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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.
My uncharitable mental model of it is that liberals ran out of ways to paint conservatives as bigots.
Its important to the liberal worldview that they're the tolerant ones, and conservatives are the intolerant ones.
For a long time this was not a problem, because conservative had fairly negative views around gays, and to a lesser but still real extent non-martial sex.
Liberals won around those topics, the standard issue conservative now knows they're supposed to be respectful toward gays, and for the most part, they publicly at least, largely are.
They can be a little freer about complaining about non-martial sex, but they're very little they can actually do.
Liberals can't declare victory and go home though, its a forever culture war, so they need to find something that conservatives aren't yet tolerant of, so trans issues it is.
I have to admit- I just think everyone deserves support and I suspect the fight will keep going forever or until conservatives kill all the abnormal people or stop trying to bully people who want to surgically alter themselves into giant spiders out of existence.
It's not going to end because um... why should it end exactly? I have this feeling of an underlying premise that there is an amount of weird that is... too weird. And... I just... don't have that premise. If something has pragmatic issues that prevent it from being pragmatic for society to support it, my first thought is "what technological advancements will cause support of this to be viable" not "lets suppress it forever."
But some people seem to see "technical advancements have caused support for this to be viable" and go into moral panic mode. Why?
Why are some people unhappy seeing the boundaries of the human condition expand? Why does it make some people uncomfortable?
What is wrong with your brains? Or is it me? What's wrong with my brain? Something is clearly wrong with someone's brain here.
"Support" is doing a lot of lifting here. Should we not execute people who want to turn themselves into spiders? sure. Should we let them eat children because that's what spiders of their size would do? absolutely not. And I think a lot of people reasonable draw the line at "Anything that is going to impose a neg negative cost on society"
What do you mean by a net negative cost on society?
Eating children sure. But that's a toy example. Where is the edge?
What happens when people are just afraid of spiders?
At some point, society isn't compatible with things- not because there's anything wrong with those things in and of themselves, but because society is being inflexible in ways it could change.
I think in cases like these, it's still reasonable... realistic... rational... perhaps even economically optimal in the short term to be antispider.
But it's braver to recognize that you're the one causing their existence to be a negative and try to change.
There are some cost inherent to accommodating extremely strange expressed desires. "normal" existing at all as a concept has some strong net positive effect because people who might think turning themself into a spider will make them happier are often just wrong. Normalizing such a thing makes it more likely marginal people might try. If we're going to start saying we should be concerned with the wellbeing of others to the degree we're trading off on our own preferences then we ought to actually also consider the second and third order effects.
We are talking about a world where you can turn into a giant spider right?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're biologically immortal.
So strong disagreement. Exploration is far more important to an immortal society than exploitation. You have forever to figure out what you like most. So you SHOULD try out being a giant spider. Trying out everything should be normalized.
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