Elon Musk Says His Trans Daughter Was Killed by Woke Mind Virus

 

In Podcast Rant, Elon Musk Says His Trans Daughter Was “Killed by the Woke Mind Virus”

The tech billionaire repeatedly misgendered his child in an interview on a right-wing podcast.

BY JAMES FACTORA

"THEM"

Elon Musk attends 'Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation Mark Read in Conversation with Elon Musk' session during...

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Shortly after announcing that his company, X, would be moving out of California due to the state’s newly enacted law that protects trans students, Elon Musk went on a demeaning rant about his own transgender daughter on a right-wing podcast, repeatedly misgendering her and saying that she had been “killed by the woke mind virus.”

The billionaire was a guest on Monday’s episode of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, which found the titular conservative influencer interviewing Musk at Gigafactory Texas, where Tesla is headquartered. Toward the end of the podcast, Peterson asked Musk about “one of the things that [he’s] been relatively vocal about,” namely gender-affirming care. Peterson referred to trans minors’ access to medical care as “the worst medical and psychological malpractice I’ve ever seen anywhere,” adding, “At least the bloody Nazis knew it was wrong and tried to hide it.”

(Peterson was likely referring to the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, which performed the world’s first gender-affirming surgeries, and which was a noted target of one of the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings.)

Although trans advocates have sounded the alarm about Musk since he bought the platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022, the CEO has tilted even further into the more full-throated endorsement of transphobic talking points in recent years. In his interview with Peterson, he agreed with the psychologist, calling the term gender-affirming care “a terrible euphemism” and referring to it as “child mutilation and sterilization,” per The Daily Beast.

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“You’re taking kids who are obviously often far below the age of consent — almost every child goes through some kind of identity crisis, it’s just part of growing up — so adults can manipulate children who have are having a natural identity crisis into believing that they are the wrong gender and that they need to be the other gender,” Musk said. Though it is a common right-wing talking point that transness naturally desists in most young people, studies have found that trans youth are actually extremely unlikely to detransition.

But the issue is personal for Musk, as he explained to Peterson, claiming that he was “essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older [children]... before I had really any understanding of what was going on” — a reference to his daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, who in 2022 filed a petition to change her name in part because, as she stated, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”

 

Musk’s interview with Peterson shed new light on the details of his falling out with his daughter, with the CEO expressing resentment over his daughter’s medical care. “It wasn’t explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs,” he said, adding that he lost his “son.” (According to a 2019 study, there is no evidence that puberty blockers alone affect fertility, and other studies have shown that blockers improve trans adolescents’ emotional health.)

“They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason. The reason it’s called ‘deadnaming’ is because, uh, your son is dead,” Musk continued, going on to say that his child — whom he misgendered and deadnamed in portions of his remarks that we have chosen to exclude here — had been “killed by the woke mind virus.”

“I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that and we’re making some progress,” he said.

Biographers and chroniclers of Musk are continuing to paint a picture of a father who is fixated on his daughter’s decision to transition. Last year, an excerpt from a biography of Musk published in the Wall Street Journal revealed that the X CEO partially blamed Wilson’s identity and her decision to cut him out of her life on the progressive school Crossroads, which she attended in Los Angeles. And last week, prominent American tech journalist Kara Swisher posted to Threads after Musk announced that X’s headquarters would be moving to Texas, writing, “He has a trans child and I am told by many close to him that the rage over it motivates a lot more than you realize.”

Swisher has been one of the foremost chroniclers of Silicon Valley since the 1990s and has been covering Musk himself for years. But as she revealed in her memoir, published earlier this year, the two had a falling out in 2022. She also wrote that “his daughter and family under his toxic thumb have endured this rage for a long time. It’s the opposite of how a parent behaves.”