Elon Musk tweeted that calling someone cisgender is a “heterophobic” way to describe a person late Wednesday. It’s just the latest effort in a longstanding campaign by the billionaire to turn words that are largely seen as neutral into some kind of hate speech.
“Cis is a heterophobic word. Shame on anyone who uses it,” Musk tweeted on X, the social media platform he owns that was formerly known as Twitter.
Musk tweeted something very similar back in June, declaring unilaterally that the words “cis” and “cisgender” are hate speech. It’s unclear if any X users have actually seen negative consequences for using the terms, though Musk’s late night tweets don’t always materialize into official policy at the social media company.
Cisgender first became popular in the late 1990s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and refers to people whose gender identity corresponds to their sex registered at birth. The word transgender refers to the opposite of cisgender, someone whose gender identity is different from that assigned at birth.
Musk has previously promoted an anti-LGBT movie by conservative activist Matt Walsh titled “What Is a Woman?” and has frequently used his platform to elevate people who work against the civil rights of trans Americans. Matt Walsh is perhaps best known for organizing a hate campaign against trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney after Bud Light sent her cans of beer printed with her own face on them in 2023.
Musk, who bought Twitter in late 2022, stripped trans people of protections on Twitter not long after he purchased the social media site, a move that was denounced by the LGBT activist group GLAAD at the time. Twitter added rules against misgendering and deadnaming people in 2018, but Musk got rid of those protections in April 2023.
GLAAD noted at the time that other social media platforms had protections for trans users and Twitter was an anomaly by tossing out those rules.
“This decision to roll back LGBTQ safety pulls Twitter even more out of step with TikTok, Pinterest, and Meta, which all maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real world discrimination and violence,” President of GLAAD Sarah Kate Ellis wrote in a statement published online last year.
There’s been widespread speculation that Musk’s hostility to trans rights might have something to do with his teenage daughter, who came out as trans to the billionaire businessman but no longer wants to be in his life.
“Musk has a dystopian view of the left’s influence on America, which helps explain his wild pursuit of Twitter to liberate free speech. He blames the fact that his teenage daughter no longer wants to be associated with him on the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists,” the Financial Times wrote in a story published the same month that Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter in 2022.
X didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed late Wednesday. I’ll update this post if I hear back.
