Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as intolerant. His position is generally extremely open-minded and comes from the position of a psychologist that has seen the failure modes of many different clients' lifestyles. When he tells moral tales that tilt toward a conservative lifestyle, they are told in the sense that straying from a conservative path is morally fine, but subjects you to personal risk of worse outcomes.

One of the main reasons for his rise to fame was the opposition to bill C-16. A bill he claimed to oppose because of its free-speech implications, when all the bill actually did was extend existing legal protections of identifiable groups to also include gender identity and gender expression. Those exact same protections already existed on the basis of race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, and mental or physical disability. If Peterson's gripe is with compelled speech then how come he didn't strongly criticize the existing legislation for other identifiable groups, but instead just singled out the new protections for transgender individuals?

> straying from a conservative path is morally fine, but subjects you to personal risk of worse outcomes.

Which is a baseless and very questionable claim to make.

> Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as intolerant.

Peterson is a Christian conservative with some fairly patriarchal ideas [1,2], so I think characterizing him as intolerant is pretty fair.

[1] "[Western feminists avoid criticizing Islam because of] their unconscious wish for brutal male domination." https://twitter.com/aliamjadrizvi/status/1001164042856271874

[2] It is "hypocritical" for a woman to wear makeup in the workplace if she doesn't want to be sexually harassed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blTglME9rvQ&t=7m12s

You are explicitly mischaracterizing his arguments. Peterson has spent more time than you or I arguing about the pros and cons of patriarchal hierarchies. The fact that he is willing to admit to their merits and demerits is evidence that he is more open-minded, and arguing at a higher level of abstraction, than most people in the political debate.

Peterson opposed C-16 on genuine and extremely reasonable free-speech grounds. He was speaking as an individual that endorses the value of free speech. Hate speech laws obviously limit free speech, have a chilling effect on genuine debates, and can even hurt our ability to think straight.

Peterson was an academic and decided to fight c16 because it became an an issue in his university and he disagreed with how their policies were going to in fact compel him to speech.

It wasn't as if he was sitting in a room somewhere looking for bills to fight compelled speech..

As I understand it (and maybe I'm wrong) his objection was that the law would compel his speech (in particular to call a transwoman a woman). Is that claim false? Is there any existing similar compelled speech under the existing legislation? If not then that seems to explain why he hadn't previously criticized the legislation.

It would compel that speech in the same way that you are compelled to call me "Joshua" and not "asshole" when we are engaging in a conversation at work.