Twitter owner Elon Musk said the words “cisgender” and “cis” are now considered slurs on Twitter after a user said they were harassed online by transgender activists.
The user wrote that he rejected the word “cis” and “cisgender,” which are often used by transgender individuals to describe heterosexual people.
“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,” the user, James Esses, wrote on the platform.
Musk, who purchased the platform last year, wrote in response Wednesday that “repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.” He added, “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform.”
The Tesla CEO also commented on a Twitter poll asking if “cis” is a slur. About 78 percent of respondents voted “yes,” it shows.
“People overwhelmingly reject this obvious slur that bigots are trying to impose,” Musk wrote in response.
It’s not clear, however, if the plans to penalize accounts that use the two words will be enforced. Musk also said that people can call themselves “anything you want” in response to a question about people who want to call themselves “cisgender.”
Some claim the term “cisgender” was created by a controversial German sociologist, Volkmar Sigusch, who notably, was the director of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or Institute for Sexual Science, at Goethe University in Frankfurt—sometimes known as the “Frankfurt School” that has been associated with the Karl Marx-inspired critical theory. Before becoming director of the institute, he studied under noted 20th-century Marxists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pioneers in critical theory.
A 1991 publication by Sigusch, titled “Die Transsexuellen und unser nosomorpher Blick” (“Transsexuals and our Nosomorphic View”), is sometimes credited as having the first instance of the term. He used it to describe the opposite of transgender.
Later, the term “cis” was used as a meme of sorts about a decade ago, popularized by the “die cis scum” catchphrase that was used by some transgender individuals.
More controversially, during an interview with Der Spiegel in 2011, Sigusch appeared to defend pedophilia as a natural sexual orientation.
In another tweet, Musk wrote Wednesday: “The contemptible creep that manufactured the term ‘cis’ has serious problems. Ignore him.”