“Cis is a heterosexual slur” Tweets Elon Musk, Who Halved Twitter’s Value
Reports of a staggering drop in the value of the worst social media site in the world coincided with Elon Must Tweeting that “cis” is a slur. Coincidence?
by Evan Urquhart
The owner of Twitter is replaying his greatest hits of bigotry amidst reports that over the past year he’s lost more money than a human being can reasonably imagine. Elon Musk yesterday tweeted that “The word ‘cis’ is a heterosexual slur.” However, it’s not the first time Musk has tweeted that the words cis and cisgender are slurs—he did the same thing this summer, claiming that the words “cis” and “cisgender” would be banned from Twitter. (That he made this proclamation while relaxing rules against slurs in the name of free speech made it entirely toothless, a shallow publicity grab with no substance.)
A useful rebuttal in LGBTQ Nation explained why “cis is a slur” is total bullshit: People who say that cis is a slur don’t offer an alternative term to use that is non-offensive. Because they don’t offer alternative inoffensive terminology, as there is with all other slurs, it’s clear it’s not the word cis they’re objecting to, but the existence of any words to describe the fact that some people are transgender, and some people aren’t. Like basically every linguistic niggle the anti-trans side puts out, the objection to the word cis is really a roundabout way of voicing objections to trans people’s continued existence.
screenshot from twitter.com
Musk clarifying that cis is a “heterosexual” slur has some comedy value. Being transgender is not a sexuality, and trans people can be homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual. Since some people are both transgender and heterosexual, heterosexual can’t be used in place of cisgender.
Conveniently, Musk brought back this “cis is a slur thing” on a day when there just happened to be other big news about Twitter yesterday: Namely that the website’s value has plunged and is now less than half what it was when Musk bought it last October. Musk famously purchased the site for $44 billion. Now, the New York Times has reported that internal paperwork dealing with stock grants for Twitter employees values it at $19 billion, a massive 55 percent drop in one year’s time.
The timing of Musk’s reuse of his corny old line that cis is a slur is really the most notable thing about it. Coming on the heels of real news about how poorly the website he bought is doing, this cis is a slur stuff reeks of desperation to change the conversation. Musk doesn’t want people to talk about his abysmal mismanagement of a once-thriving social media platform, so he’s throwing out something offensive targeting trans people in the hopes everyone will look away from the trainwreck brought on by his own actions.
In this, Musk is far from alone: What he’s doing so transparently is the same thing the entire right wing media establishment, backed by conservative billionaires, has been doing with the entire anti-trans panic. There are real problems in this world, plenty of them, and they are growing. They have been both caused and exacerbated by the profit-seeking motives of the uber-wealthy. Ordinary people’s quality of life is falling, the climate of the entire planet is at stake, and we’re facing the real possibility of either extinction or a human presence on this planet so marginal as to be nearly unrecognizable to people who grew up in highly developed nations. Even over the shorter term we’re watching an explosion of homelessness and poverty, women have lost the right to choose whether to have an abortion, a racist backlash halted any momentum to address police violence, and a sexist backlash halted any momentum to address sexual assault and harassment.
The answer to all of this provided by Christian conservatism is trans people. Every aspect of trans people’s lives, from basic document changes and medical treatment to what bathrooms trans people use and what sports teams we play on has been politicized and legislated and trumpeted, over and over. What Musk is doing when he tweets “cis is a slur” is exactly the same thing conservatism as a whole is doing with the transgender issue. There are real problems, and the policies conservatives want will make these problems much worse, not better. How can they obscure this from the public? By making increasingly extreme and bizarre attacks on trans people, for as long as that works, and when it stops having the desired effect they’ll move on to another group to terrorize, likely with policies in place making life for trans people unimaginably harder.