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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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Is "straight" a slur? "Able-bodied"? "Neurotypical"? Those, like "cis", are all neutral valance ways of describing a person as normal along some axis. I'm guessing you're disagreeing that "cis" is neutral valance?

If I kept going on about the straights, able-bodied, and neurotypicals who are doing things that I deem to be unpleasant, at some point I expect others to treat me like I'm using slurs. That's kind of how slurs evolved in the first place, otherwise they wouldn't be slurs. Most of the time, I don't have any reason to use those particular terms anyway, so if I want to talk about those kinds of people, I just don't use "straight", "able-bodied", or "neurotypical". I generalize this from the principle of talking about everyone like they want to be included in the conversation.

And, yes, "cis" doesn't sound neutral to me. Adding a qualifier in front of something inherently implies that it's different from the norm. If I kept talking about "blorg men" and "blorg women" and "blorg people", I sincerely doubt that any person would think that I'm talking about the vast majority of people. Rather, they would think that I would be talking about some minority of people with the "blorg" attribute, whatever "blorg" may mean. I would expect them to be confused if I told them I'm simply talking about people who, say, have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot. Double their confusion if, preceding this, I was ranting about "blorg privilege" and how "blorg people have it easy" and similar statements.

(This isn't even getting into people accurately described as such not wanting to be called "criminal", "con man", etc., and us not calling those slurs.)

Well, for one, I don't really see criminals demand to not be called a "criminal" that often, if at all. For two, this would be kind of pointless, because the accusation of someone's criminality goes far beyond just surface-level labeling. Like, personally, you can tell me someone is a criminal, but I'd ask you for specifics. And then if you told me "well, he was convicted of the sexual assault of a woman", there's not really many language games one can do to weasel out of that accusation besides challenging the definition of "sexual assault" (and of course, "woman").

For three, I don't go on angry rants about people I describe as "criminal". Like, I can think of plenty of cases where "criminal" would be unacceptable, but those are when it's obvious the speaker is using it as a thinly-veiled replacement for "black" (e.g. "I hate people with criminal skin color"). The same cannot be said for "cis", and while anecdotal, at least one person (WhiningCoil) has replied to my comment corroborating this. I also don't treat all people described as "criminal" like they're a unified group who are all in coordination to achieve some common goal.