Elon Musk Vows To Suspend Twitter Users Who Use ‘Cis’ or ‘Cisgender’: Those Are ‘Slurs On This Platform’

Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, file

Elon Musk, who has called himself a “free-speech absolutist,” declared that the words “cis” and “cisgender” are considered to be “slurs” on Twitter, and could cause users to be suspended from the social media platform.

“Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions,” Musk tweeted. “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform.”

Musk’s tweet came in response to children’s advocate James Esses, who wrote,

Yesterday, after posting a Tweet saying that I reject the word ‘cis’ and don’t wish to be called it, I receive a slew of messages from trans activists calling me “cissy” and telling me that I am ‘cis’ “whether or not I like it.” Just imagine if the roles were reversed.

Esses publishes a site called TRANSparency, that’s “dedicated to providing open and honest reflections on the issue of our time — the impact of gender ideology on society.”

According to Merriam-Webster, “cisgender” is defined as “a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth.” The dictionary added the word, along with “genderqueer” and “Mx.,” in 2016, according to The Washington Post.

The Post reported,

Cisgender first found legitimacy among lexicographers last summer, when the Oxford English Dictionary added an entry for the word, which OED traced to the late 1990s.

Merriam-Webster argues that cisgender is older than that: The oldest evidence of its use that editors there could find dates back to 1994. (Its first mention by this publication appears to have come much, much later, in a May 2013 blog post, according to searches of two databases.)

“Cisgender” has not been labeled offensive or a “slur” by Merriam-Webster.

Twitter’s “hateful conduct policy” does not list examples of “slurs,” according to Forbes.

Twitter’s hateful conduct policy page does not explicitly mention what words the platform considers slurs, but notes it prohibits “targeting others with repeated slurs…that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category.”

Musk did not clarify when Twitter began considering those words slurs, and it is also unclear whether the platform has handed out any suspensions.

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