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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Right because that's objectionable speech. You don't need to worry about non-objectionable speech because no one would care to censor it.

I don't know what you mean by freedom on consequences. I guess a consequence of speech could be to get your account banned? If anything Twitter leaving up your objectionable content would result in more likely conferences of being fired or something.

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> Right because that's objectionable speech.

Objectionable to whom? Elon seems to have no issue blocking speech objectionable to pseudo-dictators[1] or declaring that cis/cisgendered are slurs that can get you suspended. He seems fine with blocking speech objectionable to those that agree with his political sensibilities.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/13/turkey-...

And yet, Elon has decided that a term used in academic medical research for nearly a century, “cisgender”, is a slur and banned from the platform. Funny how he wants to protect objectionable speech that aligns with his political view while restricting “objectionable” speech that doesn’t.

From Wikipedia, while the concept has been discussed since at least 1914 the actual term cisgender has apparently only been used since 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender

Cisgender is recent, but it’s also primarily used to serve as the counter to transgender. To understand “cisgender”, it’s useful to study the history of “transgender”. Transgender was introduced as a term because it encompassed a larger group of people and avoided the stigma surrounding “transsexual”. Transsexual has a history dating back about a hundred years. Since “trans-“ and “cis-“ are antonym prefixes, once you have transsexual, you have cissexual. For the purposes of Elon’s rule, it doesn’t matter whether it’s CISsexual or CISgender, he objects to “cis”.

One reason why many people, particularly feminist women, find "cisgender" a disagreeable term is because it's a linguistic concession that makes it more difficult to argue for the rights of actual female women, as it implicitly redefines "woman" to include males and "man" to include females.

Disagreeing with a particular taxonomic way of describing different types of people simply because it makes it hard to advance your political beliefs does not mean the words involved in that taxonomy are slurs. “Slur” has a particular meaning, and it isn’t “makes it hard for me to achieve my political goals”.

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