Reasons to Hate Twitter #3,505,400,881 and #3,505,400,882.

Elon Musk is such a fucking assgadget.

Elon Musk, champion of free speech and notorious for resisting anti-bullying and anti-harassment measures at Twitter because of their potentially chilling effects on bullies and harassers, appears to have personally intervened to add “cisgender” to the list of slurs at Twitter whose use is officially discouraged. From TechCrunch:

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and could be used in a harmful manner in violation of our rules,” the warning says. You can continue to publish the post or delete it.

Musk has a history of repeating the assertion popular with anti-trans jackasses that cisgender is a slur rather than a neutral and factual description of a great many people. Thus this is hardly a surprising development, even if unwelcome. If I hear of people being banned for using cisgender “in a harmful manner” you can be sure I’ll let you know.

As for today’s second reason to hate Twitter, Erin In The Morning has done the heavy lifting:

This weekend, multiple accounts and news stories were posted in far-right outlets claiming that a new study showed that “transgender surgeries dramatically increase the risk of suicide.” The claim, based on a study published in a pseudoscience journal, as determined by Media Bias/Fact Check, was then amplified by leading anti-trans accounts on the Twitter platform, including Elon Musk himself.

The study was laughably bad, attributing suicide attempts to gender affirming surgical care by comparing trans people who have had surgery to cis people who visited an emergency room for any reason. As Erin Reed and a number of others quickly pointed out, if you want to study causation, you need an appropriate control group. For studying trans persons’ suicide attempts and how they are or aren’t caused by surgeries, you would need to compare those attempts before and after surgery, or, even better, compare attempts in those persons who had completed all intended/desired surgeries to attempts in trans persons who had requested but were denied gender affirming surgeries.

Reed brings receipts from JAMA Surgery showing that “respondents who underwent all desired gender-affirming surgeries had significantly lower odds of past-year suicide attempts,” and from Retraction Watch that the journal publishing the “research” in question had “retracted 56 papers” in its first two years of operation.

Nonetheless, when the right wing picked up the story that someone said gender affirming surgery causes suicide attempts, Elon dutifully forwarded that news despite the pitiful journal quality, the clearly erroneous study design, and the completely unwarranted nature of the conclusion. What happened next?

The fake news got 24 million views. Twenty. Four. Million. And lest you think it was all hate-reading, Musk’s tweet got 105k likes, 25k retweets, and only 6.5k comments as of the time Reed took her screenshot. On top of that,

None of the posts about the study received any community notes on the Twitter platform, despite many being submitted to correct the error. This is a serious failing of the Community Notes feature, which is supposed to correct misinformation.

Go read Reed’s story on the whole research-paper debacle. Here we will just say that there’s no bigger indictment of Twitter as a whole than this incestuous clusterfuck between a shitbag and his community.