Devil’s advocate here: how exactly does this tweet fit with Elon Musk’s commitment to make twitter the home of free speech on the internet?
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
For those of you who are, blessedly, normal people who have no earthly idea what “cis” even means, a brief explainer: It is a word that describes what we would previously have just called “normal” – a man who believes, correctly, that he is a man is called a “cisgender man” by some transgender activists. A woman who knows, correctly, that she is a woman is called “a cisgender woman”. The term is mainly used these days in the fruitier sections of academia to distinguish normal men and women from transgender men and women who have usurped the gender identity of the opposite sex.
So if somebody calls you “cis” online, that’s all they’re saying: That you are indeed a man or a woman, and you don’t profess that the doctors got it wrong when they had a quick peek at birth and marked your birth certificate correctly.
Most regular people can agree, I’d imagine, that “cis” is an entirely stupid word – an effort to differentiate that which does not need differentiating. It’s the functional equivalent of insisting that everybody in the world must refer to bananas as “yellow bananas”, just because a very tiny fraction of bananas are naturally pink or black. It is, as a general rule of language, the exception which needs to be denoted, not the standard.
But a word being stupid does not automatically make it a slur, does it?
That’s actually where this discussion gets interesting: My instinct, like that of a lot of others, I’d imagine, would be towards a classically liberal position where something simply being annoying is not enough to classify it as bigoted, or racist. But the counter-argument is that this is no longer the broadly agreed position.
Take the example, reported by Fatima yesterday, of the furore over Dermot Kennedy apologizing for describing himself as “knackered”. While the noun “knacker” is a recognised slur word against Irish travellers, the verb “to be knackered” certainly is not: It is derived from the traditional meaning of the description of a horse or other animal as being “fit only for the knacker’s yard”, coming from the times when a knacker was not a traveller, but a person who slaughtered and rendered animals no longer fit for consumption. It means tired, exhausted, and of no further use. The word does not refer to travellers in any way.
And yet, it can be construed as offensive, and a slur, if somebody chooses to be offended by it. This, incidentally, is the position also adopted in the Government’s new hate speech bill: Speech need not be objectively hateful to be criminal – it need only be perceived as hateful by the alleged victim.
In this context, Elon Musk’s decision to treat “cis” as a slur is perfectly defensible, because to define a word as a slur word in the modern environment requires only that some people choose to be offended by it. In many ways, he is simply implementing the same standard for hateful speech as many western Governments are adopting.
The problem is that this is a fast road to Orwell’s 1984 vision of a language deprived of most meaning and thousands of words: If words can arbitrarily be defined as slur words based on the views of a minority of people looking to take offence, then it will not be long until we have very few words left. If a word can simply be defined as a slur because a certain number of people are offended (exactly how many need to be offended seems unclear) then what is the limiting principle? Can my fellow Monaghan natives simply decide, some day, that “Farneyman” is a slur? According to the Musk standard, and the hate speech standard, then it appears that we can.
The instinct for people on the broad right to adopt and copy the tactics of the nutty left by defining their favourite words as hateful slurs is understandable, in the context of the culture wars – but it is no less stupid than the people who use words like “cis” in the first place.
As it is, “cis” is, in my view, a helpful word, because it identifies those who use it as what my grandmother would have called “doses”. The same is true of other progressive innovations, like identifying oneself by preferred pronouns.
Finally, Musk committed to delivering a platform that allowed free speech. Whether you like it, or do not, somebody going around insisting that men and women should actually be referred to as “cis” men and “cis” women is engaging in free speech by making an argument. Punishing them for doing so by restricting their speech is not consistent with Musk’s mission, as he set it out.
We would do well, when resisting those who want to silence others, to avoid becoming the very thing we profess to hate.