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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   33011 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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An interesting tweet from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841

Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.

The words “cis” or “cisgender” are considered slurs on this platform.

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).

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

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.)

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.

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.

"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?

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.

They only exclude people who try to exclude others.

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...?

Those terms are meta-exclusionary. They only exclude people who try to exclude others.

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.

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.

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.

"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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