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So how do you refer to someone who’s straight, but in a wheelchair? Or a cis autistic person? You can be “normal” in one axis but not another. Surely it’s handy to have a word that refers to the default attribute?
If you feel denigrated being called straight, do you also feel denigrated being called right handed (assuming you are)? Or would you want to be called normal handed?
To me your argument just sounds like the same language policing that the left is oft guilty of, but with a right wing flavour.
I want to be called dextrous, and left handed people should be called sinister.
I jest, but the fact that those words have those connotations indicates that that kind of thinking was likely in use at one point.
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I don't see why the first can't be referred to as "wheelchair user" and the second as "autistic person". There is a convention in communication where if you leave out an attribute, it is assumed to be normal, or at the very least, not currently relevant to the conversation. Especially since "wheelchair user" does not necessarily mean that they are not straight and "autistic person" does not necessarily mean that they are trans.
This is very different from "cis" for a few reasons.
Estimates of the proportion of right-handed people in the population varies widely from 70% to 90%, but whatever it is, the actual number is far from 99.99%, in contrast to the proportion of non-trans people. So it would be incorrect to say right-handed is "normal-handed" (unless one is joking, of course). It may be the majority, but not the norm.
The accommodations for people of a certain handedness are very understandable and very reasonable. E.g. talking about manufacturing left-handed or right-handed computer mice. So there's plenty of innocuous reasons to use the term.
Most of the time that "right-handed" or similar is used, it is used neutrally and without a negative connotation. E.g. this isn't about the actual hands of people, but talking about how to drive on the right-hand side of the road with a vehicle that has a steering wheel on the right-hand side of the car. (I say most of the time, though, because I just searched "right-handed" on Twitter to look at the usage of the term, and there are a few recent tweets mock-arguing that it is a slur in response to Elon Musk's tweet, which I can decidedly say means it is being used in a negative context.)
If you mean language policing as in "don't say the n-word", then I guess so. But I agree with that policing insofar as I don't really think it's productive to let people say the n-word all the time, although at that point it's more about behavior, not language.
If you mean language policing as in "say 'people of color' instead of 'black people'", I don't think that's the same thing, because "black people" is definitely a neutral term (and as a minor point, "people of color" is just more awkward to say).
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