, is that it is essentially evolutionary. It changes over time. And if you look in the dictionary today and don’t find that third thing, look again in a year, in two years, in five years, it will be there. So the fact of its absence at the moment is really not determinative of anything. It’s coming. We might as well be ahead of the curve than behind it. And with that, I’ll give it the floor. So one of the things that I don’t like to do in a discussion, and I suppose this is part of the whole problem, is I don’t like to cede linguistic territory to the people with whom I disagree. And that’s actually part of the reason why I have refused, let’s say, to use a set of pronouns that I believe are, I really believe the use of them is irrelevant in some sense to this particular issue, because I actually think the issue is quite a bit deeper. Just, and so part of my objection to using those particular pronouns was the lack of my desire to cede linguistic ground to people whose political, philosophical, and even deeper moral stances I do not agree with in the slightest. And as soon as you cede linguistic ground to your, let’s call them adversaries, you have decided that you’re going to play a game within the rules that they have established, and therefore you lose. So that’s why I’m taking objection to some degree to the way that this is formulated, because it isn’t really about the right to decide. It’s about the right to insist upon by force. And you might say, well, what constitutes force? Well, I debated Brenda Cosman, a lawyer, and she said, because I had made the claim, let’s say, that you can be jailed for not using this particular category of pronouns, which we’ve already agreed is enshrined, the necessity for doing so is already enshrined within the current legislation, so I’m glad that we agreed upon that. And she basically insisted that according to the surrounding policies, you couldn’t be jailed for that, they could just take away everything you owned. And I thought that was extremely interesting, first of all, because she seemed to think that that was alright, but also because she didn’t actually notice that that was kind of the point that I was making. Plus, if you don’t agree or act out the, what would you call it, the judgment of the human rights tribunal, then they can take you to, I believe it’s Ontario’s Superior Court, where they can nail you for contempt, and then they can put you in jail. So yeah, okay, fine, you know, it’s a nuance, but it’s a non-trivial direct route, and people have, in fact, been jailed for such things. So let’s get to the insist upon by force issue here, because that’s really the issue, and that’s the way that this should be formulated. And so, well, we can also, there’s another problem here too, and the problem is, well, which pronouns exactly? And you might say, well, a transsexual, male to female, has the right to be addressed as she, and the reverse as he, and in fact, most transsexuals, in fact, the overwhelming majority of them, they’re about maybe 0.3% of the population to begin with. And I would estimate, although I don’t know for sure, that it’s 99% of them, but no one really knows, actually want to be addressed by he or she, they just want to be addressed by the other one. Okay, so there’s a tiny minority, the size of which no one knows, who insists that that particular categorization scheme doesn’t apply to them, so the question then is, which one does? And the problem with that is that you cannot actually answer that question, and I can give you a hint about that with regards to the ever-lengthening acronym used by the LGBT community to describe those who are marginalized. And you may notice that every year there’s an additional initial in that acronym, and the reason for that is that the potential number of identities will multiply until it fractionates down to the level of the individual itself. It has to, because you’re not a group, you’re not a member of a group, you’re the simultaneous member of multiple groups, in fact, so many groups that they can’t even be enumerated. And if my linguistic usage is predicated on recognizing all of those identities, well, we might as well just go home now, because I don’t have time to come up with a million different descriptive pronouns that are properly going to more or less evolve the free market, because one of the things the free market does is enable you to recognize your multi-dimensional existence, say, and mine simultaneously using mutually agreed upon price as the determinant that takes all of those factors simultaneously to the level of the individual. And that’s a big problem. And I think that’s a big problem, because it’s actually incomputable. And actually, on a pure computational level, there isn’t any other solution to that problem, because it’s actually incomputable. So the pronoun problem becomes very, very problematic very, very rapidly. You can see that with the acronym growth and the LGBT community, which has to fractionate, will continue to fractionate, because none of those groups are homogenous in any but the most trivial of senses. So that’s a big problem. Which pronouns? Okay, so what sort of problem is that? Well, in New York State, for example, they’ve already more or less passed into law the proposition that there are pretty much as many pronoun descriptors as there are people claiming identities. And so on Facebook, for example, which is a good example of, say, Coleman-Parlantz, there’s about 71 different gender identities already recognized and no agreed upon lexicon to represent any of them. And so the issue there is, well, what stops the infinite multiplication? And the answer to that is whim. And that’s actually written into the law, because the law already states that your identity is predicated on your subjective. And I would say whim. And that’s also wrong. It isn’t. So I was watching Louis C.K. the other night, and he’s a great philosopher. And he said that if you – and I’m sorry, I don’t normally use profanity, but Louis C.K. does, and I am quoting him. He said, well, if you call someone an asshole, they can’t actually object, because it’s not up to them. It’s up to someone else to determine if that’s the case, because that identity classification is actually a socially negotiated process. And that’s the thing about your identity, the idea that your identity is a subjective construct. It’s like – and I’m being literally truthful about that – that’s what two-year-olds think, and that’s why they can’t play with others. So two-year-olds are egocentric, and they cannot expand their conception of the world to include the minds of others. They don’t really learn to do that until between two and four. And by the way, if they don’t learn that by four, they never learn it. And so by the time they’re four, what they learn is that your identity is actually a negotiation. It’s a negotiation from moment to moment and also throughout the course of your life. So for example, even a child who’s pretending knows that. You be the mom, I’ll be the dad, we’ll play house. You can take on that identity, and I’ll take on this one. But we both have to agree on what the identity is, or we can’t play. So your identity is actually part of the public commons. And the idea that it’s your subjective determination is it’s so primordially wrong psychologically that it doesn’t even register. So and the notion that’s already written into the law, and that’s an absolute catastrophe, because in every possible way, developmentally, psychologically, philosophically, biologically, it’s a completely untenable proposition, but it doesn’t matter because it’s already written into the law. It’s like your identity, it’s like your reputation. You think you get to have the reputation you want? Well, good luck with that one. We’re so good at tracking reputation that if we have an evolved module for remembering reputation, you cheat once, I’ll never forget it. And you don’t get to object to that. You know, I mean, you can, but that isn’t going to change the outcome. And it doesn’t change the fact that your reputation, which is certainly a major part of your identity, is something that’s dependent on the interactions that you have with other people. To revert to the notion that that’s a purely subjective construct is just, I just can’t even believe that we’re seriously considering that, and much less writing it into the law. And then there’s something even more appalling going on underneath the law than that, which is we have actually written into the law now a social constructivist view of identity. And so the social constructivists roughly believe that all elements of human identity are socially constructed, which is very peculiar because at the same time they also insist that all of your identity is subjective. Wim and those two propositions aren’t logically commensurate, but you know, the people who are generating this sort of thing don’t really care about logical commensurability. But in any case, the proposition that your identity is somehow unmoored from a reality outside of your subjective, say, in linguistic space is also, it’s wrong. There’s no other way of putting it. So like, and this is written into the law already. So the proposition is that biological sex, which many of the holders of saying, but admiration for this law don’t even believe exists, which I don’t even know what to say about that. But the proposition is that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual preference vary independently. That’s the law. And it’s wrong. It isn’t even close to right. It doesn’t mean they don’t vary, but varying independently is a whole different proposition. It’s completely, completely different proposition. So look at it this way. Okay, so here’s biological sex. We’ll say there’s some amount of overlap. I don’t care. Like, make me overlap this much. It’s not because only 0.3% of people are miscategorized by their biological sex. Okay. So then you think, well, in terms of gender identity, it’s 99.7% of people have the same gender identity as their biological sex. So much for independent variation. There’s some variation, but it’s not independent. Then you add gender expression on top of that. You say, well, the vast majority of people who are of one biological sex and the same gender express that the same way. And almost all of those, we could say 97%. It’s probably more like 98%. But maybe it’s 95%. I don’t care. Have the sexual orientation that you would expect if you knew their biological sex, their gender identity, and their gender expression. So the idea that those are very independently, it’s like, okay, fine. But what that means is that you either don’t know what the word independently means, or you don’t care, or you’ve defined it, you’ve redefined it completely. Well, you can’t just muck about with the law that way. You know, you can’t instantiate a philosophical viewpoint into the law without noting what you’re doing, especially if it’s pulpably false. And this entire, and this is partly the reason that I object to the thing to begin with. It’s like, apart from its logical untenability given the infinite multiplication of potential identities, apart from the fact that there’s no consensus whatsoever on what set of pronouns you should even hypothetically use, apart from the fact that your identity is a socially negotiated phenomena at its core, well, there’s the ultimate foolishness of the proposition that there’s no relationship between these four levels of the manner in which human beings conceptualize themselves. And that’s all tangled up in this one piece of legislation, which is why the idea that people should have the right, legal right, to force other people to recognize the particular game that they’re playing at that moment is, it’s multi-dimensionally observed. And worse than that, it’s dangerous. And I’ll conclude with that. The reason that it’s dangerous, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is because it’s also the expression of an underlying, I’ll call it ideology, you could call it a philosophy, but I don’t think it actually qualifies, although, and it’s mostly postmodern. Now, postmodernists are very smart people, but, you know, the smart ones, but their notion of what constitutes truth and reality is debatable at best and pathological at worst. And that’s a problem because this kind of legislation emerges immediately out of that philosophical context. And philosophy matters. It’s the axioms by which you orient yourself in the world. Those things matter. And if you write a whole new set of axioms into the law, which we’ve already done, by the way, they’re going to unfold. They unfold according to their inner logic. And you don’t have any choice about that. They unfold in some sense all by themselves, just like if a virus invades your body, it unfolds all by itself. You think, little bitty virus, great big body. Well, don’t be thinking that. The law is a virus. Laws are viruses. There’s something alive. You add them to an ecosystem, that’s what we are. They’re going to do whatever their internal logic demands. And we’re going to see how that turns out over time. And I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before, when people walk down this particular philosophical path. And I suppose this is the point where people accuse me of scaremongering, but I have watched that sort of thing. It’s like the axiomatic presuppositions nested inside this legislation assume that human beings have no intrinsic nature. And what that means is that they can be remolded in any manner whatsoever by the state. Well, we’ve watched that happen. I wouldn’t recommend it. And so it’s for all those reasons that I think that the proposition is false. The law is absurd to the point of incoherent error. It’s actually wrong. It’s not just bad law. It’s actually wrong. And to boot, it’s dangerous. And it’s not least dangerous because it actually constitutes forced speech. And that’s a difference. That’s a very different thing from just saying that there are things you shouldn’t say because you’ll upset the polity. You know, fair enough. But that’s not the same thing at all as saying there are things you have to say because you have to act and speak in accordance with this particular philosophical view of human beings. Good enough. All right. Three points I want to respond to. Number one, the force question. Number two is the matter of the infinite number of pronouns. You know, one per person. And the third one is the question of whether identity is a negotiated matter. So on the force question, we agree on this. We are talking about forced speech. No question. This is not a question about what you, you know, really ought to do in polite society. No, we’re talking about what the law says and what the law will make you do. And if you don’t do it, maybe not immediately, but eventually the cops will come. So no bones about it. We’re talking about serious stuff here. It’s not just preferences. It’s what the state requires you to do. So the stakes are high, no doubt about it. On the infinite number of pronouns matter, however, I mean, you can see that that would be problematic. If, in fact, we took the proposition to its logical extension without pulling it back a little bit, then yeah, if everybody is allowed to pick their own pronoun, then it obviously becomes unworkable because you can’t. You can’t make sense of it. If you’re the teacher, I mean, you can’t keep track. I can’t keep track of people’s first names, much less their pronouns. So yeah, if you get to the stage where there are, you know, 13 different sub-classifications for the kinds of gender identity that you want, then I think the law is going to say, well, actually, no, what enabled us to do this in the first place was reasonable limits on free speech. And now the requirements are unreasonable. What we’re talking about here is really the ability to insist upon a gender neutral pronoun. If we got so far as to say that you can pick your own pronoun, then I don’t think the arguments that I made before really apply. Because now you’re into real absurdity. So this is not a limitless thing. It is not to suggest that everybody has a limitless ability to insist upon the language to be used by other people. All we’re saying is that there is a logical and reasonable case to be made that there needs to be something that is neutral. Maybe one, maybe a couple. I’m not going to give a number to it. But granted, if we get to a situation where there is an unlimited number, then fair enough, that seems out of hand to me. Number three, identity as a socially negotiated matter. Well, there’s some truth to this. Yes. In the outside world, as you are interacting with people, forming relationships with people of whatever kind, maybe friendship, maybe intimate, maybe you’re starting a family, I mean, your gender identity is important to those people, too. And so, yes, there is certainly an element of social negotiation in your gender. But that negotiation is not taking place with your teacher. It’s not taking place in the classroom. The teacher doesn’t have to know what that negotiation is about. Doesn’t have to know its outcome. As far as the teacher is concerned, all he or she or it needs to know is what you want to be called. In the sense of one or the other or neither. That’s all. Let’s try this analogy. The point is that gender should be irrelevant in the classroom, just like race should be irrelevant in the classroom. So, if we had a situation in the English language where different races were being referred to by different pronouns, we might find that a little bit abhorrent because it doesn’t matter. Why would you distinguish between someone who is white and someone who is dark? Same question with gender. Why do you need to distinguish between someone who is he and someone who is she? You can if you want to, and it’s okay with them, but the point is you don’t need to in order to carry on the task you’re supposed to be performing. So, if that person doesn’t want to fit into that binary, well then, what’s the big deal? I think I’ll leave it there. Well, you know, it’s hard to argue with the reasonableness of the vast majority of that statement, set of statements. But the acceptability of the argument is predicated on whether or not that degree of reasonableness is actually already built into the law or will be. And my suspicions are actually that at some point it will be, but I can tell you there’s going to be a lot of carnage before then. Because my worthy opponent basically pointed out, as I did previously, that the idea that we can devolve into a near infinite set of pronouns, by the way, which the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies already essentially recognize. So they’ve already admitted that, although I’m certain, I’m virtually certain that the people who formulated the policies really had no idea when they formulated that this was going to go beyond he, she, and they. They had no idea that within five years there would be 71 different gender identities and a set of pronouns associated with each. So I think this multiplicative explosion that’s occurred caught them by surprise. They wouldn’t have formulated the legislation that way to begin with, I think, if they would have had the foresight to see what happened. But you never know. But all right, so back to the idea of these reasonable limits. Well, I think that as these matters are forced through the courts up to the Canadian Supreme Court, that these sorts of limits will in fact be imposed. That we’ll find that it isn’t, people don’t have the legal right to be addressed by whatever pronoun they choose, because we run into precisely the problems that we’ve been discussing. But the problem is that as the legislation is currently constituted, which is more or less what we’re discussing, well, perhaps it should be constituted in a manner that would sustain a Supreme Court challenge, if we’re going to talk about should. And I don’t think there’s a hope in hell that the way it’s constituted right now would withstand a Supreme Court challenge. It’ll depend on how they select the Supreme Court justices. And we’ll see how that turns out in the future, because already, I don’t know if you know this, but the law has been put in place so that the people who select our judges are going to have to undergo mandatory unconscious bias retraining before they’re allowed to sit on the committees. And so, well, you can think about that. And if you want to, I’d recommend looking into the validity of the tests that are used to diagnose, so to speak, unconscious bias, because they don’t even come close to meeting the necessary requirements for a clinical diagnostic instrument. And there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that unconscious bias retraining produces the intended results in a fair bit than it actually produces the opposite. So we could easily be in a position where the Supreme Court itself becomes pathologized by this process to the point where they won’t invalidate the law, but under the current circumstances, I would say that it is inevitable that they would. But people are going to pay a vicious price for that. It’s no simple matter to fight a vicious piece of vicious, ill-written, pathological piece of legislation all the way up through the court system to the Supreme Court. And the number of people who have the emotional wherewithal to manage that, the strategic resources, the intelligence, the team, and the finances, they’re just non-existent. There might be like two people like that in Canada. You know, I mean, Ezra Levant did something like that with the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal. It just about did him in financially. He’s a tough guy, pretty emotionally stable, but it’s no joke. Well, you know, my proposition is that the law as currently formulated is observed. It’s observed multidimensionally. It’s bad law. And my opponent stated, well, essentially, it will have to be made reasonable. It’s like, yeah, okay, no problem. If it’s made reasonable, then it’s made reasonable, but that isn’t what we have now. You might think that the idea of Ms. Because that’s actually not a bad comparison, you know, but I’d like to point out that there were never any legal penalties for not using Ms. Ever. And language just doesn’t change that way. It never changes by legislative fiat. That isn’t how it works. It changes especially in English. It’s bottom-up process because a word is a tool, actually. It’s not a description for a thing. And what happens is that if you invent a good tool, any of you can do that. If you invent a word that fits and all the linguistic monkeys out there are waiting for that tool, they’ll pick it up just like that. And the truth of the matter is that no one’s come up with that particular linguistic tool to solve this particular problem. And that’s an indication that there actually isn’t a solution to it yet. And that’s partly because it’s an exceptionally complicated problem. And so the idea that that should be solved in some sense by ill-conceived, ill-written, philosophically untenable legislation that has a, I would say, pathological and punitive philosophy at its base is it’s not a tenable proposition. And it’s certainly not the law as it currently stands. So I guess that’s that for my rebuttal. Thank you. Okay, we’ll start taking questions. Blue shirt in the back. I have a question for Dr. Peterson. And I think Dr. Hardy sort of already praised this. And I was just wondering to speak to it a bit more directly. When we’re talking about whether you can force someone to refer to you or refrain from referring to you in different ways, I guess one issue that I’m having difficulty with is what a pronoun is. I think we all acknowledge that you have a right to force people to refer to you in certain ways. If a professor had a class and they had a student who insisted on calling them a girl when they were male or, you know, calling them queer or something, or I can think of way worse words, they would say, well, that’s not a pronoun. That’s a derogatory label that’s just meant to degrade me. But if, you know, who’s to say what is a pronoun? And I’m not sure that it necessarily would change if 95 or 97 friends all insisted on sort of degrading or, you know, using that pejorative label to the person. And I think that people who are transgendered or whatever do experience when people use the wrong gender labels to them, they’ve experienced real prejudice. They experience it as kind of a precedent that way. So I don’t know if identity is a subject or an object, but I do know that we place important demands on one another. I don’t know about nature, but I know that fundamentally, like our society is going to work better if we respect each other. And I think history bears that out. That self-respect and allowing people’s self-identification to play a role in that public aspect, we do already have limits on how people can refer to each other and they’re informed by how people want themselves to be referred to. Okay. Okay. Well, that’s a lot of questions. So I’m not trying to be a smart aleck about that. It’s just I’m going to have to sort that out for a minute. Well, the first thing I would say is, you know, pronouns, and I’m not a linguist, so I’m not going to be able to whip this off the top of my head. Although I do know that there is a psychologist named James Pennebaker who’s written a whole book on pronouns, which you might be interested in referring to. And pronouns turn out to be extraordinarily important as signifiers, but they’re also part of what’s called a closed linguistic category, and they don’t change. And so that’s something that’s useful to note. But you also bring up the distinction or the lack of distinction or made a lack of distinction between adjectives and pronouns. And that’s pretty interesting, because there’s no real reason why if you can’t insist upon which pronoun I use to address you, you can’t also assist on which adjective I use to address you. And there’s a lot more adjectives. And so that’s because I don’t see like if you can choose your damn pronoun, why can’t you choose your adjective? I mean, adjectives are the words you listed as pejorative were actually not pronouns. They were adjectives. And so you can object to them. And there’s no shortage of times when you use a pejorative adjective to describe someone, especially if you believe that they’ve misbehaved. It’s like if the person can insist upon their pronoun, why can’t they insist upon their adjective? And that’s another part of this problem with this multiplicative complexity that it isn’t addressed properly within the law. With regards to respect, you know, you said, well, human civilization progresses a lot better if we respect one another. And I actually don’t believe that at all. I believe that human civilization progresses and maintains itself when we respect people who earn respect. You don’t just respect everybody randomly. What the hell use is respect if you just respect people randomly? It’s like inflating the currency, you know. It’s like the Simpsons episode where, you know, Bart gets a trophy because it’s every child gets a trophy day. All you do is inflate the currency. Respect is actually limited to that category of people who have earned respect in some manner. So whatever you’re talking about with regards to, say, common decency between people, it’s not respect. And the definitions actually matter. They matter a lot. And so I hear the respect argument all the time. But you also can’t force me to respect you. I mean, you might be able to force me to act like I respect you. But you can’t force me to respect you. It’s just not possible. You could break me, I suppose, and then perhaps I would do it. Although I can’t see exactly how precisely. But so there’s a number of… I mean, I get your point, and I’m not trying to denigrate it in any sense. There’s a complex issue here, which is to what degree do you allow individuals to govern the conversation that’s had about them in their presence? Or otherwise? But I would just revert back to my original argument, which is that’s a negotiation. It’s either a negotiation. You’ve got three states. You can negotiate with someone. You can be their slave. Or you can be their tyrant. And I would pick negotiation. But as far as I’m concerned, the law right now, as it’s currently instantiated, is a tyrant. And it makes people into its slave. And we’re going to pay for that. And it’s predicated on, hypothetically, on respect and compassion. I don’t buy that for a second. I don’t think that’s true in the least. And there’s a huge literature on compassion. Here’s a problem with compassion. Mother grizzly bears are very, very compassionate towards their cubs. But if you get near those cubs, they’ll tear you to pieces. And that’s the flip side of compassion. And I’m speaking not as a lawyer here, but as a psychologist. That’s already well documented. Compassion is by no means an emotion that produces the desired social outcome. Quite the contrary. Life is much more complicated than, well, if you were just empathic, everything would work out. It’s like you can’t be equally empathic to everyone. And that’s a big problem. So I’ve answered some of your questions. We’ll address some of them. But that’s about the best I can do at the moment. Question? My question is to Dr. Peterson. I was wondering why you take on, it seems like every time, on every step of the way, on every step of the quality rates, the slippery slope argument comes up, and the courts and society solve that issue. So do you think that those arguments are fair, considering past instances? It’s a tough one, eh, because, you know, I think it was Yogi Berra who said something about things are hard to predict, especially the future. Which is quite a nice line, actually. But that’s the problem with slippery slope arguments, you know. But I don’t think I’m making a slippery slope argument, because I think I’m objecting to the laws it’s currently instantiated, not as how it will be. We have already written a social constructionist philosophy into the law. That’s already there. Now, what the consequences of that will be, I can’t tell, but one of the problems is it’s wrong. It’s factually wrong. It’s stati- sorry, actually it’s statistically wrong. That’s the problem. Because the insistence is that those factors that I described independently vary, which is a pred- it’s a predicate of social constructionist and postmodernist thinking. But it’s incorrect. There’s no evidence whatsoever for it, unless you gerrymander the notion of independence. And, you know, once you start doing that, that’s a big problem. So, so I, you know, so I stand by my initial documentation of the errors in the law. And I do think, by the way, that assuming that things continue on their current jurisprudential course, which is debatable, you know, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, in the powers that it’s abrogated, it’s being given by the Legislative Assembly, it has the right to suspend normal jurisprudential procedure and also precedent. So you might want to look that up, because that’s a real fun thing to read. So, if society continues on its current course and the courts operate under their current presuppositions, then this law will be subject to the limits that you described. And so, could be. But, like I said, there’s going to be carnage along the way. Are there? So I just want to bring a little bit of facts into this, because I know you’re talking about seating in linguistic territory, but facts unfortunately belong to both sides. So, I don’t have a- I don’t have a question for Mr. Peterson suggested. The key distinction here, and this is me talking now, not the advocate, the key distinction is that this legislation doesn’t prevent you from doing something, it requires you to do something. That is an outrageous proposition. Outrageous. Hate speech is bad enough, because it is a significant step away from counseling a crime. Now there are some restrictions on free speech in Mike and Anne, which are appropriate. Counseling a crime is one of them. Defamation might be, although that has some problems. But counseling a crime is the best situation where you shouldn’t be allowed to say that. But hate speech is an expression of an opinion. About nobody in particular. It’s about a group. Now if you have an individual who believes those things about a group, you know, lots of people, including me, would say that’s unfortunate. But if you’re living in a free society, you’re supposed to be allowed to say what you think, even if other people don’t like it and are offended. The essence of free speech is to be able to offend, not to prevent offense. Over to you. Well I’m going to answer that more or less as a psychologist. So one of the tenets of clinical therapy, including psychiatry, in its, say, non-medical forms, is that dialogue is curative. That’s actually the fundamental proposition. And the thing about having someone in therapy is, you know, they’re often, like everyone, bent out of shape quite badly. Sometimes homicidal. Sometimes. Homicidal is good enough. And hurt and vengeful and, you know, and for good reason often. No joke. Good reason. If you were in their shoes, you’d feel the same way in all probability. You have to let those people talk. You have to let them talk. They don’t even know what they think until they talk. You know, you think, you think, and then you talk. It’s like, no, you don’t. You know, most people can’t think at all. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. It’s very, very difficult to learn to think, because to think you have to hold an argument between two opposing positions in your own head. You have to delineate both positions. And you have to make, like, not a straw man out of either. You want to make, in Sam Harris’s term, an iron man out of both. And then you have to do that alone. It’s like, yeah, maybe you can do that if you’re Dostoevsky, because he’s the only person I’ve seen who’s really managed that consistently. But to expect anything other than an unbelievably well-trained mind to even step into that territory is naive beyond belief. Almost everyone thinks by talking. They don’t even know what they think until they speak. And so often, if you let people speak, they’ll speak and they’ll say, you know, and then they become aware of some internal contradictions, or maybe they shock themselves. That happens a lot. It’s like, oh, I can’t believe I said that. And they hear what they have to say. It’s being revealed themselves to themselves. Geez, that just enough right there is often enough to change them. But even if it isn’t, let’s say they’re particularly intransigent, and we’re not debating about whether hate speech exists, because bloody well right, it exists. And it can be unbelievably pathological. And I think I’m actually quite familiar with that sort of thing. But you want that out in the air so that people can hear it. You want to drive the people who hate underground? We know what happens psychologically when you do that. It’s a very bad idea. Anything you drive underground thrives. It thrives. And it partly thrives because it isn’t even allowed to express itself, and then it festers and turns into hatred that far exceeds the original. And the idea that you make society safe by not letting horrible people say terrible things is that it’s not a good proposition. You want those people out in the open where they can say what they have to say, first of all, so they can see what they’re like, second of all, so that they can see how people respond, because you don’t even know what you should think in some sense until you watch how people respond. You know, it’s some, well, I won’t go on and on about that. And then the question, there’s other questions. Who defines hate? Geez, that’s a deadly one. It’s like, it’s great if you’re on the left and the left is in power, because the left defines hate, but they’re going to be in power forever, man. And as soon as the people who are on the opposite side come into power, they’re going to use whatever arguments you had and their own and whatever you think is going to be hate speech, like, right now. So you should always, and this is what the founders of the American Constitution did, you know, they always thought, okay, how could an absolute malevolent fool screw this up? They never thought, well, how can we establish the utopia? So that’s what you’re always thinking when you’re putting a limit on something, including someone else’s speech. It’s like, okay, how could the most malevolent fool imaginable screw this up the worst possible way? And then presume that will happen. And then take steps so that that isn’t how it turns out. So you have to let the people who have horrifying viewpoints express them, you know, subject to these limitations because you want to make them into martyrs? That’s what happened with, I can’t say it properly, Kirk Wilders. No, no, the Dutch guy. Yeah, yeah, the Dutch guy who’s leading the polls, by the way, and who has a pretty decent chance of winning the election. They nailed him for hate speech and his popularity went up like 4%. It’s like, doesn’t seem like a very smart move to me, but I’m sure he’s not too unhappy about it. You know, and it might be that the fate of the EU rests on his shoulders. Maybe not. Maybe it’s Marine Le Pen. In the centre, then? You both mentioned the difference between, to different degrees, laws that are telling you not to say something versus laws that are forcing you to say something. I wonder if both of you could talk more about that, why you think one is more extreme than the other when both seem to be imposing some dishonesty on the speaker. Well, I don’t think that laws that restrict your speech in the ways that we’ve been describing are any good either. I think they’re both tyrannical. But the requiring you to use a word that is not actually in the dictionary yet, I mean, I said that, I suggested that language was evolutionary, and it is. Language does change. And it may well be that we get this kind of a pronoun sooner or later. I’m not addicted to that at all. I think that kind of a pronoun would be kind of cool. Probably very appropriate in civilized society. It’s not the word I’m talking about when I’m criticizing it. It’s the idea that we should be changing language by statute. That is the problem. That means that language is now considered to be in the purview of the state. No, not in a free country. So I’m not sure I’m answering your question, but I just think, I mean, they’re both bad. One’s more extreme than the other one is. So let me tell you about an experiment. So, you know, people think they think, which we’ve already gone through, and they do that only to a limited degree because thinking is hard, and mostly we do that by talking. But people also think they know what they’re talking about when they say something, and generally they don’t. And I’m not being cruel about this. Like, imagine I asked one of you to come up and draw a helicopter on the board. It’s like, you know, you’re going to draw like a helicopter, a five-year-old draw. Like a box with a beanie on top of it with a stick out the ends, like a helicopter. It’s like, no, no, that’s not a helicopter. It’s not even close. Like, you don’t know about helicopters. It’s like, would fill many volumes. Right, but your knowledge is sufficient to communicate kind of an abstracted representation. And a lot of your thought is actually like that. You don’t know as much as you think you know. And that means you’re more vulnerable in many ways than you think. And so here’s an example. Let’s say I bring you into the lab and I get you to fill out a political attitudes questionnaire and I localize you, say, halfway between center and radical left, something like that. Maybe an NDP territory or something like that. And then I ask you to write a 500-word essay about why corporations are a blessing. Okay, I know, so you don’t agree with it. Yeah, yeah, I know you don’t agree with it. But like, try to write a decent essay. If you write a good one, I’ll give you like an extra 10 bucks or something. Whatever, 50 bucks, whatever, whatever. So you write out this essay and it’s contrary to your viewpoint. And I bring you back the next week and I give you the same political attitudes questionnaire. Well, what do you think happens? You’ve moved substantially towards the right. And so if I regulate what you have to say, I regulate what you think. And you might think, no, but you’re wrong. Because what you think, what you say, especially if you do it bitchily, determines what you think. And I am not willing to cede that to the state. But also, but not only because I object, especially to this particular philosophical embedding of this particular statute, you say. But also because, you see, your stupid opinion is the corrective for the state’s stupid opinions. Like we’ve all, we’re just swamped in ignorance and stupidity. It’s just, it’s a human condition. And states are horrible tyrannical messes. And individuals are like corrupt and blind. And so it’s amazing we can stumble around in the world at all. But what you hope is that now and then some dingbat utters something vaguely sensible that helps curb the tyranny of the state. And you’re going to have to let a lot of stupidity be erred before any pearls of wisdom emerge to the surface. So you have to let people stumble around like prejudiced morons because that’s what they are. But hopefully as they stumble and listen they can become a little less appalling. And so can the state. And that’s no utopian vision, I can tell you that’s for sure. But I’ve never seen a utopian state and I’ve certainly never seen a perfect person. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me to phrase it in exactly that manner. Don’t let people inside your head. It isn’t obvious that they know what they’re doing. So. Over here? Yeah. So I had a thought while you both were talking. And it seems like the sort of genesis of this debate comes from people who they feel as though the current words don’t describe them accurately. No. There are men who feel like women and vice versa. And then there’s people who don’t feel like either apply. And I think you’re, Mr. Peterson, I think you’re right to point out that there’s a kind of weird flip that occurs. Where it’s no longer that the language doesn’t describe them, it’s that the language has to sort of point out their exact identity and uniqueness. And I think maybe a way to sort of reframe the idea is not to have a language that has to cater to every single person, but sort of a singular term that can denote whether or not someone wants to partake in the current structure of language. So he or she, and then if you had a third term that didn’t have to have any connotations of gender, but rather stood for the proposition that they don’t associate with you or she. And that way you can leave it sort of spatially neutral to any particular person. Well, maybe reasonable legislation would have been set up in that manner, you know. But I would say let’s democratize the problem. As soon as someone comes up with a solution that people find usable, it’s like, it’s like Ms. It’s like I use Ms. You know, I think it’s kind of, that’s useful. You know, I’m actually more comfortable using it, I would say. And you know, I kind of got the point. People didn’t want to have their marital status advertised publicly. It didn’t seem necessary. Well, women aren’t the same as they were 100 years ago, right? They’re not even close to the same. The pill was a biological revolution. And then things flipped upside down. So we needed a new word. Okay. We came up with one. It wasn’t implemented by force. It was implemented by public opinion. And that’s how English in particular, like the French is a bit different because they actually have families to decide what constitutes an acceptable word, especially in France, but also in Quebec. But in English, it’s like, it’s the commons, man. Throw a word out there. You’ve nailed the problem. People have picked that up so fast you can’t even believe it. It’ll just spread like, virally. Well, we don’t have that solution. And why is that? Well, because we don’t know how to solve this problem. And so the legislators come along and say, well, you solve it by asking each person to tell you what to say. It’s like, no, sorry, wrong. Plus, dangerous. Plus, motivated. And a variety of other things. So, sure, fine. But I can’t decide if that’ll work. There’s a strange idea now, for some reason, that in some sense the world is obligated to validate your identity. And that ain’t so. It just ain’t so. You deal with the world as it is, as we all do. And if a word comes along that works, it will be used by people because people are interacting and negotiating. It doesn’t happen because there is a legal idea that the world has to respond to your needs. It’s just not the case. If the world is required to validate your identity, you’re done for. And the reason for that is that every single one of you have a pathological direction in which you are likely to go. And that’s because every temperamental virtue comes with a temperamental vice. And so the only, you know, you think you’re sane. It’s like you’re not. You’re not even close. If I put you alone in a cave for two weeks, you’d be done. You can’t be sane on your own. And so what happens is that your parents, if they have any sense, train you, roughly speaking, to be vaguely acceptable to other people. And they keep nudging and winking at you every time you’re a moron so that you get nudged into something approximating acceptable. And you’re clued in enough to pay attention so when someone raises an eyebrow or doesn’t find your joke funny or something rather subtle like that, you immediately revise your identity. And we’re always nudging and tapping each other nonstop, exchanging information about how to stay sane. And if I’m forced into a position where I have to validate your identity, it’s like what if your identity is wrong? What if it’s pathological? What if it doesn’t serve you well? And I start validating it. You think I’m your friend? I’m not your friend at all. I’m a mirror for your narcissism. And you will disappear and drown. And I see this happening all the time with people. Like if you’re fortunate, you’re surrounded by people who like you now and wish you’d be a little better. And they’ll let you know when you’re failing on that. And then you think, you don’t even have to think that much. All you have to do is watch. It’s like, is this person rolling their eyes at it? That’s a bad one. That predicts divorce, by the way, when you get to eye-rolling stage. That’s not good. But basically, you’re fortunate that people don’t validate your damn identity. It’s like what makes you think you’ve got your identity figured out? You’re really complicated. And you’re clueless as hell about it because you can’t represent yourself entirely. You’re the most complicated thing that exists. How are you going to come up with an accurate definition of your identity? You’ve got 100 people out there helping you out if you’ve got any sense, if you’re vaguely tolerable, and they’re kind of hinting at you not only what you are, but what you might become. Man, you should welcome invalidation of your identity. Now, malicious, well, that’s a different story. But it’s not that easy to separate out accurate criticism, especially if it hits you right where it hurts, which is where you’re wrong. You can’t separate that out from maliciousness or hate speech. It’s like good luck. Good luck. You never learn anything without pain. And often, when you receive a piece of corrective information from someone, it’s like if you could throw that person in jail, you would. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Do you have a question? Yeah, I have a question. So looking at the past three years, because we do have that benefit, looking at the Human Rights Tribunal, there has been case law, but it hasn’t just been pronouns, right? It’s attached to other forms of harassment. So I would kind of posit that that’s what we’re going to see, that it’s going to be usually cases of employers or, you know, Hockey Canada not allowing someone who identifies as a man to change the locker room, that kind of thing. So does that change your opinion, knowing that, you know, so far with the case law we do have, hasn’t been a freedom speech isolated incident? It doesn’t, although I’m not disagreeing with what you said. The problem is, as far as I’m concerned, and this is something I addressed earlier, is that bad legislation will be co-opted by people you detest and despise. And so even if these people are reasonable, the problem is, as soon as you put bad law in place, bad people rush in to enforce it. And so you’re basically stating, well, there’s a human rights organization, say a societal organization, that’s been reasonable in its decisions so far, which I’m not completely convinced of, by the way, but you know, so what? They made some mistakes. That happens. But the idea that under the current legal conditions, with this particular legislation in place, those are the same people that are going to be running it in the near future is wrong. What will happen is that people who want this kind of power will rush in to take it. That’s exactly, it always happens. So it will certainly happen in this situation. It’s like, imagine an insurance company, eh? So you work for an insurance company and you have to decide if grandma gets her cancer treatment. Well, if you’re the least bit compassionate, you’re going to last about 15 minutes in that job, because every day you’re making absolutely brutal, brutal decisions. And you have to, because the insurance company doesn’t have an infinite amount of money. Well, so what happens to people in those positions? Well, they either quit, or they get hard-hearted as hell, or people who can do just that with no problem occupy the positions. Well, it’s the same situation here. Bad legislation makes bad rulers. And I think this legislation is, it’s so bad, it’s almost unbelievable. You know that if you’re an employer, you’re basically responsible for all the inaction or action of your employees if they offend someone, whether or not that offense is documented or not, whether or not it was intended. It’s like, who would write a piece of legislation like that? Well, you can read the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s policies. It’s like, it’s their plainest day. So, no, I don’t trust the legislation at all, and I don’t believe that it would be reasonably enforced. I think the courts will take it apart over time, but it’ll cost someone, and it could have been me, and still might be, a lot, a lot. And other people will suffer while that’s happening. So that’s how I see it. So you’ve had your hand up for a while, Scott. Thank you. First of all, even though I disagree with you, thank you very much for coming to speak with us. I had sort of two quick points. One of them might be more point in question. I thought it was interesting in response to an earlier question, you said something about pronouns being a linguistically closed category. I thought that was an interesting concept because we’ve all been using the singular you all night, even though that historically didn’t exist in English. So clearly things do change. Pronouns do change. But my question for you is, your concern was that pronouns could be a sort of a limitless category, or at least that was my understanding. We have limitless categories all over the place. The charter recognizes that individual people’s conceptions of religion can differ. Names are a limitless category. So why are pronouns in particular a concern? And if you don’t accept the pronoun someone else tells you, where should you get the pronoun to refer to them as? If they’re not the source of it, what is? Well, I don’t care what pronouns people want to be addressed by. And of course they have different names, but I’m not required by force to use them. So that’s the fundamental characteristic. It’s like, it isn’t whether or not you can decide to use whatever pronouns you want, but that isn’t what we’re discussing. We’re discussing whether or not I should be required by force to use the same pronouns. And there’s no such thing as a limitless category, by the way. That’s an impossibility because a category, you read your postmodernists, they figured this out. Categories require limits, and limits exclude and marginalize. It’s the central doctrine of postmodernism. And so they’re the critics of categorization, and that’s why I’m bringing them up. They’re not friends of categorization. I’m making the argument for the enemies of categorization. And so there’s no such thing as a limitless category. Which is also, actually, by the way, why the LGBT acronym in the universe keeps multiplying, is because what’s actually happening is that there is a category, which you might consider normative sexual behavior, traditional sexual behavior, and there’s those who do not fit into that category. Well, no one fits into that category. So the category, it’s a category without limits. That excluded is a category without limits. It’s not a category. It falls apart of its own accord. It tends towards infinite multiplicity. It has to, because it contains an infinite multiplicity, and that will manifest itself across time. And then with regards to why we use the pronouns we use, it’s like, well, who knows? I don’t know. It’s partly, I don’t buy the you thing, by the way, because it was valid before that. So there was still a marker in the same linguistic category. And technically, they are close linguistic categories. So if they change, they change very slowly. But whatever, I’m going to cede that. But technically, I think it’s erroneous. They transform much slower than other category sports. Let’s put it that way. So where do these come from? It’s the commons, man. It’s like everyone decided that over some extended period of time, and it seems to work, so people use it. And it’s certainly not because of subjective decision. I mean, that’s an element in it, obviously. But it’s only one of who knows how many elements. We don’t know. Many. So. All right. Well, we’re out of time. Thank you very much for our participation, everyone. Thank you. Professor Carney argued devil’s advocate, because no other law professor was willing to argue with Professor Chisholm. And I think it’s lamentable, because I think we all can agree that this was a very important conversation, and it was very satisfying. So if you’d like to see more provocative debates or get involved with us, we’re a thriving new group, the Running Needs Society. We will be hosting our student leadership conference in the summer in the country, in Ontario. And we have a lot of fun things going on. So thank you very much for coming, and thank you, professors. Thank you. Thank you.