On June 21 Elon Musk tweeted that the words cis and cisgender “are considered slurs on this platform”.
The terms have gained significant traction in recent years — especially among the LGBTQ+ community and its supporters — to refer to a person “whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth”, as defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.
In the same tweet Musk also said that “repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions” — this appeared to suggest that the use of “cis” and “cisgender” in a manner deemed combinative would result in account suspension: in effect, censorship.
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
Cue a Twitter backlash, with accusations that Musk was quashing freedom of speech and committing a “fascist flex”. It comes at the same time that Musk is being accused of folding on freedom of speech in India.
Admittedly, at first glance his stance does seem an infringement of freedom of speech. Cis and cisgender are commonly used by many simply as a description; primarily as an antonym to distinguish those who are not trans.
But there is another way of looking at it — there usually is — especially if you remember that there was a time, not that long ago, when cis and cisgender basically did not exist in the wider lexicon. Now they very much do. It’s worth thinking about that. Words are not like mushrooms that just sprout up. They are deployed by humans as a means to an end.
Along with much of the jargon of postmodernist dogmas beloved by Left-wing academia, such as critical race theory and queer theory, cis and cisgender are Frankenstein words — some would say nonsense words. They can often confuse, obfuscate and actually make it harder to engage in meaningful dialogue and cooperation. In other words, they are the antithesis of conventional language.
By calling out these terms, there is an argument that Musk is defending the correct and effective use of language that enables and supports freedom of speech.
Two of the greatest British writers of the 20th century, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, wrote extensively about the power of language and how words are twisted and manipulated to serve political ends.
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”, Orwell wrote in his justly famous 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. “Words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s minds by ready-made phrases…can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one’s brain.”
Two recent governmental reports in Europe illustrate this problem well. The German government’s recently released new National Security Strategy that was “supposed to be the blueprint for a vast defence transformation of Europe’s premier power at a time of war turned out to be 74 pages of clichés, fluff and inventories of known German policy positions,” Gabriel Elefteriu writes for Brussels Signal.
Similarly, after 15 months of considering the EU’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic, an EU Parliament special committee has released its 56-page report. The report is riddled with jargon, myopic narratives, inconsistencies and strange connections, while refusing to discuss the elephant in the room of whether lockdowns were an appropriate response.
Words are both “indispensable and fatal”, as Huxley explained. There are potentially massive implications underpinning the word “cisgender” that many would reject if they considered them. The concept that you can have a “gender identity” — which can be switched if another is selected — is anathema and absurd to most. As is the idea that you are assigned a particular sex when you arrive in the world, as opposed to it being down to the organs you are born with and the chromosomal and hormonal package that goes with it.
There are outliers, those born with intersex genitalia. But that does not justify a conceptual reverse engineering whereby you can then call into question the entire binary construct of the natural world that is underpinned by male and female. But that is what the terms cis and cisgender and their use implicitly do. It’s a revolution in thought — forged in the realm of abstract academia over decades — that is increasingly seeping into and dominating mainstream media. It is well illustrated in a recent Guardian article that discusses “cisgender women who support trans rights” and what “cis women” should be doing in relation to trans-related issues.
“Moralists harp on the duty of controlling the passions; and of course they are right to do so,” Aldous Huxley wrote in his 1952 non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudun. “Unhappily most of them have failed to harp on the no less essential duty of controlling words and the reasoning based upon them.”
Ostensibly Huxley’s novel tells a rollicking story of demonic possession alongside religious and sexual obsession in 17th-century France. But it is also an exploration of the immutability of the human condition across the ages in which language has proven “the instrument of man’s progress out of animality” but also the “cause of man’s deviation from animal innocence and animal conformity to the nature of things into madness and diabolism”.
Huxley’s point was that “far more dangerous than crimes of passion are the crimes of idealism [that] are instigated, fostered and moralised by hallowed words.”
Musk’s tweet itself is an example of the bad use of language. It’s not clear what exactly he is saying. His tweet can be read as implying that the terms are slurs at any time, but it can also be read that they are only slurs when used in a harassing way, and hence their use is fine at all other times.
The line is not clear. Which is invariably the problem with the freedom of speech v. incendiary hate speech conundrum. Where do you draw that line? Because as soon as you try to draw it — and regulate it — then that oversight can be used to shut down speech that a particular interest group doesn’t approve of.
This is of great import in Europe right now. Opponents of Ireland’s proposed new “hate speech” bill fear that it will clamp down on the ability to freely express religious views. Then there is the EU’s proposed Digital Service Act (DSA) aiming to regulate our increasingly digital world and the way we interact with it, and its AI Act, the world’s first Artificial Intelligence law making its way through the legislative process.
Freedom of speech — and what it is permissible to express and what isn’t — is very much in the regulatory cross hairs of EU lawmakers, with significant implications for the 450 million or so citizens of the 27-member state bloc. The onus is on each of us to think more clearly about which words we are going to use when grappling with the complex challenges confronting European societies across the continent.
“One ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end,” Orwell said.
As much as Europe’s liberal elites abhor America’s divisive abortion fights, they are here already