Elon Musk Desperately Wants Transphobia To Be 'Woke'

He'll take anything at this point as long as it 'allows' him to be crappy to trans folks.

Last year, Elon Musk's partner Grimes left him and then briefly dated Chelsea Manning. Around that same time, his daughter Vivian came out as trans ... and severed ties with him, due to his being a transphobic dickweasel. Since then, he has been trying to fill the void of real human connection with the adoration of thousands of Twitter trolls who are, we can only assume, equally repulsive to those who know them in real life.

On Wednesday, Musk soothed the bruised soul of a man whose presence on the social media site seems to be dedicated solely to expressing his anger over the fact that trans people exist by telling him that, from now on, the terms cis and cisgender will be considered "slurs." 

— (@)  

They are not slurs. Musk and others want them to be "slurs" because they want some kind of moral backing for their intolerance, but they're obviously not slurs. They are simply terms meaning someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth. It's no more of a slur than straight or heterosexual .

Musk then tweeted "Etymology FTW" at someone who claimed that the man who invented the term cisgender was a pedophile, as if this would somehow invalidate it. This would also potentially invalidate several words invented by Lewis Carroll, who himself has been accused of being a pedophile (though this has never actually been confirmed and is frequently disputed) — including chortle, snark and galumph.

This is not, however, how etymology works.

This is not true. The person who coined the specific term "cisgender" was biologist Dana Defosse , who first used the term in 1994 when she was a graduate student, in a Usenet group. The prefix "cis" is Latin and has been used in science, chemistry specifically, since forever. However, Volkmar Sigusch, the man Musk and others claim invented the term, was still not a pedophile, "pedosexual" or "pedophile-sympathizer."

Sigusch was a German sexologist. He studied human sexuality. In no way did he support child molestation. He just believed — as any reasonable person ought to — that people who are sexually attracted to children should get therapy so that they do not abuse children. This is even noted in an article about him in the Peter Thiel-funded right-wing Cosmo-wannabe website Evie. 

He spoke about the importance of approaching pedophiles and offering them therapy. "It's been my experience that you can reach your objective with what I would call kind-hearted, informed and enlightened patients – in the sense that they don't lose their desire, but that they no longer have physical contact with children," he continued. [...]

However, it's also worth noting that when asked how society should handle pedophiles, Sigusch said, "In accordance with the law. There is no other way to answer the question. We are all potential murderers, and we are all potential rapists and abusers."

The article's headline called him a "pedophile sympathizer" and quoted several random social media users who claimed that he and all gender researchers were pedophiles. Alas, the only "fact" they had to "prove" in any sense that he was sympathetic to "pedophiles" was the fact that he once quoted Woody Allen in an entirely unrelated context, 20 years after he supposedly wrote this paper (there are no English translations of it online, if there is a German-language one,Wikipedians have yet to find it ). So congratulations to anyone who has ever used the term "lurve," you are now also a "pedophile sympathizer" according to this website, as Allen coined that word in Annie Hall. Because that is just how things work.

 But I digress .

It's an interesting development, given the fact that Musk and other right-wing zealots have generally not considered "slurs" to be a problem to begin with — and in fact Musk is perfectly happy to have his new army of "blue checks" spouting the n-word all day long. But it does go along with a recent trend of them trying to adopt left-wing morality to justify their own aims. They want to attack people with slurs and face no repercussions, so they cite "free speech" and ask liberals "Why do you hate free speech?" They love Vladimir Putin and are in favor of him invading Ukraine, so they claim that they are now anti-war and ask liberals "Why do you love war now?" Though to be clear, no one is supporting "war," there are no American soldiers fighting in this war, we are simply offering some support to a nation that is being invaded (which will likely lead to preventing a larger war later on when Putin doesn't stop at Ukraine just like Hitler didn't stop at Poland).

They want very desperately to be able to be assholes with impunity and will try every possible angle to make this happen for themselves. They are frantically grasping at every available straw, even straws they previously disagreed with.

There is no reason for anyone to be upset by the terms "cis" or "cisgender." It literally just means that your gender corresponds to the gender you were assigned at birth. It's not a big deal to anyone except those who feel importantly about being able to exclude others. Some transphobes with less guile than Musk made this clear with tweets about how they don't want to be called "cis" or "cisgender" — they want to be called normal . And for those who are different from them to be called ab normal.

This, ultimately, is what it all comes down to. Anyone who has ever lived in a small town gets this. There are simply people who can't feel good about themselves unless they get to tell everyone else what kind of mailbox they're allowed to have, to determine what is normal, to determine what is allowed, to decide who is in and who is out and who can sit with them at lunch. I realize this is a rather shallow reading of such cruelty, but I don't think it's actually much deeper than that. There is a certain kind of power one can only have in a very small community and those who crave that power are frantically trying to exert it over the entire internet, and the more it becomes clear to them that they can't exert that power, that no one cares what they think or who they think is normal, the more absurd they get.

Elon Musk bought an entire social media platform in hopes of being able to force his views upon the world and the world is still disobeying him. Why? Because the world is very big and when something is that big there's just no such thing as "normal." Everyone has someone to sit with and no one is afraid to stand up to the powerful in a world this big because they know they will find support, somewhere.

Things are really bad right now — I don't mean to downplay that at all. The more miserable these people are with the big, wide world full of people who don't care what they think, the more they will lash out, the more they will try to make a small world out of a big one and the more they will try to hurt people. And we will have to keep fighting to prevent them from being able to do so. But as long as we do, they lose. No matter what they win, they lose. So that, I guess, is something.

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