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An interesting tweet from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841
My initial reaction to this was that "well, aren't you already allowing slurs on Twitter, Elon?" But then I realized that there's a distinction here - slurs may be allowed, but harassment is not. After all, he used the words "cis" and "cisgender" without any censorship, much like many would censor a typical slur such as "nigger" as "n*gger" or "n-word". You may be allowed to use "cis", but you're not allowed to directly call someone "cis" on the platform.
More to the point, I think it's very valid to describe "cis" and "cisgender" as a slur, insofar as a slur is something you call a group of people who don't want to be called that (similar to the "'TERF' is a slur" debate). Certainly, "cissy" is definitely a slur (which the person Elon Musk was replying to was called). So why don't people want to be called "cis"?
I think it's because labeling the vast majority of the population (something like 99%) and making them have to use a qualifier to describe themselves is a systematic effort to make them seem more different from the norm than they really are. For the vast majority of human existence, a woman would be described as "a woman", until suddenly (around the late 2010s or so), she would now have to be described as "a cis woman", to distinguish her from "a trans woman". The implied argument seems to be that "a woman" is now suddenly ambiguous and one does not know whether one is referring to a woman in the classical sense, or a trans woman.
I would agree with this, except that I still see many instances of "women" being used when it's really being used to refer to trans women. If a qualifier is needed now, why not just keep saying "trans women" all the way through? So the "cis" terminology seems to just be a ploy to redefine "woman" to by default mean "trans woman", thus making the "cis" qualifier necessary to refer to a woman in the classical sense. But this would seem to contradict one of the supposed goals of the trans movement, that trans people should be treated the same as non-trans people. Why not refer to trans women and "cis" women equally, without the qualifier?
And it's not like it's impossible to refer to non-trans people either. I've seen many terminologies used that are much more acceptable, such as "biological women", or "non-trans" as I've been using. There's also "assigned female at birth", but I feel like that's much more of a misnomer, as it implies that gender/sex is something you're "assigned" rather than a fundamental property that is immutable (at least with today's primitive technology).
Is "straight" a slur? "Able-bodied"? "Neurotypical"? Those, like "cis", are all neutral valance ways of describing a person as normal along some axis. I'm guessing you're disagreeing that "cis" is neutral valance?
(This isn't even getting into people accurately described as such not wanting to be called "criminal", "con man", etc., and us not calling those slurs.)
Unequivocally yes. They are all words meant to denigrate and marginalize normal people. You can tell because they are all synonymous with normal. They only reason they exist is because gays, cripples, and retards wanted a word other than normal to refer to normal people, so they don't have to be reminded how abnormal they are every time they want to talk about normal people. Hence, cis, straight, able-bodied, neurotypical, and so on right up until you get people unironically using words like cisheteropatriarchy.
This comment has accrued enough user reports for "antagonism" that I feel like I have to say something, but I admit I'm torn. What you've written is blunt enough that it could probably do with less heat, but you are answering a direct question in a clear, honest, and direct way, demonstrating good adherence to the "speak plainly" rule. But you have accrued several warnings and a ban in the last six months, which weighs against you here and increases my suspicion that you are pressing on boundaries just to see what you can get away with.
On balance, I'm issuing you a warning, but at the same time I think it would be fair to note that if a regular user with a couple of AAQCs had posted this exact comment, I would probably let it slide. Please work on making comments that are far from the edge, before seeing how close you can get to it.
I'm not trying to get close to the edge, I'm just being honest, earnest, and straightforward while spending enough pixels to avoid being called low effort.
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Neurotypical was invented as the inverse of "autistic". Some autistics are, to use the old word, "morons", but over half aren't (I'm autistic and have IQ 130). It's one thing to use slurs, but is it so much to ask that you use accurate ones?
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The only one of those that has a negative connotation to me is the last one. The first seems neutral-sounding, and the second positive.
Cis also sounds mildly negative. Both cis and neurotypical would sound more neutral if they're being used that way for clarity's sake. It depends on context to some extent, as all word use does.
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That's interesting because "neurotypical" I thought to be genuinely merely descriptive.
I'm beginning to believe that anyone who pays close enough attention to politics can't actually approach these things as JAQ neutral liberal. Before you can sincerely suggest X is descriptive, someone will convincingly tell you that term has already been weaponized and is not just descriptive.
Those who lament the hijacking of liberalism are forced to participate in such hijacking lest they show themselves to be rubes who just fell off the proverbial turnip truck.
Anyone approaching politics in a "descriptive, neutral" way is a con artist or a moron.
“Neurotypical” used to exclusively mean without neurological structural differences from the norm, ie, without autism, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, and anything else identified as being physical, not chemical.
It was adopted by the bipolar community, among others, creating a neuro-atypical disability pride community which now includes every emotional disturbance and memetic misconfiguration, including the dysphorias and dysmorphias.
“Neurotypical” is now used as an insult for “people who don’t know what it’s like to be us.” It’s another power-critical term intended to make “normal” unutterable without a sense of guilt.
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So how do you refer to someone who’s straight, but in a wheelchair? Or a cis autistic person? You can be “normal” in one axis but not another. Surely it’s handy to have a word that refers to the default attribute?
If you feel denigrated being called straight, do you also feel denigrated being called right handed (assuming you are)? Or would you want to be called normal handed?
To me your argument just sounds like the same language policing that the left is oft guilty of, but with a right wing flavour.
I want to be called dextrous, and left handed people should be called sinister.
I jest, but the fact that those words have those connotations indicates that that kind of thinking was likely in use at one point.
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I don't see why the first can't be referred to as "wheelchair user" and the second as "autistic person". There is a convention in communication where if you leave out an attribute, it is assumed to be normal, or at the very least, not currently relevant to the conversation. Especially since "wheelchair user" does not necessarily mean that they are not straight and "autistic person" does not necessarily mean that they are trans.
This is very different from "cis" for a few reasons.
Estimates of the proportion of right-handed people in the population varies widely from 70% to 90%, but whatever it is, the actual number is far from 99.99%, in contrast to the proportion of non-trans people. So it would be incorrect to say right-handed is "normal-handed" (unless one is joking, of course). It may be the majority, but not the norm.
The accommodations for people of a certain handedness are very understandable and very reasonable. E.g. talking about manufacturing left-handed or right-handed computer mice. So there's plenty of innocuous reasons to use the term.
Most of the time that "right-handed" or similar is used, it is used neutrally and without a negative connotation. E.g. this isn't about the actual hands of people, but talking about how to drive on the right-hand side of the road with a vehicle that has a steering wheel on the right-hand side of the car. (I say most of the time, though, because I just searched "right-handed" on Twitter to look at the usage of the term, and there are a few recent tweets mock-arguing that it is a slur in response to Elon Musk's tweet, which I can decidedly say means it is being used in a negative context.)
If you mean language policing as in "don't say the n-word", then I guess so. But I agree with that policing insofar as I don't really think it's productive to let people say the n-word all the time, although at that point it's more about behavior, not language.
If you mean language policing as in "say 'people of color' instead of 'black people'", I don't think that's the same thing, because "black people" is definitely a neutral term (and as a minor point, "people of color" is just more awkward to say).
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They are slurs when people use them with the intention of a put-down, not because they inherently denigrate "normal people", whatever that means.
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If I kept going on about the straights, able-bodied, and neurotypicals who are doing things that I deem to be unpleasant, at some point I expect others to treat me like I'm using slurs. That's kind of how slurs evolved in the first place, otherwise they wouldn't be slurs. Most of the time, I don't have any reason to use those particular terms anyway, so if I want to talk about those kinds of people, I just don't use "straight", "able-bodied", or "neurotypical". I generalize this from the principle of talking about everyone like they want to be included in the conversation.
And, yes, "cis" doesn't sound neutral to me. Adding a qualifier in front of something inherently implies that it's different from the norm. If I kept talking about "blorg men" and "blorg women" and "blorg people", I sincerely doubt that any person would think that I'm talking about the vast majority of people. Rather, they would think that I would be talking about some minority of people with the "blorg" attribute, whatever "blorg" may mean. I would expect them to be confused if I told them I'm simply talking about people who, say, have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot. Double their confusion if, preceding this, I was ranting about "blorg privilege" and how "blorg people have it easy" and similar statements.
Well, for one, I don't really see criminals demand to not be called a "criminal" that often, if at all. For two, this would be kind of pointless, because the accusation of someone's criminality goes far beyond just surface-level labeling. Like, personally, you can tell me someone is a criminal, but I'd ask you for specifics. And then if you told me "well, he was convicted of the sexual assault of a woman", there's not really many language games one can do to weasel out of that accusation besides challenging the definition of "sexual assault" (and of course, "woman").
For three, I don't go on angry rants about people I describe as "criminal". Like, I can think of plenty of cases where "criminal" would be unacceptable, but those are when it's obvious the speaker is using it as a thinly-veiled replacement for "black" (e.g. "I hate people with criminal skin color"). The same cannot be said for "cis", and while anecdotal, at least one person (WhiningCoil) has replied to my comment corroborating this. I also don't treat all people described as "criminal" like they're a unified group who are all in coordination to achieve some common goal.
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Honestly, in certain contexts I would consider those slurs. Able-bodied aside (and that probably because I don’t know that many disabled progressives), I’ve certainly heard straight and neurotypical used in the same way slurs are.
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Why is neutral-valence terminology appropriate in a given context?
I'm no authority, but I think at least a part of the progressive project is to encourage language that's less exclusionary. The idea here is that by having neutral-valence terms to describe each other without resorting to the kind of implicit judgment a term like "normal" contains. There's an implied acceptance or tolerance when labeling something normal that I think most humans probably have some psychological need for. Certainly, it's at least preferable to being sorted into a category that's implicitly abnormal, and thus much more likely to be subject to ignorance, misunderstanding, and prejudice.
"Racist", "Sexist", "Homophobe", etc, are all exclusionary by any reasonable definition. If Progressives just want neutral-valience language to describe each other without resorting to implicit judgement, why is their language packed to the gills with terms that implicitly judge others?
Again, I'm not an authority on progressive thought, but my best guess is that their argument would be that it's unfair to judge others on what they consider inalienable characteristics like gender identity, race, sex, etc. but that beliefs and behaviors are relatively more choosable and thus fair game.
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Why don't you go ahead and claim jailing people for kidnapping is hypocritical?
The point is that Progressives are not interested in a neutral viewpoint in the abstract, but only as a tool to undermine moral views they disagree with. They do not treat their own moral views with similar skepticism or "objectivity". Hence, the appeal to neutral viewpoint is not itself neutral. It is an isolated demand for rigor, and should be discussed with that reality in mind.
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The rules require that you respond to what was actually said before arguing something else. In particular, this means that putting words into people's mouths is not really allowed, even when you frame that move as a question. This is low effort, don't do this.
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Those terms are meta-exclusionary. They only exclude people who try to exclude others. This is reminiscent of Popper's intolerance of intolerance.
I expect you can come up with new examples that are not meta in this way, but of course, offhand, I cannot.
I'm largely repeating the response below, but I believe the actual causality is reversed: the people who use these terms take people they want to exclude and then deem those people as excluding others. Similar to the whole thing about Popper, which is that, by and large, the people who most loudly proclaim the principle are ones who take people they already don't want to tolerate and deem those people as being intolerant, in an effort to justify their pre-existing intolerance.
Should we then be intolerant of the intolerance of the intolerant...?
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No they don't. Someone can be a "racist" for having the wrong skin tone and singing along to the wrong song, or refusing to give up a rented CityBike. Moreover, as is increasingly popular on the left, there's a categorical denial that anyone who isn't white can be "racist" at all - thus "racist" itself is a term being used to exclude others.
Similarly with "sexist" and "homophobe." The most common use-case is attacking someone who holds disfavored object-level beliefs regarding, e.g., sexual morality or family formation.
You might be right in practice. I suppose this is the bailey, Esparanza's use is the motte.
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Actually, the outrage was worse than this. The argument of Twitter activists wasn't that she was refusing to give up her CitiBike. It's that she was trying to somehow steal the bike that the other black men had rented and was using her status/privilege(?) as a white woman to cry crocodile tears, and thus trying to get someone to call the police, and therefore the police arriving would commit racist police brutality on them, and therefore her resisting in that manner means that she was committing literal violence on them, despite there being more black men than her who were all individually physically stronger than her. And of course, therefore, it's appropriate that she be canceled and fired from her job as a nurse.
At least, that was the argument as I understood it. It's all completely incorrect, of course, and I do not endorse it in the slightest.
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"White"? "Bourgeoise"?
"Pedophile" is exclusionary and judgmental. Generally speaking, would you argue that Progressives are okay with judging and excluding pedophiles, or would you argue that they object to doing so?
If I say that homosexual acts are a sin, how is that more exclusionary and judgmental than a gay person saying that my moral assessment of homosexuality is bigoted and homophobic?
Also, you (or the progressives you're referring to) are misusing the paradox of tolerance. It applies to people who respond to argument with personal violence.
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The main difference compared with those other examples is that not everyone agrees the relevant axis (gender identity) exists or is coherently defined. By using the term "cis" you're implicitly buying into the premise that gender identity is a real, coherent thing.
That's different from being a slur though. I don't think astrology is real but if someone were to call me a virgo I wouldn't say they're using a slur.
That's fair, I don't actually think "cis" is a slur, but I do think it bothers some people for reasons that don't apply to terms like "straight."
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That’s such a Virgo thing to say. I bet you’re also a blood type O.
(This was an example of how nonconsensus and/or technical terminology can be used to insult someone.)
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