Elon Musk Has Made Anti-Trans Hatred One of Twitter's Core Features | The Nation

Move over, Webster’s—Elon Musk apparently runs the dictionary now. And wouldn’t you know it: Musk’s dictionary is weird and transphobic. The Twitter owner issued a decree on Wednesday in one of his favorite places—the replies to someone else’s tweets. Musk announced that going forward, “the words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform,” and that repeated use of the terms would lead to temporary suspensions at a minimum. For the purposes of removing all doubt: “Cisgender” is not, by any commonly understood definition of the word, a slur. It’s a term adopted by the medical community to describe someone who aligns with their biological sex and gender from both (“cis” is a Latin prefix meaning “this side”), as opposed to transgender people, who do not. In a clinical sense, the word “cisgender” is a way for medical practitioners to differentiate between a transgender patient and someone who identifies as their birth sex or gender without having to label them as “normal” or a control group. So how did a term that has been largely embraced by the medical community wind up becoming an Internet-poisoned slur to the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks? To answer
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