What does any of this have to do with what they said? There's a difference between an in-group privately calling each other whatever and said in-group directing it towards someone not part of said group.

> How about let people say and do whatever they want amongst themselves and stay out of their conversations.

Sounds like a great way of excluding people from the workforce.

Sounds like an opportunity for any of the wealthy left-leaning people to start a competitor and seize market share by hiring those traditional companies consider undesirable.

We did it guys. We solved workplace harassment! The market will solve everything.

I've seen a few "female plumber" companies advertising on this basis, with the implied promise of not being rude or patronizing to female customers.

Great at excluding snowflakes which is what you want in those dangerous professions. If you get pissy that someone called you ginger, you're clearly not cut for any demanding and dangerous job. Better stay in your sanitized white collar safe space while you tweet how the world is mean.

Check out professions by suicide rates https://www.registerednursing.org/articles/suicide-rates-pro...

Apparently a lot of construction, extraction installation, maintenance and repair folk have a very bad time of i. Perhaps if they could get decent support in the work place that wouldn't happen. Though I suppose you'd probably conclude it's just natural attrition as the snowflakes kill themselves.

If a workplace has a culture you don't like, they aren't excluding you, you are choosing to exclude yourself.

That's fine, but why do you think the culture should mould to your needs?

> why do you think the culture should mould to your needs?

I think a professional work culture should generally be such as to allow the people who are capable of doing the work with the minimum ofaggression aimed at them. Controversial, I know.

"how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs"

Some dickhead flinging racial slurs at me all day doesn't make me feel that they have my back. Quite the opposite, actually.

Have you ever attended a mandatory DEI meeting? The entire premise of that industry is to tell you which slurs are acceptable (ie: cisgender ) and which are not.

"Cisgender" is a slur the same way "male", "heterosexual", and "white" are (I am all three; four, including cisgender). In other words, it is not a slur.

Slur isn't an intrinsic property of a word: it's a property of how it's used. "Male" can be a slur, as can "heterosexual", or "management". In theory, "cisgender" can also be a slur, though I've never heard such a use. (You'll sometimes hear "cissy", but I've never heard that used against a specific person.)

You might argue that "punching up" is acceptable, or even that it's not slurring by definition (which I'd dispute), but membership of one "privileged class" doesn't automatically translate to actual privilege. (I think the feminists call this intersectionality.) In such a context, the labels of "privileged classes" absolutely can be used to punch down (e.g. saying "you're such a man" and slamming the door in the face of an impoverished gay transgender man trying to access domestic abuse services).

The usage of the word "slur" in question -- it has to be this if it's on a list one can learn from DEI consultants -- is

    a derogatory or insulting term applied to a particular group of people.

It is inherent in the term itself, not in its use.* So it isn't simply anything that can be understood as an insult. All the stuff about "punching up" and so forth is beside the point.

"cisgender" has a technical meaning which is still it's primary use: someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth (so it can apply to intersex people as well). In this it is like "heterosexual" and "male". Arguably it is not like "white", in that who counts as white is malleable, but for the most part whatever it is, in most contexts, "white" is not a slur either.

* I am in fact a lapsed linguist. I have a PhD. My specialization was in semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is meaning encoded in language. Pragmatics is meaning inferred from use: "it's cold in here" meaning "shut the window", for example. I am aware that one can talk more precisely and at much, much greater length about all of this. But this is Hacker News, so this is all I am going to say.

By your given definition of "slur", neither "management" nor "cissy" are slurs (except in the sense of "cissy" as a variant spelling of the slur "sissy").

I'd say "white" is no more or less malleable than the others. "Male" has multiple, mostly-overlapping definitions; by extension, "heterosexual" and "cisgender" are likewise flexible, though "heterosexual" has additional flexibility. While the concept of "white" is completely ungrounded in base reality, as a cultural term (a description of how racists categorise people, and of who's affected by the consequences) it's relatively stable: the definition in Western Europe is completely different to the definition in North America, and the boundaries have shifted over the centuries, but contemporary racists in a given racism-domain seem to agree with each other.

Very few of the people saying "cisgender" say it in a way that suggests sixty years earlier they'd have dragged me behind a car for having the temerity to be that way.