Elon Musk is the patron saint of transphobic parents

Content note: this article contains references to deadnaming, misgendering and other forms of transphobic language

Elon Musk has spent the last few years radicalising himself in public and cartwheeling ever further to the right. Since taking over X, formerly Twitter, he has promoted race science, antisemitic tropes, white supremacist conspiracy theories and is now donating millions of dollars each month to ensure the reelection of Donald Trump. But of all these preoccupations, transphobia seems to be the one that excites him the most – and it could be the key to explaining his journey from someone who used to describe himself as “socially very liberal” to a hardline extremist who spends his days chatting with neo-Nazis. Yesterday (July 22), Musk gave an interview to Jordan Peterson on right-wing news platform Daily Wire, during which he discussed his estrangement from his trans daughter – who he misgendered and deadnamed throughout – and made it clearer than ever that his hostility towards trans rights is personal.

This was not a surprise revelation – it has been known for some time that Musk himself has a trans daughter. According to court documents released in 2022, she changed her legal name and gender partly due to “the fact I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” Musk has previously blamed this estrangement on the ‘Neo-Marxists liberals” who have taken control of schools and universities, who he believes turned her against him by teaching the “full-on communism [...] and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil” – an explanation which was as much about her political leanings as her gender identity. 

But during his interview with Peterson, Musk spoke more directly about the influence that his daughter’s transition had on his political evolution. He described himself as having been “essentially tricked” into signing documents which would allow her to receive gender-affirming care. “I lost my son, essentially,” he said. “They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason. The reason they call it ‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead.” This was the tipping point – he went on to say – which made him determined to destroy “the woke mind virus”. 

Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet and, even by the standards of a billionaire, he has an outsized influence on shaping politics through his ownership of a major social media platform. He has already wielded that power to great effect, changing Twitter’s ‘hateful conduct policy’ so that deadnaming and misgendering are acceptable but the word “cis” is routinely censored. But Musk’s trajectory is not at all uncommon. The transphobic parents of trans children are a significant bloc within the “gender-critical” movement, and the participants tend to be animated by the same set of grievances – the feeling that their children have been stolen from them or even “killed”; the belief that their children – rather than exercising agency or actually being trans – have fallen prey to a manipulative ideology. These people above all seem to be motivated by a sense of thwarted ownership and rebuffed authority: they wanted their children to be one thing and, against their wishes, their children turned out to be something else. It’s the same complaint which homophobic parents had in the 1970s (and which many, although thankfully less, still have today.)  

A recent report by Sasha Baker and Valeria Rocca, published by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, revealed the influence of the Bayswater Support Group – a gender-critical parent’s group which advocates for conversation therapy, lobbies against trans rights and helped the Conservative government to draft guidance which would have banned schools from teaching children about trans identities (Labour has yet to confirm whether it will scrap this.) The report also exposed a private Discord group, where Bayswater members joked about being abusive (“one day they might thank us for that ‘abuse’”, one parent wrote) and recounted destroying their trans children’s belongings, blocking access to Childline and preventing them from taking hormones at home.

Outside of the world of “gender-critical” campaigning, parental transphobia is widespread both in the US and the UK. One study by British charity Galop found that 43 per cent of trans people have experienced abuse from family members; while research carried out in the US has found that trans teens are significantly more likely to experience abuse than their cisgender counterparts. The prevalence of parental transphobia makes trans people disproportionately vulnerable to homelessness, either because they are thrown out or feel compelled to leave a hostile environment. Musk is just the most visible example of an archetype which is depressingly common.

Still, no other transphobic parent has the power to generate global headlines when they denigrate their children. It’s hard for anyone to escape an abusive parent, so much harder when that parent is Elon Musk – I feel sorry for his daughter and hope she’s OK. It is profoundly unfortunate that one of the world’s most powerful men – never a great guy to begin with – has poisoned himself with an ideology so hateful.