World's richest man Elon Musk has said that calling someone cisgender is "heterophobic". He expressed his views on Wednesday in a post on X (formerly Twitter), the platform that he bought for $44 billion in October 2022. Forbes said this is the latest effort 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," Mr Musk said on X and his post amassed a large number of views in a short time.
As per Forbes, the word cisgender became popular in the 1990s and according to Merriam Webster, and refers to someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth.
The word transgender is opposite to cisgender - it refers to someone whose gender identity is different from that assigned at birth.
This is not the first time that Mr Musk has tweeted something like this. In June last year, he had declared that "cis" and "cisgender" are hate speech.
Giving historical context, The Independent said in a report that ancient prefixes cis-, literally translating as "on this side of," and trans-, translating as "on the other side of," have been part of spoken English since the 17th century as a dichotomic descriptor.
The prefixes then began being used to talk about gender and sexuality during the 19th century, it added.
Mr Musk had threatened to ban the term on the social media platform, with people using it receiving a temporary ban on X.
