If you've been wondering why Elon Musk spends so much time online criticizing gender-affirming care, a conversation this week sheds some more light on a big reason behind that: his 20-year-old trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson. Mediaite reports that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO sat down Monday for an interview with Canadian psychologist and conservative commentator Jordan Peterson, in which Peterson asked Musk why he is "willing to make this an issue"—"this" being gender-affirming care. "It happened to one of my older boys," Musk replied, adding that he was "essentially tricked into signing documents" to give consent for Wilson to go on puberty blockers, and that "I lost my son, essentially."
"They call it deadnaming for a reason," Musk said. "The reason it's called deadnaming is because your son is dead. So my son ... is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus." Musk said that "I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that," and both he and Peterson called gender-affirming care "evil" during the podcast, per Fox News. Musk continued his comments on X, the social media platform he owns, noting that Wilson was "born gay and slightly autistic, two attributes that contribute to gender dysphoria." Musk added: "I knew that from when he was about 4 years old and he would pick out clothes for me to wear like a jacket and tell me it was 'fabulous!', as well as his love of musicals & theatre. But he was not a girl."
In a name-change petition in 2022, Wilson wrote that the reason for her request was "Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape, or form." Experts reiterate that gender-affirming care—which can include everything from talk therapy and hormone therapy to surgical procedures—is "a valid, science-backed method of medicine that saves lives," per USA Today. "In any medical field, we're continuously improving the care, changing the care, developing new guidelines, developing research," a pediatric endocrinologist tells the paper. (More Elon Musk stories.)
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