Joe Rogan gets a lot of criticism and prior to the pandemic one of the biggest points used against him were past comments he made about trans mixed martial artist Fallon Fox. His comments were fairly harsh and were long branded as trans phobic. This is perhaps why Rogan softened his stance on trans mixed martial artists in the women’s division.
But you still not might’ve been able to anticipate Joe Rogan’s response to Jordan Peterson’s criticism of transgender actor Elliot Page. The conservative author and former professor of psychology at the University of Toronto came under fire from the well-known podcast presenter for denigrating Page and using his “dead name,” Ellen.
Twitter suspended Peterson for violating the terms of service for “hateful behavior” after Peterson claimed that a “criminal physician” had removed Page’s breasts.
Actor Zachary Levi was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience on Tuesday. He called Peterson one of the “deepest thinkers” in the world with a lot of integrity. However, he also acknowledged that he has his own stuff that people have problems with.
Levi added: “Like, I get it. Nobody’s perfect. It’s sad, man, because again, there’s a lot of fear and pain on all that. All the sides of that too.”
View this post on Instagram
Then Rogan cited the viewpoint of comic Brian Simpson.
Rogan said: “My friend Brian Simpson had a very good thing to say about that. He was like ‘I come to you for, like, heavy duty intellectual s***. Not for this.’ Like, this is not a thing to be getting offended about.”
Rogan continued: “Like, everybody’s in favor of everybody doing whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody until it gets to the gender – and then people start getting weird.”
“They start thinking it’s a mistake. They start thinking, ‘Why you doing that?’ They start thinking all kinds of things.”
In June, Peterson tweeted: “Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”
But even after being banned from Twitter, he continued to mention Page. This happened just after the Umbrella Academy star covered Esquire magazine last month.
Peterson told podcaster Kyle Kulinski, “See, I would’ve left Ellen Page alone if she hadn’t been parading her new abs in a fashion magazine. How many kids do you think she convinced to convert, one? A thousand?”