Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and the recent owner of Twitter, recently tweeted that he considers the words “cis” and “cisgender” slurs.
In response to a tweet from James Esses saying he “received a slew of messages from trans activists calling me ‘cissy’ and telling me that I am ‘cis whether or not I like it,’” Musk wrote, “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform.”
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023
According to Twitter’s hateful conduct policy, the platform prohibits “targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes, or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category.”
Musk wrote another tweet in response to a post claiming the person who coined the word “cisgender” was a pedophile saying, “Yup, the contemptible creep that manufactured the term ‘cis’ has serious problems. Ignore him.” However, the word is credited to researcher Dana Defosse, a cisgender woman, who first used the word in an internet forum in 1994.
“The fact is, whether or not somebody identifies as cisgender doesn’t negate the fact that cisgender identity is a valid construct. It exists, and it has meaning in how we operate in the world,” Defosse told HuffPost regarding Musk’s comment. “Banning use of a word that’s part of our daily vocabulary around the world, that appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s a cowardly and futile attempt to censor an idea which is, in my opinion, way bigger and more enduring than anything Musk could hope to offer… If you ban the word ‘cisgender’ on Twitter, how’s somebody going to have an informed, rational discussion of gender identity in the world?”
It has not been confirmed that Musk’s tweet reflects a genuine change in Twitter’s policy, but the site dropped its protections for trans people from misgender and deadnaming in April. Since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, hate speech reached unprecedented highs according to the New York Times.