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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).
Because normal people object to being called something other than normal? Trans people having so much support in the media skews how truly abnormal almost everyone thinks they are. Its a bizarre scene whenever a trans person enters any not-LGBTQ (on and on) place and starts trying to fit in. So they often don't even try, they just start being bizzare and demanding respect. Some FTM people can moderately pass as really weak looking soyboys. But they seem much less even a part of the project. Those are mostly very depressed people who's depression continues so brazenly through transition they are lucky to ever see people as they can often not exit their abode. Contrasted with the never passing loud MTFs that so often represent the movement, and well, the abnormality is so stark that calling something that is not that anything but normal is simply a bizarre turn of vocabulary.
I've never understood how people who are, essentially, less than 0.01% of the population have gained a comparatively much higher proportion when it comes to their representation in the popular conscience. Trans rights activists don't like the 0.01% argument, which is fine - but then they turn around and use it themselves by saying that a people that is 0.01% of the population is harmless. Which, besides being not how things work in any capacity, is having it both ways.
I'm convinced the reason trans people occupy such a large space in the cultural imagination relative to the size of their demographic (and are able to get their demands met so easily) is simply because a disproportionately large number of coders in Silicon Valley are trans women.
That could explain other things too, like why the furry community has a significant number of people and why furries have so much disposable income. I've seen many jokes about how if there was a plane full of furries, and it crashed, killing everyone on board, the tech infrastructure in America would crumble soon afterward.
If it's the plane out of a gathering, I found the way I want to go out.
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