Elon Musk says terms 'cisgender' and 'cis' are now considered 'slurs' on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk says terms 'cisgender' and 'cis' are now considered 'slurs' on Twitter

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28 pointsnickthegreek18 comments

Elon moves on personal, and, at times, trivial influences. His offer to buy Twitter may have been precipitated by a girlfriend who thought the Babylon Bee was being unjustly banned from Twitter. Twitter hired some first-rate lawyers to draft the agreement, and then it snowballed from an amusing gesture to possibly the worst LBO in history.

This at least can be partly attributed to Musk having a child who is trans. He seems very unsettled by that.

In 58 BCE, Julius Caesar was appointed governor of [REDACTED, PRAISE ELON]-alpine Gaul.

It's not a slur but aren't slurs allowed on Twitter anyways?

I guess he will down-rank slurs and nobody will see them which ends up being almost the same as banning them.

How are these terms a slur, exactly? They just describe a property of being.

Most slurs started as describing a property of being, but over time began to be perceived as something else.

This isnt one of them.

They offend Elon's free speech sensibilities.

I haven't heard "cis" deployed as a slur, but "incel" seems to be predominantly used that way. Isn't it also a property of being?

It's not an intrinsic property, as it only comes into existence due to social interactions. An individual, viewed fully removed from all other humans, can be cis or trans, but they can only be involuntarily celibate in the context of a society.

I assume it's a bit like how a few straight people used to object to the term 'straight', generally complaining that they were just 'normal' people (haven't seen this in years, but it was big in the nineties and early noughties from the more over-sensitive corners of the right wing).

Though arguably even more absurd; 'cisgender' is the rough equivalent to the rather dry technical term 'heterosexual', and I've never heard of anyone objecting to _that_. It's not even slang!

"Cisgender" is obviously not a slur, come on, but this is Saint Car we're talking about; one shouldn't necessarily expect things to make sense.

(One wonders how he thinks people _should_ describe non-trans people).

"A bit like" is underselling it. It is that. Occasionally, I politely ask people objecting to the term "cis" what word they would prefer I use instead. I've had people directly tell me I should refer to cis people as "normal".

Another, much more interesting response I've gotten multiple times is that I should use "man/woman" instead of "cis". Which implies that transgender people either don't exist, or don't belong to either category.

> Which implies that transgender people either don't exist, or don't belong to either category.

Which is a bit odd, as the same general sort of people seem to believe it is just the _height_ of wit to refer to trans women as men.

> 'cisgender' is the rough equivalent to the rather dry technical term 'heterosexual'

I'm pretty sure 'cisgender' means "identifies as birth gender" and has no connection to your sexual preferences (hence 'cishet' being 'identifies as birth gender, attracted to opposite gender'.)

What I mean is that it's not even slang (as "straight", which some heterosexuals used to take offence to, is); it's about as dry a description of non-trans people as we have in English.

Projection. If you use trans as a slur you think cis is a slur.

In the context they were used, I can see how they can be considered a slur.

The context was that some people were calling someone a "cissy".

https://twitter.com/UKHomosexual/status/1671428042072129537/...

Today in "Free Speech Absolutist"

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