Is cisgender actually a slur?
All right.
So, in the last week or two, I can’t remember exactly when this went down, Elon Musk posted on Twitter that cis and cisgender are both slurs and if you use them on Twitter, you can get locked or banned.
And look, the thing is, every single argument that they are using in this current moral panic about trans people is exactly an argument they used about gay people, only they just changed the words a little bit.
There were a ton of people who were super upset that you had to call yourself straight.
It was just normal people and gay people.
You weren’t straight.
You’re just normal.
And that’s what’s happening right now with the word cisgender.
All cisgender means is you agree with the sex you were assigned at birth.
Your experience of your gender is the same as what they predicted when they looked at your genitals.
That’s all it means.
It’s not a slur.
It’s a descriptive term.
The argument that it is a slur is basically based on this idea that there only need to be descriptive words for people who are not “normal.”
And so if you are “normal,” you don’t need a descriptive word for yourself.
The problem with this is it makes it much harder to actually talk about issues affecting trans people because then we have to see well, for trans people, it’s like this, for non-trans people, it’s like this.
And that’s much less graceful language and they actually don’t like that either.
Usually when people are saying stuff that is ridiculous like white is a slur, straight is a slur, what they mean is we don’t want you talk about your problems and we definitely don’t want you to talk about us.
So no, cisgender is not a slur.
It has never been a slur.
The thing about a slur is that it is targeting people who are oppressed to reinforce their oppression.
You can’t slur cisgender people who are being cisgender because they are in power everywhere.
They rule everything.
So you can’t – they are already in the position of power.
They are not marginalized for being cisgender.
Nobody is being denied job opportunities for being cisgender.
Nobody is being denied housing for being cisgender.
And if they are, it is like such a minuscule portion of what is happening in the world at large.
So no, it’s not a slur. Elon Musk is a man baby who is throwing a fit on the internet because he is the most divorced man in the world and his mama had to tell him not to fight Mark Zuckerberg.
That’s all that this is.
It is just a temper tantrum by a child who happens to be too old to technically be a child anymore.
And it is also part of fascism.
Fascism is about normal, OK, fine people who we want to keep around and then those bad, terrible people who are wrong who we have names for and they are the ones we need to get rid of.
We need to stop them existing.
Fascism and transphobia are always the same thing.
They are always linked.
It is kind of impossible to be transphobic and not end up down the path of fascism because fascism is all about returning to this idealized history where things were simple and plain, where like everything was easy, things were clearly categorizable and that’s just not fucking real.
It is always fascism.
It’s always fascism.
If you watch people who get into transphobia, they just get weirder and weirder because it takes over their whole fucking life.
It is fascism.
It is a beautiful gateway to fascism that people have made.
If you want to argue that with me, tell me why J. K. Rowling liked the tweet by the Washington Three Percenters who are an outright white nationalist group saying that they are all Gryffindors.
She fucking agrees because transphobia is fascism like that’s all it is.
So, cisgender is not a slur.
If you say that it’s a slur, you just look ridiculous.
You look ridiculous and no one is taking you seriously except other people who already believe exactly what you do.
That’s all.
That’s it.
It’s not a slur.
Move on.
Get a life, especially you, Elon Musk.
You have so much fucking money.
Can you buy a personality?
Is that a thing you could do?
Could you buy yourself some peace of mind?
Men will buy a whole $44 billion website rather than going to therapy about the fact that they are divorced.
They will threaten to cage-fight Mark Zuckerberg and then make their mommy bail them out.
It is just the most divorced man.
I just can’t.
