Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube personality Jordan Peterson said he would “rather die” than delete the tweet he posted about actor Elliot Page last month.
Speaking to the National Post, Peterson, 60, said Twitter had temporarily suspended most of his account’s features on June 28 after he tweeted about the 35-year-old actor. In his now-deleted post, Peterson referred to Page using his former name and claimed he had his “breasts removed by a criminal physician.”
“I penned an irritated tweet in response to one of the latest happenings on the increasingly heated culture war front,” Peterson told the publication. “There are no rules on Twitter except don’t do what we don’t like today. They are always applied post hoc by algorithms and idiots bent on maintaining their woke superiority.”
Mikhaila Peterson, the Canadian psychologist’s daughter, called out Twitter following the temporary suspension and tagged Elon Musk in her post, writing, “Definitely not a free speech platform at the moment.”
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The YouTube personality addresses his “irritated tweet” in a video posted on Friday, explaining that his Twitter account’s restrictions will only be lifted once he deletes his post.
“I have essentially been banned from Twitter as a consequence. I say banned, although technically I have been suspended. But the suspension will not be lifted unless I delete the ‘hateful’ tweet in question, and I would rather die than do that,” Peterson says in his video. “And hopefully it will not come to that, although who the hell knows in these increasingly strange days?”
Peterson’s tweet was a reaction to a New York Post article about Page, who announced that he is transgender and non-binary in December 2020, and his excitement over being introduced as a transgender character on Netflix’s “Umbrella Academy.”
In May, Peterson also found himself embroiled in controversy for calling plus-size model Yumi Nu “not beautiful” in a tweet. After facing online backlash, he announced he would be quitting Twitter for a few weeks.
Nu, who became the first Asian plus-size model to grace the cover of “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit,” responded to Peterson’s words with a TikTok video of her lip-syncing Nicki Minaj’s “Itty Bitty Piggy.”
Featured Image via Jordan B Peterson (left), Late Night with Seth Meyers
